The Oxford Handbook of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies 9780198866787, 019886678X

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

LATE COLONIAL INSURGENCIES AND COUNTER-​ INSURGENCIES

The Oxford Handbook of

LATE COLONIAL INSURGENCIES AND COUNTER-​ INSURGENCIES Edited by

M A RT I N T HOM A S and

GARETH CURLESS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​886678–​7 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780198866787.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

List of Contributors

Introduction: Revisiting the Violent Collapse of Empires Martin Thomas

xi 1

A P P ROAC H E S TO I N SU RG E N T A N D C O U N T E R-​I N SU RG E N T V IOL E N C E 1. Beyond the State/​Rebel Dichotomy in Twentieth Century African Warfare Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer 2. Counter-​Insurgency and the Russian ‘Way of War’ Alex Marshall 3. Fire as Rebellion and Repression: Revolutionary Ireland in Perspective Gemma Clark 4. Insurgencies in Early Post-​Colonial Indonesia Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid

27 44

63 81

5. Humanitarian Illusions: American Counter-​Insurgency—​From the Indian Wars to the Global War on Terror Jeremy Kuzmarov

101

6. Sources, Methods, and the Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland Rachel Caroline Kowalski

119

vi   Contents

‘RU L E S OF T H E G A M E’ : L AW, D O C T R I N E , A N D  P ROPAG A N DA 7. Decolonization’s Wars and the Civilianization of Violence Martin Thomas

141

8. The Architecture of Colonial Control: Britain’s Pacification of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–​1939 Matthew Hughes

161

9. Late Colonial Counter-​Insurgency as an Intellectual Challenge: The Development of Dutch Tactical Doctrine during the Indonesian War, 1945–​1949 Christiaan Harinck

179

10. The Geneva Conventions, Insurgency, and Decolonization Boyd van Dijk

197

11. ‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’? Capital Punishment and British Colonial Counter-​Insurgency, c.1916–​1973 Stacey Hynd

214

12. Sinning Quietly: Law and Human Rights in British Colonial Counter-​Insurgency Brian Drohan

232

13. Internment, Imprisonment, Interrogation, and Resistance in Low-​Intensity Conflict: Carceral Warfare and Republican Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland 1968–​c.1988 Tony Craig

252

A F F I L IAT ION S : M OT I VAT ION A N D M OB I L I Z AT ION 14. The Place of Revolutionary Violence in India, 1905–​1947: From Aberrant Nationalisms to the Nationalist Mainstream Gajendra Singh

275

15. The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–​1915: Internal Conflict and the Counter-​Insurgency Campaign Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag

291

Contents   vii

16. Unwanted Friends: Loyalty and Citizenship in Britain’s Imperial Wars, 1899–​1960 Daniel Branch

310

17. ‘Independence or Death’? Rank and File Recruitment, Ideology, and Desertion during the Wars of Decolonization in Indonesia and Malaysia, c.1945–​1960 Roel Frakking

327

18. Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy, 1954–​1975 Pierre Asselin

348

19. Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency in South Africa: Young Comrades in the 1980s Township Uprisings Emily Bridger

365

20. Guns, Grain, and Gold: The Peasant Base of Algerian Guerrilla Logistics, c.1954–​1957 Neil Macmaster

382

21. The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN in Algeria (1954–​1962) Saphia Arezki 22. The Aden Protectorate Levies, Counter-​Insurgency, and the Loyalist Bargain in South Arabia, 1951–​1957 Huw Bennett and Edward Burke

399

418

DE V E L OP M E N T A N D P OP U L AT ION C ON T ROL 23. Strategic Resettlement: Population Removal and Coercive Development in Late Colonial Counter-​Insurgency Moritz Feichtinger

439

24. Gendering Development and Social Control in the Iberian Empires in Africa, 1950s–​1970s Andreas Stucki

464

25. Discourses of Development and Practices of Punishment: Britain’s Gendered Counter-​Insurgency Strategy in Colonial Kenya Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz

482

26. The Labours of (In)security in Portuguese Late Colonialism Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro

501

viii   Contents

27. (Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa, Mozambique (1966–​1974): Social Knowledge, Development, and Counter-​Insurgency Cláudia Castelo

524

28. Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict: Collective Health Security during Late Colonialism in Africa Philip J. Havik

543

29. Refugees in Violent Decolonizations Phi-​Vân Nguyen 30. Indonesian Strategic Resettlement and Development Policies in East Timor Christian Gerlach

565

580

B E YON D B OR DE R S : T R A N SNAT IONA L DI M E N SION S 31. Limits of Sovereignty: Developing Blank Spaces in Asian ‘Bordered-​Lands’ after the Second World War Aditya Kiran Kakati

597

32. The Hunger General: Economic Warfare during the Indochina War Christopher Goscha

616

33. A Community of Mavericks: Circulating Counter-​Insurgency Knowledge in the West (1945–​1975) Elie Tenenbaum

630

34. Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases: External Sanctuaries and the Transnational Dimension of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-​Insurgencies Mathilde von Bülow

647

35. Dark Networks and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland Aaron Edwards

668

Contents   ix

E N DI N G I N SU RG E N C I E S A N D T H E A F T E R L I V E S OF V IOL E N T DE C OL ON I Z AT ION 36. The Cyprus Revolt and the ‘Prickly Subject’ of Truces Maria Hadjiathanasiou

687

37. To Forget and Remember: The Paradoxical Legacy of French Military Actions in Algeria Raphaëlle Branche

706

38. Violence and (Dis)order in the Caribbean Postcolony: Guyana and Jamaica Gareth Curless

719

Index

747

Contributors

Saphia Arezki, Research Associate at the Institute for Research and Study on the Arab and Islamic Worlds. Pierre Asselin, Professor, Department of History, San Diego State University. Huw Bennett, Reader, School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University. Daniel Branch, Professor, Department of History, University of Warwick. Raphaëlle Branche, Professor, Department of History, Paris Nanterre University. Emily Bridger, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Exeter. Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart, Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Waterloo. Edward Burke, Lecturer in the History of War since 1945, University College Dublin. Cláudia Castelo, Researcher, Institute for Social Sciences, University of Lisbon. Gemma Clark, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Exeter. Tony Craig, Associate Professor, School of Justice, Security and Sustainability, Staffordshire University. Gareth Curless, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Exeter. Brian Drohan, Academy Professor, Department of History, United States Military Academy—​West Point. Aaron Edwards, Senior Lecturer, Department of Defence and International Affairs, Faculty for the Study of Leadership, Security and Warfare, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Kent Fedorowich, Research Fellow, Department of Military History, Stellenbosch University; and Senior Research Fellow, Department of History, University of Bristol. Moritz Feichtinger, Lecturer, Department of History, University of Basel. Roel Frakking, Lecturer, Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University. Christian Gerlach, Professor, Historical Institute, University of Bern. Christopher Goscha, Professor, Department of History, University of Montreal in Quebec. Maria Hadjiathanasiou, Research Fellow, Department of Politics and Governance, University of Nicosia. Christiaan Harinck, Lecturer, Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University.

xii   Contributors Philip J. Havik, Senior Researcher, Centre for Global Health and Tropical Medicine, Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, NOVA University Lisbon. Matthew Hughes, Professor, Department of History and Politics, Brunel University. Stacey Hynd, Professor, Department of History, University of Exeter. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of History, European Studies, Archaeology, and Arts, University of Coimbra. Aditya Kiran Kakati, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Amsterdam and Research Fellow, International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden University. Peter Keppy, Senior Researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam. Rachel Caroline Kowalski, Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford. Jonathan Krause, College Lecturer in History, Hertford College, University of Oxford. Jeremy Kuzmarov, Managing Editor, CovertAction Magazine. Miles Larmer, Professor and Director of the African Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Bart Luttikhuis, Alberdingk Thijm Scholen and previously fellow at the Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and Lecturer at Leiden University. Neil MacMaster, Honorary Reader, University of East Anglia. Alex Marshall, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow. José Pedro Monteiro, Researcher, Communication and Society Research Centre, University of Minho. Phi-​Vân Nguyen, Associate Professor, Department of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Saint-​Boniface. Bethany Rebisz, Lecturer, Department of History, University of Bristol. Gajendra Singh, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Exeter. Andreas Stucki, Ludwig and Margarethe Quidde Fellow, German Historical Institute Rome, Italy. Elie Tenenbaum, Research Fellow and Director of the Security Studies Centre at the French Institute of International Relations. Martin Thomas, Professor, Department of History, University of Exeter. Ian van der Waag, Professor, Defense and Security, Rabdan Academy—​Zayed Military University. Boyd van Dijk, Oxford Martin Fellow, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. Mathilde von Bülow, Lecturer, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews. Abdul Wahid, Lecturer, Department of History, Faculty of Cultural Science, Universitas Gadjah Mada.

Introdu c t i on

Revisiting the Violent Collapse of Empires Martin Thomas For several decades, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine notwithstanding, conflicts within states rather than between them have been the prevalent form of organized political violence worldwide. The lethality of conflicts between insurgent groups and counter-​insurgent security forces has risen markedly since the Second World War, just as those of conventional or inter-​state wars have declined.1 Sadly, this has been a form of warfare substantially practised beyond the juridical constraints of international law. The majority of these internal conflicts originated in decolonization, in the global process of empire disintegration, which, alongside Cold War contests, reshaped the configuration of nations and geopolitical interests in the twentieth century and beyond. This Handbook’s starting point is recognition that it is in the violence of decolonization that the phenomenon increasingly identified as the ‘civilianization of war’ developed most clearly after 1945.2 Violent decolonization typically involved contests between imperial security forces and paramilitary groups embedded among local communities. Armed insurgents and counter-​ insurgent security forces rarely recognized or respected the inviolability of colonial subjects as non-​combatants. In a pattern now all too familiar, the warring parties systematically targeted local populations whose compliance was—​and is—​considered more crucial than undisputed control of territory.3 Civilians have suffered both direct military assaults and 1 The literature on the prevalence and duration of intra-​ state wars is large, although the inclusion of late-​colonial conflicts in global analysis of civil wars varies. Good introductions include Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); D. Balch-​Lindsay and A.J. Enterline, ‘Killing Time: the World Politics of Civil War Duration, 1820–​1992’, International Studies Quarterly, 44/​4 (1999), 615–​642; J.D. Fearon and D. Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, American Political Science Review, 97/​ 1 (2003), 75–​ 90; P.M. Regan, ‘Third Party Interventions and the Duration of Interstate Conflicts’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46/​1 (2002), 55–​73. 2 For perspectives on this phenomenon, see: Andrew Barros and Martin Thomas (eds.), The Civilianization of War: The Changing Civil-​ Military Divide, 1914–​ 2014 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 3  The Islamic State is the notable anomaly here insofar as it has aspired to achieve both outcomes. For broad analysis, see: Seth Lazar, ‘Necessity and Non-​Combatant Immunity’, Review of International Studies, 40:1 (2014), 53–​76.

2   Martin Thomas multiple forms of everyday violence ranging from discriminatory treatment under law to forced population removal, food denial, and torture. Affording better protections to the most vulnerable population groups, including women and girls, adolescent males, ethno-​ religious minorities, refugees, and displaced persons, remains the most difficult task in conflict limitation and peace enforcement.4 As the Handbook contributions demonstrate, these were problems intrinsic to the violence of empire collapse. More striking still, most intra-​state conflicts and regional conflagrations since 1945 have originated in insurgencies, not just against incumbent authorities but, more often, against those authorities’ external sponsors, whether imperial governments or other foreign powers. This Handbook focuses on the former group, on the insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies fought out as European overseas empires disintegrated. Seeking to identify the causal dynamics and social processes of such violent decolonization, the Handbook addresses the most taxing problems in conflict limitation: how to constrain the actions of insurgents and counter-​insurgents in asymmetric ‘guerrilla wars’; how to mitigate the consequences of proxy involvement in imperial struggles; and how to protect civilians in war zones where combatant–​non-​combatant distinctions either have no traction or have broken down. Underlying these questions is a unifying theme—​and a core Handbook objective—​ studying the organizational practices and cultural presumptions of insurgent movements and counter-​insurgent forces in order to comprehend their violence choices. Analysts of sustained anti-​colonial rebellions have tended to frame them as variants of ‘irregular warfare’. From this starting point, insurgent strategies have usually been codified along four main axes. The first, and still most commonplace, characterizes insurgency as derivative, as adapting the well-​known precepts of Maoist revolutionary warfare in which insurgent groups follow distinct phases of consolidation, widening social control, and eventual military confrontation with their opponents. The second is attritional, predicated on the idea that insurgent forces grind down their enemies by imposing politically unacceptable losses upon them. In this typology the intolerance of domestic publics for little known wars in ‘far-​ away places’ becomes critical.5 The third line of interpretation, more appealing to scholars of global history and human rights, suggests that insurgents might win less by practising violence than by exposing the violence done to them and the surrounding civilian populations caught up in decolonization conflicts. In this view, insurgents triumphed thanks to their relentless exposure of colonial maltreatment, which hastened a turning tide of global opinion against anachronistic imperialist racism.6 The fourth and final line of interpretation emerged from the new left radicalism of the 1960s in which direct revolutionary action, the ‘violence 4 Ward

Thomas, The New Dogs of War: Nonstate Actor Violence in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021); Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Roland Paris, ‘The “Responsibility to Protect” and the Structural Problems of Preventive Humanitarian Intervention’, International Peacekeeping, 21/​5 (2014), 569–​603. 5 This is a common refrain in historical and political science literature alike. As examples, see: Michael Burleigh, Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World, 1945–​1965 (Basingstoke: Palgrave-​Macmillan, 2013), and Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 6  The now classic exposition of this view is Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Introduction   3 of the deed’, was identified by its practitioners as the core tenet of insurgency.7 In this reading, the language of violence changed and was differently understood. It became more performative and was often terroristic, designed to shock local and international audiences into the concessions demanded by its perpetrators. Building on these interpretations, the Handbook refines ideas about the nature of late colonial conflict, the ways in which colonial security forces responded to it, and the patterns of violence, rights abuses, and legacies of inter-​communal distrust that resulted. Despite mounting interest in counter-​insurgency and empire, comparative investigation of colonial responses to insurrection and civil disorder is sparse.8 Instead, it is sometimes contended that colonial security forces followed discrete national traditions and unique patterns of organizational learning, making comparison moot.9 The Handbook challenges this view. Bringing together a large group of leading specialist scholars, it explores the inter-​dependence and enduring resonance of the colonial conflicts that engulfed European empires after 1945. Some chapters analyse issues of insurgent mobilization, the civilianization of conflict, and the nature of insurgent proto-​states; others examine counter-​insurgency beyond the national paradigm approach focusing on epiphenomena—​among them, securitization strategies, population removal, sanctuary bases, targeting, and truces. The goal is to offer thematic pointers and detailed cross-​regional insights into insurgencies and those assigned to suppress them. Above all, contributors are concerned with the agency and experience of those individuals and groups involved in late colonial conflicts. Who joined insurgencies? Why did they participate and in what capacity? Why, on the other hand, did colonial subjects sometimes strike bargains with imperial security forces, or avoid taking sides altogether? How did civilians navigate the competing demands of insurgents and counter-​insurgents? These are questions left unanswered in studies concerned only with the strategic and doctrinal aspects of population-​centric counter-​insurgency. Why now? Conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, the West African Sahel, Myanmar, and Ethiopia have fired interest in colonial experiences of rebellion, while other western interventions in sub-​Saharan Africa have prompted accusations of humanitarian interference.10 Numerous contemporary conflicts of this type are rooted 7 The

genealogy of this viewpoint is explored from various perspectives in: Paul Thomas Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-​Cold War Order (Oxford University Press, 2012); Judy Tzu-​Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); and Peter Krause, Rebel Power: Why National Movements Compete, Fight, and Win (Cornell University Press, 2017). 8 Pioneering comparative British works on imperial policing and colonial insurgency, each the product of conferences in the early 1990s, did not stimulate much wider debate: David Anderson and David Killingray (eds.), Policing and Decolonisation: Nationalism, Politics and the Police, 1917–​1965 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Robert Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1994). 9 A powerful recent reiteration of the national cultures argument is Beatrice Heuser and Eitan Shamir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counter-​ Insurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 10 Norrie MacQueen, Humanitarian Intervention and the United Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), chap. 4; T. Allen and D. Styan, ‘A Right to Interfere? Bernard Kouchner and the New Humanitarianism’, Journal of International Development, 12 (2000), 825–​842; Michelle Moyd,

4   Martin Thomas in experiences of empire breakdown. Current transnational connections between insurgent movements and, on the other side of the divide, the international coalition building between counter-​insurgent security forces do more than evoke decolonization conflicts—​they are traceable to them. With the need to historicize the current wave of intra-​state wars in mind, the Handbook turns on the idea of resonances. It suggests that the study of late colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies, of the fights over decolonization that were the predominant form of warfare in the Global South during the mid to late-​twentieth century, are intrinsic to understanding patterns of conflict throughout much of our contemporary world. With its focus on transnational activism, armed insurrection, state violence, and human rights abuses, the Handbook has clear relevance for the study of contemporary civil conflicts.11 These connections notwithstanding, few historians have exploited insights from political scientists about insurgent behaviour and state repression of popular dissent.12 The Handbook tries to remedy this. It combines empirical, historically informed understandings of colonial state violence with more theoretical interpretations from political scientists that seek to explain how authoritarian colonialism shaped popular protest and resultant strategies of state repression. The Handbook brings together leading scholars of colonial violence working across various sub-​fields from the nature of irregular warfare, the civilianization of conflict, and intelligence-​led counter-​insurgency, to the deployment of ‘loyalist’ militias, forced population removal, and the growth of transnational insurgent movements that have since come to typify contemporary conflict. Viewed in the round, contributions highlight connections between late colonial counter-​insurgency campaigns and amongst insurgent movements. Some explore exchanges of personnel and strategic ideas, others the growth of social movements and diplomatic networks, which made a global case for self-​determination and sovereign rights. With its focus on colonial state collapse, forms of organized violence, revolutionary anti-​colonial movements, and the interconnected nature of contested decolonization, the Handbook’s findings should be of wider relevance to scholars concerned with fragile states, insurgent behaviour, transnational activism, and social mobilization. Historical analysis of the violent twentieth-​century decolonization of European Oceanic empires has tended to divide along two axes: one methodological, the other ideational. Those ‘What’s Wrong with Doing Good? Reflections on Africa, Humanitarianism, and the Challenge of the Global’, Africa Today, 63/​2 (2016), 92–​96. 11  Standout

works in comparative politics include: Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War; Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution; Heuser and Shamir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counter-​Insurgencies; Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Erica Chenoweth, Adria Lawrence, and Stathis Kalyvas (eds.), Rethinking Violence: States and Non-​State Actors in Conflict (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2010); Adria Lawrence, Imperial Rule and the Politics of Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). 12  The most relevant—​ and influential—​exception is Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Important recent additions to the social scientific literature are Paul Staniland, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-​State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021); Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Bullets Not Ballots: Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).

Introduction   5 wedded to global history’s concern with processes of connection and the movement of ideas, have dwelt upon the consolidation, in some cases the revival, of internationalist attachments as transnational movements at odds with the fixity of western empire. Networks of insurgent connection, sanctuary bases, and cross-​border flows of people, weapons, supplies, and ideas are increasingly described as keys to understanding how the anti-​colonial weak defeated the colonialist strong.13 All of those issues feature in chapter contributions to this Handbook. Those tied to imperial history’s primary interest in practices and ideas of empire have tended towards more conservative conclusions, dwelling on the persistence of colonial states and the strategies developed to counter insistent threats to imperial authority. Assuredly empire ended, but the message here is that decolonization was rarely won through military means. The consequent analytical challenge is to explain how liberation movements so often got their way against counter-​insurgent security forces, if not through organized violence. Often unacknowledged but still underlying a good deal of this imperial history is a deeper ideational divide between those we might see as followers of the philosopher Hannah Arendt and those whose views are closer to sociologist Charles Tilly’s. Building on her reflections on violence, for the Arendtians, heightened internal opposition to imperial control after 1918 and, again, after 1945 were intrinsically destructive of empire: violence—​including acts of repression—​undermined colonial authority, destroying any residual legitimacy claimed by imperialist governments.14 The solution to that analytical challenge, in other words, is to explain how the violence of late colonial conflicts delegitimized empire, sapping the will of metropolitan governments and publics to defy the global rejection of colonialism as an acceptable way of doing politics. The Arendtians, though, have not gone unopposed. Following Charles Tilly’s conceptualization of contentious politics and war as catalysts to state-​making, others frame violent anti-​colonialism and the aggressive imperial responses to it as acts of creation, whether of proto-​nations from colonies or of a more intrusive style of empire, one whose subjects were increasingly made administratively legible to their rulers.15 For the Arendtians, colonial violence was all the more shocking because meaningful colonial governance—​in the sense of local authority structures, tax collection systems, and basic welfare provision—​was

13 

For a survey of social scientific literature on, and approaches to, the subject, see Jeffrey T. Checkel (ed.), Transnational Dynamics of Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3–​26. Although focused on Eastern bloc state actors, the variety of transnational insurgent connections emerge clearly in Young-​Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Philip E. Muehlenbeck and Natalia Telepneva (eds.), Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World: Aid and Influence in the Cold War (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018). 14  Hannah Arendt, On Violence (London & New York: Harvest Books, 1970). For analysis of Arendt’s thinking about permissible political violence, see Caroline Ashcroft, Violence and Power in the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), especially chaps. 6 and 7; Jock McCulloch, ‘Empire and Violence, 1900–​1939’, in Philippa Levine (ed.), Gender and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 223. And for the colonial oversights in Arendt’s thought, see: Ratna Kapur, ‘On Violence, Revolution and the Self ’, Postcolonial Studies, 24/​2 (2021), 251–​269. 15  Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Charles Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Ernesto Castañeda and Cathy Lisa Schneider (eds.), Collective Violence, Contentious Politics, and Social Change: A Charles Tilly Reader (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 121–​154.

6   Martin Thomas often minimal before the violence took place.16 In sociologist James Scott’s terms, even in 1945 large parts of colonial territories were anarchic spaces whose populations were neither visible to nor meaningfully governed by central authority.17 Here we reach common analytical ground. For the Arendtians who see in organized violence a failure of politics and those, like Tilly, who see warfare, including the conflicts attending the end of European empires, as contentious politics pursued to its fullest extent, the shared presumption is that the violence of decolonization was a political accelerant. Few dispute that late colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies were decisive, strategically determinant of decolonization outcomes, and instrumental to the political cultures of post-​independence regimes. The thinness of the colonial administrative presence before numerous late colonial insurgencies began does not mean that state violence was absent. In regions such as the highland interiors of north-​eastern India, Burma, and Laos, famously studied by Scott, processes of border demarcation were, by 1945, bound up with colonial efforts to develop collaboration with ethnic minority communities perceived as potential empire loyalists in the face of nationalist movements identifiable with dominant ethnic majority populations.18 As these examples illustrate, even in thinly administered regions, colonial power could be locally devastating when it ‘turned up’. Aside from fomenting local frictions between ethnic communities, this ‘turning up’ might take the form of coercive tax collection conducted with police backing, it might be the sweep operations, detentions, or other collective punishments security forces conducted in response to disorders. Or, turning our attention to Dutch Indonesia and French Vietnam in the revolutionary ferment of summer 1945, it might be the arrival of a reconquering ‘expeditionary force’. The globalizing of anti-​colonialism was meanwhile facilitated by three changes to the post-​1945 international system. One was the crystallization of the Cold War and the consolidation of a ‘Second World’ ideologically predisposed to the anti-​colonial claims of insurgent movements across the Global South. These Second World–​Third World connections multiplied following the 1950s emergence and 1960s consolidation of a non-​ aligned movement determined to put issues of racial and economic inequality at the heart of international relations and cultural diplomacy.19 Another critical change was the foundation of the United Nations. The world’s leading supranational organization invested its credibility in a growing corpus of international law that was predicated on respect for individual human rights. But was the UN genuinely universalist in its rights politics? In one sense, yes: the 16 Archives

Nationales d’Outre-​Mer (ANOM), Aix-​en-​Provence, Gouvernement-​général d’Algérie (GGA), 40g: Centre d’Informations et d’Etudes (CIE)/​Services des Liaisons nord-​africains, Carton 40G/​ 32, Sous-​dossier: Haute Police, Ministre plénipotentiaire Gazagne to prefects of Algeria, 19 September 1945: ‘A/​S de la mise en résidence surveillée de personnes indésirables dans les territoires du Sud’. 17  James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), especially chaps. 5 and 6. For discussion of Scott’s analysis of ungoverned spaces, or ‘Zomia’, see Jean Michaud, ‘What’s (Written) History For? On James C. Scott’s Zomia, Especially Chapter 6’, Anthropology Today, 33/​ 1 (2017), 6–​10. 18  See Aditya Kakati’s chapter in this volume. 19  Giuliano Garavini, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South 1957–​1986 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 7–​44; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-​Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 142–​171.

Introduction   7 United Nations and its affiliate agencies expressly rejected the scientific racism that had been invoked by European imperialists for decades—​albeit in a coded rhetoric of ‘civilizing’, societal modernization, or cultural ‘assimilation’. And, over time, the expansion in UN membership resulting from decolonization elsewhere also ensured an increasingly sympathetic General Assembly audience for oppositional voices from within those regions still living under colonialism. But in another sense, no: the international laws of the 1940s were ill-​ adapted to decolonization conflicts, which imperial powers, as UN members, insisted were purely domestic concerns. More seriously, it is questionable whether leading UN actors, from Security Council members to early Secretaries-​General, viewed colonized spaces and colonial lives as matters of primary strategic and moral importance. To be sure, attitudes were changing, but they took years to do so. Put differently, the UN’s role and that of its affiliated supranational agencies was cumulative, their impact sometimes decisive, but more often gradual. The third essential change in the post-​war international system was the coalescence between the more assertive non-​aligned states and various liberation movements from 1958 onwards. They professed an authentic Third World diplomacy that rejected the worldviews and political gambits of the Cold War giants by invoking colonial discrimination as the most globally salient ideological divide.20 What had been an informal coalition crystallized into opposing power blocs within the Global South with the 1961 split among non-​aligned movement members between newly independent states willing to accommodate structures of western capitalism and those militantly opposed to it. By 1962, lasting transnational connections between key African protagonists, from Algeria’s FLN to South Africa’s ANC, were in place. These new alignments of radical Third Worldists heralded the final phase of decolonization’s wars in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as struggles against the minority rule of settler colonialists from Southern Africa to Israel. Historians’ attention to these globalizing factors has helped unravel the conundrum beloved of strategic studies theorists: how did the weak beat the strong? Taking the panorama of international diplomatic contacts and transnational mobilizations into account, the response is that anti-​colonial insurgent movements did not, ultimately, need to defeat imperial security forces militarily. Exposing their abuses through relentless media campaigning, grinding down their rank and file through insistent targeting, and highlighting the abuses characteristic of colonialist politics to sympathetic governments and public audiences around the world discredited the soldiers and police at the sharpest end of counter-​ insurgency.21 Wars of decolonization, then, were as much campaigns of moral disarmament as they were physical struggles of arms. The argument is a seductive one, appealing to the notion that a global public sphere waking up to colonialism’s cruelties ultimately counted most of all. There are limits to this line of reasoning even so. For one thing, there is abundant evidence that regimes and governments around the world were not above changing sides.22 Worthy 20 See

the essays in Muehlenbeck and Telepneva, Warsaw Pact Intervention in the Third World; Christopher J. Lee, ‘Return of the Event: Bandung and the Concept of the Conference’, in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World After Empire: the Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives, 2nd ed. (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019). 21  The clearest iteration of this view remains Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution. 22  Milos Popovic, ‘Fragile Proxies: Explaining Rebel Defection Against their State Sponsors’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 29/​6 (2017), 924–​930.

8   Martin Thomas anti-​colonial causes were shelved or abandoned if governmental decision-​makers felt their national or regional interests were better served by doing so. The South African regime, for instance, enjoyed considerable success in dividing the global coalition of anti-​apartheid states ranged against it from 1960 onwards.23 For another thing, as a multilateral grouping of anti-​colonial Global South voices the non-​aligned movement would disappoint. At times, it was eclipsed, if not suborned, by the zero-​sum logic of Cold War geo-​politics. At others, its advocates struggled to slow the onwards march of capitalist globalization and the mass consumerism at its heart. Not surprisingly, anti-​colonialist artists and activists played on the juxtaposition of imperialist conflicts and capitalist consumerism in making their case. For all that, the power of transnational mobilization and anti-​colonial activism, while considerable, did not, in and of itself, precipitate decolonization or the end of its wars. Those who hoped for a decisive Third Worldist turn in international politics would also face disillusionment with the emblematic anti-​colonial insurgencies they backed from Southeast Asia to North Africa, some of which remained intensely sectarian and commensurately unscrupulous in eliminating local rivals for power. To take a few examples, think of Lê Duẩn’s (birth name: Lê Văn Nhuận) North Vietnamese regime’s single-​minded pursuit of a Communist command economy after victory over the United States, Anwar Sadat’s decision to opt for Egyptian coexistence with Israel, or the failure of the New International Economic Order initiative launched by the oil-​producing nations and sympathetic commodity exporters across the Global South in 1973–​4. Anti-​colonialist regimes confronted with enormous administrative problems and economic disadvantages rarely tolerated much internal dissent. Facing such overwhelming local challenges, it was difficult to sustain unity between them on issues of principle.24 Bearing these factors in mind, the analytical trend among imperial historians is now pushing in a global direction. As I’ve suggested, wars of decolonization are typologized as highly internationalized and intrinsically transnational. The internationalization operates at discrete levels, from the direct involvement of external backers in what were often complex proxy wars to the engagement of international support and public sympathy. Often this involved the formation of proto-​governments-​in-​exile and the appointment of designated representatives overseas, alongside propagandist output, cultivation of the media, and intensive lobbying of supranational organizations, non-​governmental agencies, and other advocacy groups about everything from the structural foundations of global discrimination to specific rights abuses. All were facets of so-​called guerrilla diplomacy.25 The geopolitical regions and ideational spaces in which this contest to win over states and publics took place expanded markedly after the Second World War. Increasing global connectivity, new media, and consequent growth in the opportunity to communicate, whether in person, in print, or

23  Jamie

Miller, An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and its Search for Survival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 62–​78, 82–​87. 24  On the NIEO, see Garavini, After Empires, 62–​82; Bernard Mommer, ‘The Shocking History of Oil’, in Elisabetta Bini, Giuliano Garavini, and Federico Romero (eds.), Oil Shock: The 1973 Crisis and its Economic Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016). 25 Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, & the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

Introduction   9 over the airwaves, helped make such guerrilla diplomacy not just an international phenomenon, but a transnational one as well.26 Another knotty issue relates to the comparability of violence practiced by those on opposite sides of the insurgent–​counter-​insurgent divide. The ethical question of whether the violence of those suffering repression and rights denial is somehow more justifiable than that of colonial security forces takes us into the realms of moral relativism and the universality or otherwise of, what, in the human rights regime emerging after 1945, were constructed as basic rights, inalienably attached to the individual. The view that those denied the capacity to alter their conditions of life peaceably might justifiably resort to violence is close to the position adopted by new leftist activists that moral relativism is defensible because the violence of the oppressed should be judged by different standards to that of the oppressor. This viewpoint, of course, has its own history. It was popularized amidst the revolutionary wave of socio-​political change sweeping a decolonizing Global South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and then catalysed by the Johnson administration’s 1965 escalation of war in Vietnam. Ironically, though, at the very moment that some anti-​war activists in the West abjured a pacifist position to endorse the violence of those fighting against colonialism, national liberation movements were mobilizing western discourses of civilization and respect for combatant-​non-​combatant distinctions in war to discredit the imperial regimes against which they fought.27 While their leftist supporters in western countries endorsed the legitimacy of anti-​colonial violence, for some insurgent groups, demonstrating restraint helped make their case for self-​determination. Putting its ethical dimensions to one side, the judgement that different sides might justifiably use differing types and levels of violence might seem comprehensible until one attempts the taxonomy of who or which groups count in each category as oppressors and oppressed. The compliance terror of insurgents trying to impose social control over widely dispersed rural communities does not sit well with the presumption that insurgent movements, such as Algeria’s FLN or Mozambique’s FRELIMO, were more selective in targeting local opponents or ‘collaborators’. On the other hand, the scale of forced population removal practiced by colonial security forces might be considered of a different magnitude entirely.28 These were phenomena closer to the model of extremely violent societies pioneered by one of our contributors, historian Christian Gerlach, in which biopolitical factors—​displacement and poor housing, loss of land, food denial, and inadequate provision for newborn children, the fundamentals of individual and family survival—​were the most egregious elements of state repression. So what, if anything, makes late colonial insurgency and counter-​insurgency not only globally significant, but analytically distinctive? Perhaps the best way to answer this is by 26 Robert J. Bookmiller, ‘The Algerian War of Words: Broadcasting and Revolution, 1954–​ 1962’, Maghreb Review, 14/​3–​4 (1989), 196–​213; Judy Tzu-​Chun Wu, Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 26–​ 27, 94–​95. 27  Petra Goedde, The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 162–​167. 28 Moritz Feichtinger, ‘“A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72; for a case study of population removal, see: Edward J. Erickson (ed.), A Global History of Relocation in Counterinsurgency Warfare (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

10   Martin Thomas explaining the organization of the Handbook and the analytical concerns that run through the volume’s chapter contributions. The Handbook is organized into six themed sections, each of between five to seven chapters. These chapters combine broad, regional treatments of decolonization’s wars with others constructed around particular facets of insurgent movements, counter-​insurgent responses, and the conflicts that ensued as European colonial empires disintegrated. The aim is to ensure the book has a strong thematic core, while allowing space to explore revealing case studies, which illustrate the issues raised by discrete forms of insurgent conflict. The goal is to identify the factors that facilitated insurgent organization and eventual victory or, alternatively, those that assisted counter-​insurgent strategies to frustrate them. With chapter contributions ranging widely across various conflicts, the Handbook sections consider the following core issues.

Patterns of Insurgent Violence and Counter-​ Insurgent Repression What, if anything, differentiated late colonial conflict from other forms of irregular war? Using various case study examples, the contributions demonstrate both the singularities and the commonalities involved. It might be objected that micro-​level analysis of late colonial conflicts ignores the elephant in the room, namely that they are ‘late’ colonial not because the apparatus of imperial governance modernizes and expands after 1945, but because time is running out for empire. Relevant here is John Darwin’s insight that what made ‘late’ colonial states was their willingness to contemplate their eventual demise once their own preconditions were satisfied. Uniquely, they were ‘suicide states’. If he’s right, then most imperial security forces were fighting to impose political and economic terms on which troops, administrators, and, in some cases, settlers could safely pack up and leave. If he’s wrong, then studying these conflicts as more contingent and less predetermined makes sense. Whichever the case, it’s surely clear that global opinions about empire and colonialism were manifestly different in 1920, in 1940, in 1960, and so on. The point here is about normativity, about prevailing worldviews, whether the challenge to them is inherent in generational changes in attitude or, alternatively, in the persistence of unthinking racism and casual imperialism, as well as imperialists’ blind spots in regard to poverty, rights, and political inclusion. If, thanks in large part to globalization, individual and collective opinions were inflected with greater awareness of—​and sensitivity to—​conditions inside colonies at war, then surely formal empire was inexorably becoming a losing bet. Gradual change of this sort represented a kind of decolonization domino theory. Fighting for empire in the early Cold War and as part of a Greater Second World War was normatively understood and generically pursued by imperial powers. Doing so twenty and thirty years later was a lonelier, more questionable business. Whatever the inflection one gives the phrase, the ‘tide of history’ had turned. Use of the term ‘late colonial’ to describe the conflicts discussed in the Handbook suggests two other things as well. One is that the violence described was somehow a prelude to imperial collapse. The other is that the chronologies of decolonization conflicts are rarely straightforward. There are several reasons why. One is that, when it comes to

Introduction   11 organized violence at the end of empires, formal ‘declarations’ of war are as unusual at their beginning as are formal peace treaties at their end. Instead, the processes of going to war and bringing organized violence to a close are murkier in decolonization conflicts. Another is that insurgent groups keen to emphasize their primacy mapped anti-​colonial conflicts onto their coalescence as a social movement. They claimed as a result to have been ‘fighting for freedom’ for longer than imperial security forces cared to acknowledge. Following the same logic, it served colonial authorities’ interest to delegitimize their opponents and to minimize the popular support enjoyed by anti-​colonial causes. The consequent impulse within imperial government was to define particular conflicts in narrower terms. Crudely put, insurgent narratives tend to lengthen conflict chronologies; imperial states tend to shorten them. Often historical accounts draw some equivalence between the implementation of emergency powers and the duration of the conflict. This may be a convenient shorthand, but it is insufficient. Several complicating factors indicate why. First is the civil war dynamic discussed below: if the conflict is a civil war (or multiple ones), what impact does this have on our understanding of the conflict’s origins and, therefore, its chronology? Second, decolonization conflicts are almost never formally, in the sense of ‘legally’, acknowledged as being ‘wars’ at all. This used to attract more methodological interest, but it is now seen as mundane—​of course they were not so recognized at the time because it was vital to the imperial powers engaged in fighting them to deny they were ‘at war’ within spaces over which they claimed sovereignty and against people over whom they claimed dominion. But the issue remains important insofar as everything from international laws to historical accounts work to defined chronologies—​and most replicate what imperial states said at the time. If working out the duration of late colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies may be less straightforward than might first appear, recognizing the centrality of political economy to the organized violence at the end of empire is not so much difficult as unfashionable. Out of favour after the cultural turn, and derided by some as overly deterministic, there remains a strong case for the centrality of political economy in decolonization conflicts on at least four grounds. First, most violent decolonization played out in rural, predominantly peasant societies where forms of land use and threats to sustainable agriculture are all issues of imminent concern to the local majority population.29 In practice, the political economy of decolonization conflicts is inseparable from the moral economies of cultural integrity and community obligation underpinning it.30 Each puts questions of land and inheritance, of agricultural incomes, indebtedness, and poverty, at its heart. A second reason to stick with political economy is that the sharp, vertical inequalities of colonial societies contributed to social division and conflict. Political economists sometimes even go as far as reinserting class dynamics into the analysis of violent decolonization. 29 The

defining work here remains Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). See also Ngo Vinh Long, ‘Communal Property and Peasant Revolutionary Struggles in Vietnam’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 17 (1990), 121–​140; Alec Gordon, ‘The Agrarian Question and Colonial Capitalism: Coercion and the Java Colonial Sugar Plantation System, 1870–​1941’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 27/​1 (1999), 1–​34. 30  The clearest expression of this viewpoint is Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (eds.), Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa II: Violence and Ethnicity (Oxford: James Currey, 1992).

12   Martin Thomas Third, both insurgents and counter-​insurgents made social policy initiatives central to their strategies. Provision of basic welfare, remedial healthcare, communications and energy, and infrastructure all posited that changing the socio-​economic complexion of a community was a prerequisite to changing its politics. Coercive development was, at root, a strategy of political economy.31 Fourth, there’s a strong argument to suggest that imperial counter-​ insurgencies were launched and, in some cases, abandoned because of political economic calculations. The connection here is between social capital and economic worth: the political point of carrying on was often correlated against the financial and reputational costs of doing so. When it was not, imperial regimes, from France’s Fourth Republic to Salazar’s Portugal and apartheid South Africa, could face collapse. Linked to matters of political economy are issues of political ecology. The political ecology of conflict centres on contests for control of natural resources, and investigates the role of such resources both in heightening the risk of war and in sustaining group violence in the absence of major ideological or cultural differences between warring parties. Secondarily, political ecology addresses the impact of such conflicts on local environments, assessing the extent to which the coercive extraction of resources, the destruction of agricultural land, and the degradation of habitats contribute to the attenuation of war.32 At one level, ideas of political ecology seem consistent with Mary Kaldor’s ‘new wars’ thesis about the primacy of material interests and criminal gain in post-​Cold War conflicts lacking ideological inspiration, as they do with Paul Collier and others’ identification of the commercialization of conflicts by armed groups seeking profit by leveraging control over resource trade.33 At another level, though, political ecology is a more neutral concept. It simply places resource extraction and changes to the natural environment at the heart of conflict analysis. It is this that differentiates political ecology from its cousin, social ecology, which connects the consumerism and mass consumption of industrial societies to environmental spoliation in the tropical world.34 This is not the same as saying that environmental degradation or fights over valuable resources cause wars. Political ecology is not so reductive. It focuses on wider political and moral economies of war, on the connections between hostile competition over particular resources and changes in local ecologies on the one hand, and, on the other, the consequent population displacements, alterations to economic activity, and disruptions to established ways of life.

31 For the related concept of household orderliness in counter-​ insurgency, see Patricia Owens, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 12–​39, 88–​130. 32  Philippe Le Billon, ‘The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts’, Political Geography, 20 (2001), 561–​584. 33  For background, see: Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); M. Berdal and D. Malone (eds.), Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000); C. Allen, ‘Warfare, Endemic Violence and State Collapse’, Review of African Political Economy, 81 (1999), 367–​384. 34 Ian Tyrrell, ‘Resource Use, Conservation, and the Environmental Limits of Anti-​ Imperialism, c.1880–​1930’, in Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton (eds.), Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-​Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 168, citing the arguments of Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

Introduction   13 Certain commonalities are apparent. One is the prevalence in such conflicts of so-​called ‘gatekeeper states’, namely, regimes that derive their wealth from trading their internal resources rather than building popular legitimacy through balancing taxation against social provision.35 Another is that the risk of conflict increases owing to the vulnerability of the resources in question, whether because of their geographical remoteness from centres of power or, alternatively, their proximity to disputed frontiers or within regions seeking secession (think of energy installations, plantations, or mining centres targeted by insurgent forces, for example). Other difficulties arise where prized resources are diffuse, sources of water or croplands for example, making them difficult for incumbent regimes to safeguard.36 More generally, resource-​led conflicts have been most prevalent in formerly colonized states still dependent on commodity export revenues.37 The ensuing environmental insecurity has tended to be worst in places where decolonization left frontier disputes and competing ethnic claims over resource ownership in its wake.38 Political ecology is a close relative of political economy insofar as its core preoccupation is with material resources: issues of access, use, and denial being central. It differs insofar as, contrary to political economy’s focus on how economic conditions affect political choices, political ecology turns on how geographical space, and the resources within it, affect social stability and the viability of communities rendered vulnerable by environmental factors. Again, its relevance needs no amplification in light of the fact that decolonization conflicts are predominantly rural wars in which lands and environments, as well as people, are at stake. Deforestation, soil erosion, water rights, and settler land grabs were powerful contributory factors to numerous late colonial conflicts, making environmental spoliation both a cause and consequence of decolonization’s wars.39 We are only beginning to realize the degree to which late colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgent strategies of land and resource denial devastated local environments.40 Laying waste to land, killing livestock, and ‘clearing’ free-​fire zones with aircraft, chemical defoliants, and minefields caused lasting environmental damage to decolonizing territories and their inhabitants.41

35  Le Billon, ‘The Political Ecology of War’, 561–​568; Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), chap. 7. 36  Ibid., 572–​575. 37  Ibid., 576–​578. 38  Philippe Le Billon, ‘The Geopolitical Economy of ‘Resource Wars’, in Philippe Le Billon (ed.), The Geopolitics of Resource Wars: Resource Dependence, Governance and Violence (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 3–​5. 39 David M. Anderson, ‘Depression, Dust Bowl, Demography, and Drought: The Colonial State and Soil Conservation in East Africa during the 1930s’, African Affairs, 83/​332 (1984), 321–​343; William Beinart, ‘Soil Erosion, Conservationism and Ideas about Development: A Southern African Exploration, 1900–​1960’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 11/​1 (1984), 52–​83; Corey Ross, ‘Developing the Rain Forest: Rubber, Environment and Economy in Southeast Asia’, in Gareth Austin (ed.), Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 199–​218. 40  Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 41 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011), 13–​14, 35.

14   Martin Thomas

The ‘Rules’ of the Game By the title of our second themed section, ‘rules of the game’, we mean the role of doctrines, laws and restrictions, propaganda, and pronouncements in shaping how conflicts were strategized and enacted. Our purpose here is to connect what was written and said about how late colonial conflicts should be fought or countered with the ensuing levels of repression that such doctrines, laws, and propaganda promoted. Emergency powers, martial law, states of siege, and other variants of repressive legislative restriction were always instruments of late colonial counter-​insurgency. So much so that the moniker ‘lawfare’ has been used to describe the employment of administrative fiat as a tool of social control. The prevalence of ‘lawfare’ raises several questions. Why are social restrictions the first resort of COIN, especially when popular allegiance is widely assumed to be the political objective or strategic ‘prize’? What differentiates such lockdowns from the inequalities of colonial law that precedes them? Who are legal restrictions aimed at? How are they enforced—​and by whom? Do they work and how might this be measured? There are several conceptual traps here. One is the still widespread presumption that ‘law’ somehow serves the social interest rather than the strategic objectives of the enforcing authority. This is deeply problematic in colonial societies. Colonial law was never rooted in community need; quite the reverse: in advancing imperial interest, legal orders considered local requirements secondarily, if at all.42 Emergency powers might be seen in this context as the logical culmination of pre-​existing colonial law, not its abandonment.43 The legal pluralism common to colonial governance adds further complexity. What happens to other forms of legality, other codes of cultural observance, other practices of what historian John Lonsdale identified as ‘civic virtue’ in situations in which tighter legal restrictions are imposed? Put differently, does the sacrifice of legal pluralism during decolonization conflicts mark the most significant rupture with past practice? Another problem is the presumed equivalence between the fine detail of legal legislation and workaday practice in the field. Just because new laws are devised does not mean that the actions of enforcers or the responses of those facing its enforcement change accordingly. Sociologist James Scott many years ago identified the hidden transcripts of resistance by which peasant populations registered their opposition to oppressive, foreign rule.44 More recently, the work of global historians in decentring histories of imperial collapse has explored the variety of means by which nominally dependent populations retained some autonomy

42 Charles Townshend, ‘Martial Law: Civil and Administrative Problems of Civil Emergency in Britain and the Empire, 1800–​1940’, Historical Journal, 25/​1 (1982), 167–​195; Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–​1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 36–​44. 43  David French, ‘Nasty Not Nice: British Counter-​insurgency Doctrine and Practice’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012), 744–​761. 44  James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). Another defining work is Michael Adas, ‘From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and South-​east Asia’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 13/​2 (1986), 64–​86.

Introduction   15 of action in the most testing conditions.45 Rarely were emergency powers observed in totality. Their transgression was, for civilian populations especially, an oppositional act more feasible, and more meaningful, than joining an insurgent movement. A further conceptual trap lurks in another equivalence problem: between legality and correctness. Rendering certain actions legally permissible does not make them ethically defensible. Indeed, the opposite more typically applies: laws multiply in decolonization conflicts. They cannot thus be described as ‘dirty wars’ in the vernacular sense of conflicts fought without rules of engagement or other legal constraints on repressive action. But additional legal restriction in decolonization’s wars did not limit the scope of permissible violence; it extended it. Put more bluntly, it is the laws themselves that are unjust or even ‘criminal’, not their violation. Hence the final conundrum, which is a causation problem. Does lawfare make decolonization conflicts more violent, or did the violence of decolonization conflicts demand additional legislative measures to provide cover for the strategies enacted? To study late colonial ‘lawfare’ is as much to analyse the limitations of legal protections as it is to investigate the legislative devices used to conceal coercive measures beneath a veneer of legality. This brings us to questions of human rights and international law, topics that also figure prominently in this part of the Handbook. Despite the explosion of scholarly interest in international law and irregular conflicts of the late twentieth century especially, there is little consensus about the part played by international law in violent decolonization.46 Put differently, the relationship between international law and decolonization conflicts is anything but self-​evident. A minimalist approach suggests that international law neither applied to, nor constrained the actions of, conflict participants. This might be explained in racial and colonial terms: international law is a white and western construct. And, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, international law and the UN as the principal supranational agency dedicated to upholding it fell short as arbiters of violent decolonization. A maximalist view, by contrast, suggests that international law shaped the ways conflicts at the end of European empire unfolded. The maximalists contend that international law affected how participants acted, how those actions were justified, and how nations, supranational bodies, and global publics responded to the conflicts in question. In a study dealing with late colonial violence, the passage of additional international laws regulating conflict after the Second World War is less significant than the mechanisms for their enforcement and the scope of their application within empires and for particular categories of people—​ insurgents, prisoners, and unarmed civilians especially. Three questions are paramount. Who may be legitimately—​or at least ‘legally’—​targeted? Should counter-​ insurgent violence be somehow proportionate or, differently put, limited by considerations of likely civilian casualties?47 Most basic of all: do the protections of international law apply in colonial conflicts depicted by one side as internal disorder, by others 45 Excellent

recent examples are David Stenner, ‘Centering the Periphery: Northern Morocco as a Hub of Transnational Anti-​Colonial Activism, 1930–​1943’, Journal of Global History, 11 (2016), 430–​450; Kim Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare, Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal, 85 (Spring 2018), 217–​237. 46  For defining statements of different viewpoints, see: Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), chap. 3; Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 47 Maja Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 14/​3 (2012), 423–​440; Helen M. Kinsella, The Image Before the Weapon: A

16   Martin Thomas as a freedom struggle with global resonance? With these questions in mind, what emerges is not the irrelevance, but the limitations of international law in late colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies.48 The mobilization of international law by insurgent movements and resistance to its application by counter-​insurgents and their governments are central to the chapter contributions in this section of the volume. Using international law and its contravention as evidence, decolonization conflicts have become the terrain for at least three strands of historical argument over human rights and colonialism. One concerns the extent to which the prevalence of rights abuses in violent decolonization rendered them distinctive. The incidence of rights abuses and the refusal of perpetrators to acknowledge rights equivalence across colonialism’s divides of ethnicity and citizen-​subject is pivotal to the argument that ‘colonial’ violence was somehow unique. The second hinges on the centrality or otherwise of rights claims to decolonization itself. To the contention that few anticolonial movements made individual rights integral to their politics, others have suggested that collective rights to nationhood and social rights to improved human security were fundamental.49 Collective social rights were, in other words, prioritized over inalienable individual rights by insurgent movements fighting for sovereign independence. For some insurgent groups, the individual rights at the core of international law were considered a western construction that sat uneasily alongside cultural-​specific ideas of belonging, community obligation, and overarching struggles against colonialism and foreign occupation. These human rights debates intersect with other topics discussed in the chapters to come—​about lawfare and legal restriction, the absence of civilian protections, the non-​recognition of insurgents, and counter-​insurgent techniques of intelligence gathering and psychological war. Debates over the nature of decolonization conflicts, their emblematic status as ‘dirty wars’, and the rights abuses identified with them are bound up with questions arising in their aftermath. What legacies have they left: within the societies and communities among whom they were fought, in forms of government and patterns of post-​colonial politics, inside the former imperial states that waged them, in wider international society and international law?50 Settlers are typically characterized as villains of the piece but have their own narratives of Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 133–​7. 48 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 199–​ 204; Giovanni Mantilla, Lawmaking Under Pressure: International Humanitarian Law and Internal Armed Conflict (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020). 49  Frederick Cooper, ‘Afterword: Social Rights and Human Rights in the Time of Decolonization’, Humanity, 3/​3 (2012), 480–​6; Bonny Ibhawoh, ‘Seeking the Political Kingdom: Universal Human Rights and the Anti-​colonial Movement in Africa’, in A. Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti, and Roland Burke (eds.), Decolonization, Self Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 35–​7. 50 For explorations of this question in various contexts, see: Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pt. II; Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954–​2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Elizabeth Buettner, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Moses, Duranti, and Burke (eds.), Decolonization, Self Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics.

Introduction   17 victimhood, forcible removal, and abandonment by imperial governments. In the case of UDI Rhodesia, that narrative lay at the heart of a constructed national identity and a racially configured counter-​insurgent strategy of ‘maximum force’.51 Historians have also been intimately involved in debates over transitional justice and, more particularly, its absence from most post-​colonial settlements. Instead, efforts to right historical wrongs or to expose truths about what took place have focused on two things: legal claims against former imperial powers for specific human rights violations and formal apologies for colonial actions, which are often embedded within wider memorialization processes.52 Although in some ways shocking, perhaps none of these elements are particularly surprising because, as mentioned elsewhere, decolonization conflicts rarely ended definitively but instead left questions of moral and political choice, of political allegiance, ‘loyalty’ and ‘collaboration’, ‘resistance’, and ‘activism’, open to contestation.53

Explaining Involvement in Violence Work in strategic studies and comparative politics has long dwelt on the ‘collective action’ problem as an indicator of how and when communities turn to violence in irregular warfare. Our focus is different, dwelling on the ‘why’. Colonial civilians are at the heart of the story. Civilians are key to strategies of exclusion and social control. Civilians are the raw material and the target audience of state-​building projects. Civilians are coerced into obeying restrictions or compelled to disobey them. Civilian insecurity is perhaps the principal insurgent recruiter.54 Securitization of civilian spaces inhibits effective insurgent action. Linked to these operational phenomena is the erosion of ‘civilian’ status itself. This is another mirror-​image phenomenon. Just as insurgents are typically denied recognized combatant status and make efforts to secure it, so civilians’ status as non-​combatants is usually eroded, making the status—​and the allegiance—​of unarmed people a central issue in all insurgency conflicts. Concentrating on colonial subjects as civilians denied the opportunity to remain neutral in decolonization conflicts, we consider the mobilization of support for warring parties, whether through voluntary or coercive means. From ‘loyalist’ militias to child soldiers, contributors unpick the choices made by those compelled to take up arms in decolonization’s wars.

51 Michael

Evans, ‘The Wretched of the Empire: Politics, Ideology and Counterinsurgency in Rhodesia, 1965–​80’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 18/​2 (2007), 186–​187. 52  David M. Anderson, ‘British Abuse and Torture in Kenya’s Counter-​insurgency, 1952–​1960’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2/​4–​5 (2012), 700–​7 19. 53  David M. Anderson and Daniel Branch, ‘Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–​1976’, International History Review, 39/​1 (2016), 1–​13; Raphaëlle Branche, ‘The Martyr’s Torch: Memory and Power in Algeria’, Journal of North African Studies, 16/​3 (2011), 431–​443. 54 As Raphaëlle Branche notes of Algeria’s ALN, alongside political commitment, fitness, and possession of a weapon, the insecurity of outlaw status and fear of arrest drove people to join the insurgency: Branche, ‘Fighters for Independence and Rural Society in Colonial Algeria’, in Nuno Domingos, Miguel Jerónimo, and Ricardo Roque (eds.) Resistance and Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2019), 67–​68.

18   Martin Thomas It has become commonplace to view decolonization conflicts as variants of civil wars. The case for rests on privileging the local, or micro, dynamics of decolonization conflict. Locally focused studies study the push factors that drove communities, kin-​groups, and individuals to select sides, and to pursue violence. Some go further, exploring both how definitive such decisions are and why they’re often contingent and reversible in practice. The civil wars argument is strengthened by three supplementary elements: first, imperial security forces typically employ a high proportion of colonial violence workers, usually local paramilitary groups. Second, these ‘loyalist’ forces frequently play a critical role both in the wider decolonization process and in the disposition of political assets, economic power, and social capital after formal independence. Third, the focus on the micro-​dynamics of collective action meshes with the preceding arguments about the precariousness of civilian status. These facets are examined in several chapters in this Handbook. The arguments against reading decolonization conflicts as civil wars are, again, threefold. First is that micro-​dynamics approaches stress fluidity in the choices made. These are often contingent, not absolute. So it becomes difficult to identify ‘sides’, or definitive markers of political and social division, which some contend is fundamental to what makes a civil war. Second is the Fanonian argument, popularized by Third Worldist radicals, that decolonization conflicts are above all social revolutions. The language of people’s wars is no longer in vogue, but the basic idea that liberation movements expressed the unifying strength of popular will persists among many, particularly on the left. The power of opinion is also important to global historians convinced that transnational networks are vital mobilizing agents. Reducing decolonization conflicts to civil wars risks obscuring the injustice of colonialism as a racist capitalist system, which, for some, remains the primary conflict dynamic. Third, the social focus intrinsic to the civil wars approach risks underplaying extraneous ‘macro’ factors, whether global issues of Cold War, geopolitics and proxy involvement, the growing importance of ‘frontline states’ offering sanctuary bases, or decisive shifts in international opinion against empire. Closely tied to the civilianization and civil wars problems, the distinctive gender dynamics of decolonization conflicts seems both obvious and challenging at the same time. Obvious because women and girls were especially vulnerable both to conflicts fought in civilian milieus and to particular forms of violence—​manifestly sexual violence, but also collective punishments, ranging from population removal to its sequels—​internment, coercive development, and permanent displacement.55 Challenging for several reasons: one is that research methodologies may be no less gendered than the archives they scrutinize; each tends to presume that political violence is essentially a masculine activity, and that passivity and victimhood may be correspondingly feminized. These dichotomies do not withstand evidential scrutiny. Another challenge relates to domestic space and other forms of female sociability practiced in discrete spaces like washhouses, field labour sites, communal cooking areas, and women’s mosque rooms. Historians, no less than COIN practitioners, have struggled to understand these spaces and what went on within them. Linked to this are ontological questions relating to resistance, violence, agency, and engagement. How did women respond to decolonization conflicts, and does it make sense to demarcate forms and 55  Laleh Khalili, ‘Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency’, Review of International Studies, 37/​4 (2011), 1471–​1491.

Introduction   19 levels of involvement by gender as opposed to by kinship, by ethno-​religious affiliation, or by geographical community for example? Similar issues present themselves in relation to the age dynamics of decolonization conflicts. Working out how different age groups were engaged, affected, targeted, or overlooked by warring parties, by legal regulations, by social welfare strategies, and by the politics of the opposing movements and communities is difficult. Young people and nursing mothers were the constituencies most directly affected by colonial strategies of social modernization. And ‘youth’, collectively described, was the social group that colonial security agencies most identified with ‘deviancy’, under-​employment, and resistance to modernizing strategies of conformity. Ironically perhaps, historians complain about the need to consider the dynamics of youth involvement, but often ignore the elderly, either assuming them to be passive victims or easily bracketed within the broader categories of ‘adult’ population, property-​holders, stakeholders, or refugees. Finally, there’s the epistemological problem: ‘youth’ and ‘elderly’ are socially constructed categories differently understood between societies. Making comparative assessments in light of these differences requires sensitivity and awareness that discussion of generalizable phenomena risks concealing important local variations. If conflicts at the end of European empire were fought among the people, if there was no recognition of combatant–​non-​combatant distinctions, and if particular civil war, gender, and age dynamics were at work, then each tendency finds its outlet in paramilitarism, which some identify as an essential feature of late colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies. Several analytical challenges arise. Paramilitarism exists across a wide spectrum, ranging from fully integrated but lightly armed security forces to vigilantism and informal self-​ protection groups. Should we, for instance, understand community punishment of alleged collaborators as paramilitarism, as vigilantism, as popular justice, as score-​settling, or as something else entirely? Sometimes ethnic retribution or religious division was pivotal. Other times paramilitaries might approximate to criminal gangs, or ‘hired guns’. Put differently, paramilitaries could be formal or informal, frontline or backline, permanent or temporary. To qualify as a paramilitary force, though, there must surely be some degree of organizational structure. It is these organizational patterns and the actions linked to them that most interest analysts seeking to explain paramilitary violence.56 The case for the distinctiveness of paramilitarism in decolonization conflicts rests on several factors. Scale first: there’s a lot of it going on. So much so that paramilitaries are identified as the primary violence workers in some decolonization conflicts. The distinctive nature of paramilitary violence is harder to pin down. It is typically low on technology, but highly punitive, overtly performative, and often exemplary. So there is substantial interest in questions of targeting, collective punishment, retribution, and rights abuses. These preoccupations intersect with the civil wars’ methodologies insofar as paramilitary collective action and alliance formation touch on questions of motivation and political control.57 Why do 56 Uğur

Ümit Üngör, Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 136–​148; Scott Gates, ‘Recruitment and Allegiance: The Microfoundations of Rebellion’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46/​1 (2002), 111–​116. 57  Jessica A. Stanton, ‘Regulating Militias: Governments, Militias, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59/​5 (2015), 899–​923.

20   Martin Thomas paramilitaries act in particular ways? Whose interests are they serving? And how decisive are they to the wider course of decolonization conflicts? Each of these questions is explored in this third section of the Handbook.

Development and Population Control Much of the violence of late-​colonial insurgency and counter-​insurgency was enacted against civilian populations through forced relocation and dispossession. As the perpetrators of such coercion, imperial security forces and, in some instances, insurgent movements justified their actions in a language of modernization and development. Depicted as a form of welfare or medical provision, social control of this kind was more than coercive; it was often ethnically configured and highly gendered. At its core were practices of population resettlement and domestic surveillance so prevalent that we identify coercive development as a primary phenomenon of contested decolonization. The numbers of people forcibly relocated to carceral sites, whether new village settlements, internment camps, or detention centres, is vast. We know more about those who were formally confined than we do about the untold millions of others who felt compelled to relocate because their lives were either chronically insecure or had become economically unsustainable. Most moved from countryside to city. Large numbers sought out extended family and kin networks for support. And many ended up in shantytowns and other marginal urban settlements, which security forces struggled to regulate and about which they increasingly obsessed.58 Forced population removal was also integral to coercive development, to strategies of enforced rural modernization whose military purposes were hidden beneath a social scientific language of community renewal, social inclusion, and breaking with ‘backward’ cultural practices.59 There are several strands to research interest in what is a very big subject. One focuses on cost-​benefits: on the results of forced population removal for insurgent and counter-​insurgent prospects. These concerns used to dominate the field and were part and parcel of the old arguments about counter-​insurgency’s population-​centric dynamics and clichéd observations about draining the rural population pool so that insurgent fish could no longer swim in it. More recently, there’s been greater focus on destinations: on forced relocation sites as spaces of political intervention, on internment camps as ‘carceral communities’, on their gendered spaces, on the forms of violence within them. Much of this work is anthropological in approach, analysing how affected communities and refugee populations adapted to their conditions.

58  Jim

House, ‘Colonial Containment? Repression of Pro-​Independence Street Demonstrations in Algiers, Casablanca and Paris, 1945–​1962’, War in History, 25/​2 (2018), 172–​201. 59  French-​ruled Algeria, British Malaya, and Kenya, and Portuguese southern Africa have attracted most historical interest in this context. Essential works include: Jennifer Johnson, The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Karl Hack, ‘Detention, Deportation and Resettlement: British Counterinsurgency and Malaya’s Rural Chinese, 1948–​1960’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 43/​4 (2015), 611–​640; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘A Robust Operation: Resettling, Security, and Development in Late Colonial Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Itinerario (2020), 1–​25; Feichtinger, ‘ “A Great Reformatory” ’.

Introduction   21 More longstanding is the interest in detention centres, particularly in colonial Kenya, Algeria, and Angola, whether on processes of screening and coercion; on the spatial design of the centres and the psychological presumptions behind them; or on the cultures of sociability, mobilization, and survival to which they gave rise. By contrast, work on those who escaped the formal colonial structures of forced population removal but who nonetheless felt compelled to move has hardly started. We know something about shantytowns as distinct political and cultural spaces, particularly in North Africa, Nairobi, and Saigon, but not much about other places. We also know a fair amount about those labelled economic migrants or refugees who leave their country of origin to seek sanctuary and opportunity. But while the latter have been bracketed alongside others forcibly relocated within a particular colonial territory, those who fled to seek work abroad are rarely treated as having been ‘forced’ to leave. Coercive removal of peoples was one of several strategies about which much was written by strategic thinkers on all sides. Some of the chapters that follow dwell on the theorists of insurgency and counter-​insurgency, from the protagonists of Maoist-​style ‘revolutionary war’ to those in imperial armies who emulated their insurgent opponents in devising strategies of social control and psychological war. Linked to the matter of swaying civilian loyalties through social control is the tendency among insurgents and counter-​insurgency practitioners to theorize about their strategic choices. Much of the early historical work in this connection is two-​dimensional. ‘Classic’ works contrast Communist-​derived theories of cadre organization, partisan warfare, and insurgent organization with counter-​insurgency schemes of ‘hearts and minds’. These depictions now appear unsatisfactory. Maoist-​style peasant insurgency was ruthless and, in its own way, elitist. It was based on an ideologically driven vanguard organization that initially concealed itself among its coethnic population before consolidating support within that population, and finally overthrowing an incumbent regime. Dissenters were often eliminated along the way. On the other side of the ‘COIN’, the notion of ‘hearts and minds’ is increasingly dismissed as fictitious and morally offensive. Along with ‘minimum force’ and other COIN myths, the idea that counter-​insurgency is armed social work, aimed at winning over a population through the provision of security and social infrastructure, has been derided as simplistic at best, downright misleading at worst. More useful is Patricia Owens’ insight about official obsession with cleansing space to create orderly environments but, as she recognizes, the day-​to-​day work of counter-​insurgency is messier, more reactive, and less clear-​cut than its theorists contend.60 Why dwell on the theories at all? For the simple reason that ideas still mattered, even if they did not work out in practice. The deeper analytical problem here turns on the connection between ideology and method, between the ‘cause’ and the way in which it was pursued.

60 Owens, Economy of Force, 279–​285.

22   Martin Thomas

International and Transnational Connections Long accepted in Cold War scholarship as crucial, the internationalization of late colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies is a subject whose methodological basis has changed a lot over the past decade or so. It is now a matter of course to highlight the importance of insurgent efforts to mobilize international sympathy, as well as the countervailing attempts made by imperial states either to thwart them or to ignore them. At first, this work focused heavily on the UN. And much of it was framed within a Cold War narrative of East–​West opposition, support for favoured ‘proxies’, and covert interventionism. Algeria, the Congo Crisis, Vietnam, and Portuguese Africa featured strongly. This work continues but it has been overtaken by scholarship in global history that looks beneath the level of insurgent diplomacy, inter-​state rivalry, and the UN as the world’s leading supranational agency. Instead, there’s greater preoccupation with the transnational: with civil society activism, with networks of support operating outside or in opposition to the Cold War international system. Typical in this respect is growing interest in networks of pan-​Africanist anti-​colonialism, in the proliferation of South–​South contacts, and in other supranational bodies—​the Non-​ Aligned Movement, the Organization of African Unity, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development—​that challenged the established global order. These welcome methodological shifts shed new light on some abiding problems, specifically, how important was internationalization to the outcome of decolonization conflicts? How do we gauge that importance? And did battles of ideas register more strongly than strategies of violence? Another widespread feature of late-​ colonial insurgencies and counter-​ insurgencies was their tendency to spill across borders. Insurgent movements often drew on foreign networks of support; counter-​insurgents devoted commensurate efforts to breaking such networks down. Some of these connections were material: cross-​border sanctuaries, arms supplies, and flows of fighters and refugees. Others were intangible: the circulation of specialist knowledge, the cultivation of sympathetic audiences. Such transnational dimensions, we suggest, were intrinsic to the globalization of contested decolonization. It is increasingly apparent that sanctuary bases were vital to the duration, the internationalization, and the outcome of decolonization conflicts. Again, there are marked regional imbalances in what has been researched. Pioneering work on the ideological and insurgent connections among decolonizing nations of the North African Maghreb is matched by the interest in the ‘frontline’ states of Southern Africa opposed to continuing white minority rule in the Continent’s Southern cone. Meanwhile, the vast territory of the Belgian Congo has been most exhaustively studied in the context of decolonization and, more specifically, through the prism of an internationalizing ‘Congo crisis’ in the early 1960s in which foreign interventions, cross-​border flight, secessionism, and sanctuary bases were pivotal. In Western Asia, the fate of the Palestinian diaspora as refugees seeking sanctuary has attracted most attention. In South Asia, there is considerable work on Kashmir, on Nagaland, on East Pakistan/​Bangladesh, and on Burma’s ethnic minorities. Moving further into Southeast Asia, the immersion of Laos and Cambodia in the wars for Vietnam was substantially conditioned by matters of sanctuary, supply, and the efforts of opposing combatants to prevent them. The Vietnam wars, like the Cambodian genocide that followed them, were also histories of

Introduction   23 refugee creation and people’s struggles to escape. For all that, not much of this work has been integrated into wider studies of late colonial conflicts. Nor have the commonalities in sanctuary bases dynamics been explored. Chapter contributions in this section of the Handbook set about these tasks.

Ending Insurgencies If working out the span of decolonization wars is less straightforward than chronologies of formal independence suggest, the point at which conflicts ended must be contentious. There are several reasons why. ‘Definitive’ or outright military victories are rare. There are some peace treaties, but not many. The fact that ‘war’ was rarely declared is part of the difficulty. So is the contested legal status of insurgent movements. More essential though is the way such conflicts were fought: each side strove to make it practically impossible, politically infeasible, and socially unacceptable for their opponents to continue.61 This was an indeterminate business, making the ‘end’ of such wars subjective. Hence the prevalence of amnesties, whose first principle was that signatories were not ‘defeated parties’ but warring ones who chose peace but who retained the capacity to resume violence. Those who devised amnesties, such as the British in Malaya or the FLN negotiators at Evian, were even willing to pretend that opponents whose military capacity had been massively reduced were something else: active combatants who opted to stop fighting for the higher purpose of peace. The presentation of amnesties could thus be an elaborate deceit, politically constructed to suggest finality but obscuring a more complicated local picture. Added to this complication, few colonial authorities withdrew entirely. The endurance of client relationships, of economic interests and strategic facilities, makes it difficult to describe an abrupt stop, a guns-​ fall-​silent, flick-​of-​the-​switch type end to a war. Conversely, insurgent movements, whether apparently victorious or defeated, rarely abandoned violence entirely. Insurgent rivals might continue fighting for the spoils of land, wealth, and power. Some might not have been party to the amnesty in question. Others might continue fighting from sanctuary bases overseas, from within client states, or in defence of ethnic or religious minorities facing discrimination within their postcolony. In this final Handbook section, two themes predominate. First is the prevalence of amnesties and surrender ‘deals’ used to bring late colonial conflicts to a conclusion. Second is the afterlife of decolonization conflicts in the dissemination of counter-​insurgency expertise and the lasting bitterness of conflicting memories about late colonial violence. Taken together, the aim of the six themed sections is to provide an analytical structure around which chapter contributors can develop their arguments about late-​colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies, the driving forces of violent decolonization over the past century or so.

61 

Paul Staniland, ‘Militia, Ideology, and the State’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59/​5 (2015), 773–​776.

24   Martin Thomas

Select Bibliography Branch, Daniel, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Byrne, Jeffrey James, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, & the Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Chenoweth, Erica, Adria Lawrence, and Stathis Kalyvas (eds.), Rethinking Violence: States and Non-​State Actors in Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010). Feichtinger, Moritz, ‘“A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​1963’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72. French, David, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 1945–​1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Garavini, Giuliano, After Empires: European Integration, Decolonization, and the Challenge from the Global South 1957–​1986 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Getachew, Adom, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-​ Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Heuser Beatrice, and Eitan Shamir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counter-​Insurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Johnson, Jennifer, The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Kalyvas, Stathis N., The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Kinsella, Helen M., The Image Before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction Between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). Owens, Patricia, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Ross, Corey, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Staniland, Paul, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). Weinstein, Jeremy, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

A P P ROAC H E S TO I N SU RG E N T A N D C OU N T E R-​ I N SU RG E N T V IOL E N C E

Chapter 1

B eyond the Stat e / ​R e be l Dich otomy in T w e nt i et h C entury Africa n Wa rfa re Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer Introduction The statist orientation of most writing on conflict in Africa has led to a general failure to appreciate the social, cultural, and structural interrelationships between ‘state’ armies and ‘rebel’ forces, even when these forces operate in similar ways and from similar power bases. An assumed, but little evidenced, distinction between ‘legitimate’ state armies and illegitimate non-​state forces has underwritten (and distorted) analysis of armed forces in Africa across a range of periods. Analysis of the ‘colonial conquest’ has commonly taken as its starting point the colonial narrative of technologically advanced European forces overcoming technologically and structurally inferior African armies. This narrative is seemingly bolstered by the relative ease with which Europeans conquered large swaths of the African interior, but it belies the extent to which the European conquest relied on African forces (an oversimplification that still marks popular writing on European colonial conquests from the fifteenth to the twentieth century). This chapter will seek to demonstrate that, in contrast, similarities between ‘state’ and ‘rebel’ forces have been relatively constant throughout modern African history and their examination is critical for building a clear understanding of conflict in an African context. For many colonial conquests the distinction between ‘European’ and ‘African’ forces was marginal, and often had little impact on the results of a given engagement or conflict.1 Indeed, alliance with indigenous fighting forces and the adoption of indigenous warfighting methodologies was common across European imperial conquests from the sixteenth to

1  The fluidity of use and allegiance between Portuguese, Imbangala, and imbare armed forces in seventeenth-​century Angola being just one of many examples: John K. Thornton, ‘The Art of War in Angola, 1575–​1680’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30/​2 (April 1988), 360–​378.

28    Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer the twentieth centuries.2 Furthermore, African forces allied with European colonizers had their own motivations to temporarily ally with colonial powers and retained significant autonomy during and after conquest. Giacomo Macola’s analysis of conflict in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Central Africa demonstrates that ‘colonial conquest’ should be better characterized as a continuation under European management of the extractive warlord economies developed in the late nineteenth century in response to global demand for ivory, minerals, and unfree labour.3 The scholarly focus on the construction of colonial state forces has likewise neglected the significant degree to which colonial power continued to rely on pre-​existing (if reconstituted) African warlords and elites with local forces and motives of their own. These local forces were critical to European military operations at every level throughout, and beyond, the colonial period. Thus, conflicts that were ostensibly waged in order to control the state—​whether to resist or to end colonial domination, to bring a particular leader to power, or to end their authoritarian rule—​were fought by soldiers motivated by diverse local and/​or socio-​cultural factors disconnected or remote from statist considerations. In some cases local elites pledged their own troops, especially mounted warriors, in support of European-​led forces as a show of loyalty and cooperation. Such gestures doubled as a display of local authority and military might. Since European colonizers rarely understood the underlying local reality of military and political capacity, such displays of power could vastly overstate the influence of certain local leaders; an overstatement that could however become reality as a result of favourable treatment from a European power. Whether immediate and concrete or delayed and implied, a quid pro quo always rested behind these displays of generosity (one of the classic means of using and perpetuating influence and power).4 Lesser chiefs and functionaries who lacked retinues of their own to lend to European armies could nonetheless recruit young men from their area to go and fight. More often than not this recruitment relied on coercion, even kidnapping, and was typically focused on the least prestigious members of a community, especially slaves (although there are some notable exceptions, such as German-​aligned askari in the First World War).5 In this sense, lesser African chiefs, especially in West Africa, performed almost identical roles to those played by their ancestors during the Atlantic slave trade a century earlier. The young men pressed into service found themselves part of a military machine that, through training and experience, ultimately made them proficient in the use of modern weapons and tactics. The skills

2 

For example, see David L. Preston, ‘“Make Indians of Our White Men”: British Soldiers and Indian Warriors from Braddock’s to Forbes’s Campaigns, 1755–​1758’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-​ Atlantic Studies, 74/​3 (Summer, 2007), 280–​306. 3  Giacomo Macola, The Gun in Central Africa: A History of Technology and Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016) and The Colonial Occupation of Katanga: The Personal Correspondence of Clément Brasseur, 1893–​1897 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 4  Formal gift giving as a means of creating and bolstering patronage networks is, of course, both an ancient and widespread practice. For example, see: Joe Trapido, ‘Potlatch and the Articulation of Modes of Production: Revisiting French Marxist Anthropology and the History of Central Africa’, Dialectical Anthropology, 40/​3 (2016), 199–​220. 5  Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014), 37–​39.

Twentieth Century African Warfare    29 learned by African troops would then be turned on Europeans in short order. Indeed, ‘rebel’ armies filled with men formerly trained by ‘legitimate’ state powers are commonplace. The ostensible professionalization of late colonial and post-​colonial armies often missed the extent to which such armies were regarded as occupying forces in regions insufficiently integrated into state-​building projects, a tension that found expression in the persistence of ‘rebel’ activity in newly independent Africa. The increasing frequency of coups and the initial popularity of their leaders masked the degree to which such projects were themselves in thrall to sectional interests. The unresolved nature of African nation-​building and the weaknesses of Africa’s new national armies found clearer expression in the 1970s and 1980s as ‘rebel’ forces increasingly engaged with state armies and threatened state sovereignty, but these conflicts were also marked by a powerful tendency by states to fund, train, and mobilize non-​state forces against their enemies, a practice that often created unforeseen consequences in the shape of ‘third force’ movements that survived the removal of their original patrons and attempts at demobilization and integration. Even where the role of non-​state forces in conflicts is well understood, there is a tendency to see this as an aberration or historically specific issue that was being or would be overcome by the professionalization of colonial or post-​colonial armed forces and the elimination or integration of rebel armies. The persistence of rebel armies, where it is taken seriously, tends to be pathologized as a failure in Africa’s development, a symptom of the wider disease of ‘state failure’. Such analytical frameworks prevent a more historicized analysis of the multipolar reality of African politics over the longue durée. These frameworks also impede analysis of the ways in which African state armies have often acted in the interests of western states or companies in the post-​independence period. A significant exception to this rule is the work of Richard Reid, which has done much to place the long-​term development of the African history of war in its full social and cultural context.6 Drawing on Reid, but focusing more specifically on the twentieth century, this chapter develops his argument further to focus specifically on the unhelpful dichotomy between state and rebel forces, which wrongly tends to characterize the latter as inherently ‘unmodern’ and the former as an essential element of the Weberian framework. The chapter also builds on the work of William Reno, who has brilliantly dissected the reasons for military rebellion against African states since independence and challenged many of the assumptions of the state-​centric approach to conflict over the past sixty years.7 In his work Reno rightly demonstrates the ubiquity of rebel versus state conflict, compared to the relative paucity of conflicts between states. However, his focus on the typologies of rebel forces, while useful, tends to emphasize the capturing of the state by rebels rather than the more open-​ended relationship between states and rebels explained here; and the post-​colonial starting point of his study tends to downplay the considerable continuities between independence and colonialism. In fact, the mutually constituted nature of African militaries flows indirectly or directly from the limited extent to which African states have been effectively constituted as distinct from society. This does not make them dysfunctional, ‘unmodern’, or even unusual. Rather, it reflects the specific trajectory of colonial and post-​colonial African political and military

6  7 

Richard J. Reid, Warfare in African History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). William Reno, Warfare in Independent Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

30    Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer history, bound up as it has been with the disconnection between state and society wrought by colonialism, the inability of post-​colonial states to overcome that disconnection, and the consequent role of African militaries in managing its impact and legacies.

From ‘Conquest’ to ‘Resistance’ It is beyond our remit here to analyse the rich history of warfare in pre-​colonial African history: Reid provides a compelling synthesis that emphasizes the centrality of conflict and military innovation to the flourishing of great African kingdoms from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. While the Atlantic slave trade significantly heightened and intensified the degree and scale of warfare in much of west Africa, it was in many places an intensification of already existing ‘local competitions for resources and identities’ that already tended, as elsewhere, towards the bringing of smaller societies into the ambit of larger, more militarized kingdoms and empires.8 Africa’s nineteenth century ‘military revolutions’ equally involved the interaction between global and local factors, as increasing political centralization was enabled by military innovation and the import of millions of guns from Europe.9 At the moment of European conquest, then, much of Africa was riven with ongoing or latent conflicts between ‘states’ and ‘rebels’, into which European powers intervened, disrupting the continuing slave trade and wider socio-​economic relations that rested in significant part on military capacity. European powers nonetheless treated all existing conflicts as backward and inimical to their model of territorialization and modernization, yet lacked the ability to effectively impose either. Colonial conquest, while drawing on superior military technology available to imperial armies, could not have been achieved without the deployment of mainly African armies against those societies that actively resisted European control. African societies mobilized and fought alongside European allies for different reasons. Some saw colonialism as an opportunity to defeat long-​term enemies and readily aligned with European powers, as was the case, for instance, with the Fante in opposing the Asante kingdom. Others were recruited and trained by more direct European intervention, including by coercion. In these cases, racialized notions of martial races informed their selection and training, as, for example, with the Zulu and Ndebele. The favouring of one ethnic group over another in military recruitment led colonial armies to take a quite specific ethnic form, which would provide a difficult legacy for their effective integration into later nation-​state armies. More generally, according to Reid ‘the colonial era represented the co-​option of European imperial impulses into extant African processes’.10 Colonial armies built on existing conflicts, armed forces, and societies, but in ways they only partly appreciated. During the inter-​war period, the primary role of African armies was the internal policing of the colonized population. The line between the military and the police was often blurred and there were numerous occasions when African ‘soldiers’ of various stripes were deployed 8 Reid, Warfare in African History, 89.

9  Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihad in West Africa During the Age of Revolutions (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2016), 250–​255. 10 Reid, Warfare in African History, 147.

Twentieth Century African Warfare    31 to suppress direct or indirect manifestations of discontent. These African soldiers commonly operated in areas in which they were themselves ethnically distinct from the populations they were sent to subdue. What Reid terms ‘Afro-​European armies’ were able to draw on available recruits in regions of recent conflict: well-​known colonial state armies such as the King’s African Rifles or the West African Regiment emerged from largely indigenous militias, though were certainly strengthened by colonial training and equipment. The regularization of colonial armies in the inter-​war period brought an invented or imposed tradition of professionalization, further alienating them from African societies. The ambitions of African professional soldiers were, however, frustrated by a racial order that denied them promotion or training for officer ranks, which would again adversely affect their long-​term professionalization.

The First World War The twentieth century saw global conflict on an unprecedented scale. The two world wars, unsurprisingly, had a significant impact on African societies. African soldiers served, fought, worked, and died across three continents, Europe, Asia, and Africa, over the course of both conflicts. Indeed, some of the very first war dead in 1914 were North Africans in Algiers who were fired upon by German warships.11 In many ways the African experiences of these wars conform to pre-​existing patterns of Afro-​European warfare laid down in the late nineteenth century. Most Africans who fought in the two world wars did so under the command of Europeans and within the broader rubric of European state armies. There were, however, many thousands of Africans whose wartime experience did not fit neatly into statist conceptions of legitimate force, and African experiences everywhere were shaped by the wars’ massive scale and scope. More than two million Africans took part in the First World War as either combatants or labourers, and roughly 200,000 of them died in that conflict.12 They fought for the Entente and for the Central Powers, and some even fought for both sides at different times.13 Over a million Africans also took part in war-​related activities (from fighting to planning to logistical work) as members of non-​aligned, independent armies or rebel groups. The fluidity between these different groups and their breadth of experiences underscores the continuities in form, practice, and intention that united diverse African war efforts across the continent. Africans took part in the First World War for a number of reasons. Many were simply conscripted and forced to fight. Others were attracted by relatively generous pay and conditions, including the right of African warriors to bring their families with them on campaign.14 In both scenarios, the men most commonly recruited into military service were either slaves or of slave background. These men were the first to be given up by communities terrorized by Afro-​European recruiting parties in an effort to save the lives of higher-​ranking 11  Eugene Rogan, ‘Rival jihads: Islam and the Great War in the Middle East, 1914–​1918’, Journal of the British Academy, 4/​1 (2014), 5. 12  Hew Strachan, The First World War in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. 13 Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 2. 14 Moyd, Violent Intermediaries, 11.

32    Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer males. In cases where ex-​slaves or the descendants of slaves volunteered for military service, they likely did so on the assumption that it was the only way to improve their socio-​ economic status. In this sense, the African and Afro-​European armies formed during the First World War arguably had more in common with their precolonial predecessors than with the national conscript armies of Europe.15 The different ways in which African soldiers were positioned, politically and socially, underscore the diversity of African war-​time experiences and categories. The backgrounds, contexts, and future prospects of participants who fought for one or another imperial power on behalf of an allied chief were necessarily different to those of soldiers coerced into fighting by Afro-​European recruiting parties. Both groups operated under military systems that demanded loyalty to colonizing powers, but one group operated as independent, nominally equal parties engaged in an act of political goodwill in anticipation of later reward. The other group, which might find itself part of the same column or battalion, operated almost entirely on the hope of survival and being reunited with their families. These distinctions of wartime experience are further complicated when considering the many anticolonial rebellions that occurred during the First World War. The primary resistance offered by groups like the Holli in southeast Benin or their Egba cousins in western Nigeria differed substantially from the experience of Chilembwe’s rebels in Nyasaland or Kaba’s rebels in Atakora. The overlap between anticolonial rebellion and primary resistance in this period only serves to highlight the fraught designations of ‘legitimate state’ armies and ‘illegitimate rebels’. It is not yet widely recognized that the First World War sparked dozens of anticolonial rebellions across the African continent; these can, when combined and considered alongside more famous rebellions in the Middle East and Europe, be understood as part of a shared global moment. While these rebellions had different immediate causes, almost all were predicated on years or decades of colonial interference, subjugation, and oppression. At the same time they arose more immediately in relation to the realities, challenges, and opportunities presented by the First World War. Most importantly for us here, these smaller wars or rebellions were typically fought by forces whose distinct characteristics challenged the state/​rebel dichotomy. One key example comes from the Volta-​Bani War, 1915–​1917. The war began when Yisu Kote, of the village of Bona, refused to provide any recruits for the French. Yisu Kote, despite having no inherent authority himself, derived authority through alliance with his cousin, Yike Kote, perenkie of Bona (meaning that he was in charge of fighting-​age men and therefore had the legitimate authority to raise an army).16 The rebel force that Yisu Kote came to lead relied on the use of pre-​existing power structures, which can only be described as ‘legitimate’, even if their use was at times unorthodox. The lines between state and non-​state actors were sometimes entirely blurred. The best example of this was the Senussi War, a conflict that raged from 1914 until the early 1920s. The Senussi War, itself a partial continuation of Libyan resistance against the Italian invasion of 1911, was a decentralized conflict under the nominal leadership of the Grand Senussi Ahmed Sharif, based in southern Libya.17 The conflict grouped together an independent 15  Martin A. Klein, ‘Slaves and Soldiers in the Western Soudan and French West Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 45/​3 (2011), 566–​568. 16  Patrick Royer and Mahir Saul, West African Challenge to Empire: Culture and History in the Volta-​ Bani Anticolonial War (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), 6. 17  Simona Berhe, Notabili libici e Funzionari italiani: l’amministrazione coloniale in Tripolitania (1912–​ 1919) (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino Editore, 2015), 98–​100.

Twentieth Century African Warfare    33 federation of nomadic peoples (primarily Tuareg, Arabs, and Toubous) under the leadership of powerful Senussi zawiyas and, in theory, fighting a war against Europeans as a single political unit. The heartland of the Senussi War was itself a hinterland that belied easy categorization. Stretching across Fezzan and Cyrenaica, the Senussi occupied territory claimed by the Italians and the Ottomans, tentatively threatened by the French, and equally claimed by the Senussi themselves. The Grand Senussi, in launching his invasion of Egypt in 1916, did so as a loyal subject of the Ottoman Empire and in line with his belief in a general pan-​ Islamic war against Europeans. His action also had the benefit of ensuring continued material support from the Germans and Ottomans, who supplied the Senussi with arms and ammunition. Further to the south, on the other hand, Senussi-​ aligned forces led by Kaocen ben Mohammed invaded Kaocen’s native Niger, nominally ‘on behalf of the Senussi Government’.18 Kaocen never accepted the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire and instead cast the Senussi as a legitimate, independent state. In this context, the distinction between ‘state’ and ‘rebel’ army is, it will be clear, unhelpful. This is especially true given how well-​ equipped Kaocen’s army was: his men were armed with repeating rifles, machine guns, and rapid-​fire artillery manned by Italian-​trained gunners. The Senussi-​related conflicts, taken as a whole, provide a persuasive argument for the futility of simple state/​rebel distinctions in African warfare.

The Second World War While fewer armed rebellions took place during the Second World War than its predecessor, the patterns of warfare in this period still blurred the lines between ‘state’ and ‘rebel’ and further demonstrated how war was experienced in different parts of Africa. The Second World War presents a classic problem of periodization for historians. From an African perspective (or, more precisely, an Ethiopian perspective), the war arguably began in 1935 with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Like so many Afro-​European colonial wars, this conflict, generally depicted as the European invasion of the last sovereign African state, was also a distinctly African affair. Some 40,000 soldiers of the Italian-​led forces were in fact African: primarily Eritrean, Somali, and Libyan.19 Italian forces actually garnered more African support, not less, as they invaded one of the last sovereign African states. Discontent over Ethiopia’s empire led many, especially in northern Ethiopia, to abandon Haile Selassie and pledge their support for the Italians.20 Many of these soldiers chose to fight, at least in part, out of opposition to long-​standing Ethiopian imperial ambitions in the region. Such motivations muddy 18 

Kimba Idrissa, ‘The Kawousan War Reconsidered’, in Jon Abbink, Mirjam de Bruijn, and Klaas Van Walraven (eds.), Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2003), 191–​192. 19  Timothy Parsons, ‘Military Experiences of Ordinary Africans in World War II’, in Judith A. Byfield et al. (eds.), Africa and World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3. 20  Richard J. Reid, Frontiers of Violence in North-​ East Africa: Geneologies of Conflict since c. 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 140–​142.

34    Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer the ‘state’, ‘rebel’, and ‘imperial’ boundaries that usually appear so clear in general histories of the period. More generally, the African continent saw fighting which was mostly a continuation of pre-​existing patterns, rather than a major break with tradition (bar one major example discussed below). Even in the 1940s, a mere twenty years before decolonization, local African leaders still retained substantial power in certain regions, complicating the neat lines of state legitimacy depicted by European imperial cartographers. This is most clearly evidenced in the High Commission Territories (HCTs) of Basutoland (Lesotho), Bechuanaland (Botswana), and Swaziland (Eswatini). Each of the HCTs volunteered men to support the British war effort as part of their efforts to solidify their autonomous status and to save their men from the more degrading racial servitude they would have experienced in the South African Native Military Labour Service.21 Such transactional relationships were at the core of Afro-​European warfare from the beginning, and are a notable aspect of warfare across time and space. This sort of recruitment had its analogues at the individual level where many Africans, especially those that faced the possibility of conscription into the French system, travelled into British-​controlled regions and volunteered in British military units, such as the Royal West African Frontier Force. Faced with the strong likelihood of having to serve in the war whether they wanted to or not, the agency of Africans was more often expressed in choosing whom they served under and on what terms, a phenomenon that challenges conventional views of the extensive state power supposedly exercised by late-​colonial forces. If the recruitment process undermined the ostensible hegemony and legitimacy of state colonial forces, the experiences of African troops once in uniform continued to blur those lines. In colonial mythology European armies were small, professional, and technological, while African armies were poorly organized, reliant on personal courage but technologically disadvantaged. Where this gap between ‘state/​conventional’ forces and African ‘native’ forces existed in the Second World War, it was often manufactured by Europeans themselves to satisfy their own prejudices and misinterpretations of African warfare. It was Europeans, not Africans, who insisted on relegating most British African conscripts to labour units and supplying them only with spears (assegai) for their self-​defence. European-​led forces also absorbed defeated African soldiers wholesale into their own armed forces in a way that not only delegitimized any European claims to the service of their colonial subjects, but which mirrored the practices of ‘rebel’ or independent armies. This tactic of absorbing defeated African forces into one’s own army was famously used by Charles De Gaulle’s Free French movement to quickly increase the size of his forces. In a broader sense, ‘Free French Africa’ poses a series of contradictions to the state/​ rebel dichotomy. Right from August 1940, when the Free French used Brazzaville and Equatorial Africa more broadly as a territorial basis for their legitimacy, the distinctions between legitimate state power and warlordism evaporated. The extensive use of impressment by Free French forces did little to distinguish them from the non-​state forces France supposedly sought to help ‘civilize’. The fact that Free French impressment in Cameroon explicitly contravened international regulations laid down by the League of Nations 21 Ashley

Jackson, ‘Supplying War: The High Commission Territories’ Military-​ Logistical Contribution in the Second World War’, The Journal of Military History, 66/​3 (2002), 729; see also David Killingray, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2010).

Twentieth Century African Warfare    35 only underscores this point.22 Examined more closely, the actions of the Free French in Africa compare poorly to those of Kaocen discussed above. Whereas Kaocen was born in Niger and led a force of largely Niger-​born Tuareg and Toubous, the Free French led a force of conscripted central Africans to invade Libya and capture Kufra, a critical site for the Senussi to which France never had any claim. For all the heroism now attached to it, Leclerc’s Kufra Oath not only seems markedly less legitimate than Kaocen and Tegama’s claim to Niger, it almost rings the same note as the infamous Voulet-​Chanoine affair. Leclerc’s proclaimed determination to continue on to Strasbourg only seems marginally more credible than Paul Voulet describing himself as an African chief during his murderous march along the Niger river.23 These complexities and identity-​redefining military experiences would arise in different form, in the African struggle for independence after 1945.

Late-​C olonial Conflict and Liberation Movements Demobilized African soldiers returned home contrasting the ‘war for freedom’ in which they had fought with the continued realities of colonial racism and exploitation. When ex-​ servicemen in Gold Coast demonstrated for financial recompense in 1948, the violent police response spurred the territory’s nationalist movement.24 In much of Africa, however, (ex-​) soldiers were marginal to new nationalist parties that campaigned and, by the early 1960s, succeeded in achieving political independence. Many of Africa’s new civilian governments were, however, quickly overthrown by army officers: sixty-​nine coups were attempted by state armies in the years 1956–​1975, of which thirty-​seven were successful.25 These men can be seen as the beneficiaries of late-​colonial military development policies. Many were trained at Sandhurst or Saint-​Cyr and afterwards were rapidly promoted to positions of authority and influence. This experience enabled these new officers to lead the militaries and indeed the governments of many post-​colonial states. This first generation of politico-​ military leaders were often conservative figures who resisted radical post-​colonial reform and, particularly in Francophone cases, tied African states closely to their former colonial masters. Some were initially feted as bringing the state-​building skills that civilian politicians lacked:26 post-​colonial officers had the potential to create new professional and indigenous national armies, but generally adopted similar methods as their colonial counterparts, 22 Eric T. Jennings, Free French Africa in World War II: The African Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 141. 23 Bertrand Taithe, The Killer Trail: A Colonial Scandal in the Heart of Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 36. 24  Adrienne Israel, ‘Ex-​Servicemen at the Crossroads: Protest and Politics in Post-​War Ghana’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 30/​2 (1992), 359–​368. 25 Patrick J. McGowan, ‘African Military Coups d’état, 1956–​ 2001: Frequency, Trends and Distribution’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 41/​3 (2003), 339–​370. 26  L.W. Pye, ‘Armies in the Process of Political Modernization’, in J.J. Johnson (ed.), The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 80–​89.

36    Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer including the recruitment of rank-​and-​file soldiers in ethnically skewed ways that reflected a post-​colonial version of martial race theory. It was also quickly evident that post-​ colonial state armies were equally susceptible to capture by particular regional or ethnic interests, as well as the influence of foreign (super-​)powers old and new. The Biafran war of 1967–​1970 reflected the failure of Nigerian nation-​building before and after independence, but also laid bare the army’s ethno-​regional military divisions, which had their origins in British preference for one ethnic group over another in terms of colonial military advancement: northern Muslim military officers refused to accept leadership of the Nigerian state and army by progressive political and military leaders from the Eastern region. The Gowon coup of July 1966, and the pogroms against Igbo civilians that followed, prompted the eastern secessionist movement and sparked the Nigerian civil war. More generally, external powers and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) endorsed the nation-​states that came into existence at independence; any attempt to challenge the borders inherited from colonialism via insurgency was, following the Katangese secession of 1960–​1963, delegitimized either because of foreign/​neo-​colonial backing, or because it was characterized as ‘tribal’ in nature and counterposed to the new nation-​state.27 Nonetheless, local rebellions simmered away in many countries—​for example the periodic outbreaks of Tuareg rebellion against the Malian state—​in the 1970s and 1980s, providing an expression of discontent with the failures of post-​independence state-​building and development projects.28 The general unwillingness of independent African states to wage direct war against each other increased the value of forces whose identity and social base enabled them to operate across national borders, while taking advantage of state forces’ inability to pursue them without creating diplomatic incidents. As Reid argues, ‘Mobutu, Amin and Bokassa signified the resurgence of the nineteenth-​ century (and earlier) phenomenon of the armed entrepreneur, seeking to attract and control people through the distribution of political and material largesse’.29 This is certainly an accurate characterization of the intentions of such leaders, but their ability to control the armed forces they established was itself limited by the capacity of their patrimonial systems, which declined steadily with the economic downturn and the subsequent debt crisis that severely undermined state capacity from the late 1970s onwards. In Kenya and Algeria, where anti-​colonial military action was necessary to overcome settler resistance to decolonization, Britain and France both drew on counter-​insurgency strategies pioneered in Malaya and elsewhere. The effective use of indigenous forces was key to these strategies in both cases. However, the differential legacy for post-​colonial governance reflected the distinct outcomes of those conflicts. In Kenya, where the repression of the Mau Mau rebellion was achieved by British-​organized ‘loyalists’, the Kenya Africa National Union (KANU) attained political power and then retained it with little direct

27 

Miles Larmer and Baz Lecocq, ‘Historicising Nationalism in Africa’, Nations and Nationalism, 24/​4 (2018), 893–​917. 28  For Mali, see Baz Lecocq, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 29 Reid, Warfare in Africa History, 155.

Twentieth Century African Warfare    37 resort to military capacity.30 In Algeria, by contrast, the armed struggle against French rule placed the FLN’s National Liberation Army (ALN) in an influential position: its leader Houari Boumédiène was made defence minister in the FLN government but proceeded to overthrow Ben Bella in the 1965 coup, heralding a long period of militarized FLN rule.31 In Southern Africa, where continued Portuguese colonialism and the racist settler regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa resisted decolonization, armed rebellions appeared the only way to achieve independence. The conversion of nationalist parties into armed liberation movements, operating from exile and under the auspices of the state forces of radical regimes (earlier Algeria, later Angola), but also China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, changed the character of armed conflict in Africa. However, attempts to wage conventional warfare, as in the disastrous 1967 Wankie campaign by the joint forces of ZAPU/​ ZIPRA and the ANC/​MK, brought about a shift among some liberation movements to guerrilla tactics, pursued effectively by Frelimo in Mozambique and ZANU/​ZANLA in Zimbabwe.32 The long-​drawn out transition to independence in southern Africa, precipitated as much by geo-​political change outside Africa (starting with the Portuguese revolution of 1974 and culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989–​1990), ostensibly pitted liberation rebels against colonial/​racist states, but, in practice, the distinction was muddied. African nationalists often characterized their movements as governments-​in-​exile and their armed forces as national armies in waiting. Meanwhile, Portugal, Rhodesia, and South Africa created and nurtured indigenous rebel forces that were deployed against their enemies to deflect responsibility for its actions. Despite such origins, Renamo, deployed in murderous attacks against civilians in Mozambique in the late 1970s and early 1980s, effectively built on popular discontent with the Frelimo-​ controlled state to become a popular opposition party. Apartheid South Africa, which took under its wing defeated rebel forces from Zaire and Angola (FNLA/​32 Battalion) and incorporated them in its own ‘third force’ deployments inside South Africa, struggled to retain a clear division between state and non-​state forces amid the township violence of the early 1990s.33 While South Africa’s transition to civilian rule brought overt military conflict to an end, some southern African countries saw continued conflict (i.e. Angola) while others (Zimbabwe, Mozambique) saw authoritarian governments in which the military played a central role (masked by nominally democratic systems) and justified their retention of power as the keepers of the flame of the armed liberation struggle.34

30 Daniel

Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 31  Yoav Gortzak, ‘Using Indigenous Forces in Counterinsurgency Operations: The French in Algeria, 1954–​1962’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​2 (2009), 307–​333. 32  For Wankie see Stephen Ellis, ‘The ANC in Exile’, African Affairs 90/​360 (1991), 439–​447. 33 Nicky Rousseau, ‘Counter-​ Revolutionary Warfare: the Soweto Intelligence Unit and Southern Itineraries’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 40/​6 (2014), 1343–​1361; Lennart Bolliger and Will Gordon, ‘“Forged in Battle”: The Transnational Origins and Formation of Apartheid South Africa’s 32 “Buffalo” Battalion, 1969–​1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 46/​5 (2020), 881–​901. 34 Henning Melber, Limits to Liberation in Southern Africa: The Unfinished Business of Democratic Consolidation (Johannesburg: HSRC Press, 2003); Miles Tendi, The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe: Mujuru, the Liberation Fighter and Kingmaker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

38    Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer

States and Rebels in Independent Africa The comparative lack of direct state-​to-​state conflict in post-​independence Africa was in some respects a reflection of adherence to the OAU ideals of non-​interference, but it masked the ineffectiveness of many state armies, many of which were more commonly deployed to repress internal dissent than to fight external enemies.35 It also created incentives for African states to make use of rebel forces to conduct indirect warfare and insurgencies against their regional opponents. While the circumstances of such deployment differed greatly, a well-​trained and experienced rebel force often proved more militarily valuable than conventional state armies: post-​conflict demobilization processes were often incomplete, and rebel armies were redeployed in different theatres for alternative purposes.36 States continually drew on exiled or minority ethnic groups to constitute rebel militia to bolster their forces, which could be flexibly deployed and for which responsibility could be denied. For example, border clashes between Amin-​ruled Uganda and Nyerere’s Tanzania led to the 1978 Kagera war: alongside a massive expansion of the Tanzanian army, Ugandan exile leader Yoweri Museveni’s Front for National Salvation, based in Tanzanian exile since 1971, played an important support role in the decisive Battle of Lukaya (at which Amin equally deployed Libyan fighters).37 In the early 1980s, Museveni and his National Resistance Movement/​Army (NRM/​NRA) launched the ‘war in the bush’ against the reinstalled Ugandan President Milton Obote, leading to Obote’s overthrow and the NRM’s victory in January 1986. Approximately a quarter of the NRM’s forces in this war was of Rwandan Tutsi origin, resident in Uganda since the 1959 ethnic violence of 1959 and organized since 1979 by the precursors of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Museveni’s NRM government strengthened the RPF, which launched its first invasion of Rwanda in 1990, and then took power in the wake of the 1994 genocide.38 The RPF-​controlled Rwandan state has, like its own historical sponsors, proven adept at pursuing its aims via the sponsorship of Congolese militia such as those of Laurent Nkunda.39 It must be stressed, however, that the successive hosting and use of such successive rebel forces was never a straightforward matter, since rebel forces commonly retained their own aims that were often at odds from those of their state masters: for example, Museveni 35 

Klaas Van Walvaren, Dreams of Power: The Role of the Organization of African Unity in the politics of Africa, 1963–​1993 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Antonia Witt, ‘Between the Shadow of History and the “Union of People”: Legitimating the Organisation of African Unity and the African Union’, in Klaus Dingwerth et al. (eds.), International Organizations under Pressure: Legitimating Global Governance in Challenging Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), chap. 4. 36  For a particularly revealing example see Erik Kennes and Miles Larmer, The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central Africa: Fighting Their Way Home (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016). 37  George Roberts, ‘The Uganda-​ Tanzania War, the Fall of Idi Amin, and the Failure of African Diplomacy,’ Journal of Eastern African Studies, 8/​4 (2014), 692–​709. 38 Alan J. Kuperman, ‘Provoking Genocide: A Revised History of the Rwandan Patriotic Front’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6/​1 (2004), 61–​84. 39 Jason K. Stearns, ‘Laurent Nkunda and the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP)’, L’Afrique des Grands Lacs (2007), 245–​267; Danielle Beswick, ‘The Challenge of Warlordism to Post-​Conflict State-​Building: The Case of Laurent Nkunda in Eastern Congo’, The Round Table, 98/​402 (2009), 333–​346.

Twentieth Century African Warfare    39 opposed the military invasion by the RPF of Rwanda but was unable to prevent it.40 Such tensions between ostensibly allied rebel and state forces were commonly downplayed both by states themselves—​which sought to project a Weberian monopoly of armed power—​ and by observers who initially tended to see such rebel groups as contractors acting on the instructors of their state masters. This reflected a wider International Relations perspective that treated nation-​states as normative and modern and characterized rebels as backward-​ looking and/​or tribal puppets of state actors.41. Africa’s largest post-​colonial conflicts, that for the Ogaden between Somalia and Ethiopia in 1977–​1978, and the Angolan civil war that culminated in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in 1988, suggested that the superpowers had turned Africa into a Cold War battlefield, and therefore the end of that global conflict logically (but entirely incorrectly) suggested a peace dividend for the continent.42 The political upheavals of the early 1990s, during which many African states became democracies, while others experienced the total or near collapse of their functioning central states, are rightly regarded as a key turning point in African political history. The demobilization of Cold War conflict in Europe saw a vast exporting of obsolete weaponry to the continent, paralleling the export of guns from Europe to Africa in the mid-​nineteenth century and with similarly fatal consequences. While the early 1990s saw, amid Africa’s great democratic wave, the overthrow of some despotic regimes and the coming to power of rebel forces that reinvented themselves as democrats (Ethiopia/​Eritrea, Rwanda), just as many states were destabilized by newly emboldened rebel movements—​in the case of Somalia, leading to its total collapse. The extent to which 1990 marked a turning point in state–​rebel relationships can be overstated and the continuities between the two periods neglected: in a period where general state weakness was exposed and neo-​liberal theorists advocated the general dismantling of state capacity, it was common to identify and even celebrate the dynamism of private actors. Zaire under General Mobutu had appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s to effectively manipulate a set of nationalist or irredentist rebel groups operating on its borders to destabilize his regional enemies—​notably Angola (UNITA), Sudan (SPLM), and Uganda (ADF)—​and thereby ensure his continuing control of his increasingly dysfunctional nation-​state, itself beset by rebel movements, such as Laurent Kabila’s People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP), backed by some of those neighbours including Tanzania. However, the post-​Cold War withdrawal of US support exposed the limited practical control Mobutu had over these groups, his own byzantine army and police structures, and indeed much of the territory and population of Zaire. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees (among whose number were thousands of genocidaires) in 1994 further destabilized the country’s eastern half. This provided the excuse for Mobutu’s overthrow by Rwanda and other states—​ making use of a Congolese rebel force, now named the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-​Zaire (ADFL), led by the veteran rebel leader Kabila, which came 40 

Kuperman, ‘Provoking Genocide’, 68–​7 1. Lapid, ‘Rethinking the “International”: IBO Clues for Post-​Westphalian Mazes’ in Mathias Albert, David Jacobsen, and Yousef Lapid, Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 23–​26. 42  For the Ogaden war see G. Tareke, ‘The Ethiopian-​Somalia War of 1977 Revisited’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 33/​3 (2000), 635–​667; for Cuito Cuanavale, see Willie Breytenbach, ‘Cuito Cuanavale Revisited’, African Insight 27/​1 (1997), 54–​62. 41  Yosef

40    Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer to power in 1997. The conventional view, that Kabila was a rebel puppet of state interests, was belied by events leading to the second Congo war (1998–​2003), in which his new regime, attacked by Rwanda and Uganda, allied with Angola and Zimbabwe and managed to retain power with the assistance of both ‘state’ and ‘rebel’ forces, most of which appeared to civilians on the ground to be indistinguishable and indeed mutually constituted, with field commanders and their troops moving between state and rebel status at extraordinary speed.43 Elsewhere, the post-​Cold War environment exposed states to rebel armies openly motivated by the seizure of minerals: Charles Taylor, a former Liberian government figure in exile in Ivory Coast, organized a rebel force of minority ethnic groups and overthrew Liberian president Samuel Doe in 1990.44 The following year, Taylor sponsored the Revolutionary United Front (RUF)’s exceptionally brutal attempt to overthrow the government of neighbouring Sierra Leone. Studies of these conflicts identified the extent to which state failure or weakness contributed to the strength of rebel groups, and identified relevant socio-​cultural factors for their influence and ability to recruit and mobilize youth fighters.45 However, the pathologization of African societies and a policy focus on phenomena such as ‘child soldiers’ has masked the continuities of community-​based military recruitment that have been at the centre of African armed forces for centuries.46 These rebellions drew Africa’s inter-​state bodies into military intervention, creating the potential for a continental conflict-​prevention capacity that would prevent the continent’s manipulation by external forces. However, the mobilization by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) of a military intervention force (ECOMOG) in Liberia was widely seen as an Anglophone/​Nigeria-​dominated intervention against the Francophone powers backing Taylor.47 ECOMOG forces were accused of looting Liberian assets, and its intervention did not create confidence that African states acting in concert could bring an end to such rebellions.48 More recently, the increasing deployment of African Union forces within the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) over the last decade have demonstrated the tendency of such forces to behave both as occupying armies and to adopt the tactics of the rebels they are ostensibly opposing.49 Out of this wave of conflicts, a new literature emerged that better appreciated the mutually constitutive relationship between states and rebels. Will Reno followed his pioneering 43 René Lemarchand, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Filip Reyntjens, The Great African War: Congo and Regional Politics, 1996–​ 2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 44  Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy (London: Hurst, 2001). 45  Tunde Zack-​Williams, When the State Fails: Studies on Intervention in the Sierra Leone Civil War (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 46  Alcinda Honwana, Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Beth Verhey, ‘Child Soldiers: Prevention, Demobilization and Reintegration’ (Washington DC: World Bank report, 2012): http://​agris.fao.org/​agris-​sea​rch/​sea​rch.do?recor​dID=​US201​2406​425 (accessed 29 October 2019). 47  Adebajo Adekeye, ‘Liberia’s Civil War: Nigeria, ECOMOG, and Regional Security in West Africa’ (Lynne Rienner/​International Peace Academy, 2002). 48 Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy. 49  William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1999).

Twentieth Century African Warfare    41 work exploring the relationship between ‘Warlord Politics and Weak States’ with insightful analysis of the failures of Somali state and regional actors in bringing Al Shabaab’s insurrection to an end. Closely observed analyses of the conflicts in West Africa and the Great Lakes region have demonstrated that, alongside the tendency of state actors to seek the flexibility and deniability available to rebel movements, rebel groups often seek the legitimacy and authority of state hierarchies and bureaucracy.50 A revealing literature has demonstrated the ubiquity of ‘rebel governmentalities’.51 Rebel groups, of course, have rational reasons for imposing forms of sovereignty on the territory and people they control: they collect revenue by taxing economic activities via roadblocks, controlling populations from which to recruit soldiers and extract income and labour, and conducting business of their own. These activities must always be understood in a context in which rebel and state military and civilian authorities both compete and collaborate in their exploitation of human and natural resources, activities intimately bound up with global economic and geo-​political dynamics.52 In such contexts, rebel governance may be better placed than nation-​states to regulate and tax the activities of mobile, insecure populations—​a dynamic that might be usefully compared to pre-​colonial social systems in which power, not least military power, was derived from ‘wealth in people’.53 We still await systematic tracing of the long history of such dynamics back into the African past, the better to appreciate the continuities and breaks in the intimate relationships between state and rebel authority.

Conclusion In recent years, the apparently clear distinction between ‘insurgency’ and ‘counter-​ insurgency’ has been demonstrated (by many authors in this volume) to be false: imperial and national powers, while relying on a distinct repertoire of techniques to undermine the insurgent forces of occupied territories and colonized peoples, in practice, often acted in parallel and comparable ways to those they sought to dominate—​their deployment of ‘scientific’ or ‘modern’ technologies a (self-​)delusion that distinguished them from a reliance on terror and subjugation only in rhetorical terms. Similarly, the distinction between government and rebel armies, while central to theories and policies distinguishing the modern state, has been shown to be, on the battlefield at least, a false one. 50 Zoe Marks, ‘The Internal Dynamics of Rebel Groups: Politics of Material Viability and Organisational Capacity in the RUF of Sierra Leone’, DPhil thesis (University of Oxford, 2013). 51 For a useful overview see Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mampilly (eds.), Rebel Governance in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 52  The work of Judith Verweijen on rebel groups in eastern DRC has proven especially revealing. See, for example: ‘From Autochthony to Violence? Discursive and Coercive Social Practices of the Mai-​Mai in Fizi, Eastern DR Congo’, African Studies Review, 58/​2 (2014), 157–​180; and with Maria Eriksson Baaz, ‘The Volatility of a Half-​cooked Bouillabaisse: Rebel–​military Integration and Conflict Dynamics in the Eastern DRC’, African Affairs, 112/​449 (2013), 562–​582. 53 For ‘wealth in people’ see, among many others, Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jane I. Guyer and Samuel M. Eno Belinga, ‘Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa’, Journal of African History, 36/​1 (1995), 91–​120.

42    Jonathan Krause and Miles Larmer The ultimate explanation for the continuing blurring of state and rebel forces lies mainly in the ongoing utility for state leaders of non-​state armed forces and the continuing availability of latent labour capacity in African societies. While state armies often proved limited in their ability to implement the wishes of governing authorities, and were hampered first by inter-​colonial cooperation and later the OAU policy of non-​interference, non-​state armed forces were able to operate in ways that, for those states, were more effective, cheaper, and/​or deniable. Local (or national) military strongmen were able to mobilize young men for warfare, based on a meaningful, if commonly violent and exploitative, relationship with local societies that enabled their mobilization in ways that neither colonial or independent states could directly achieve. Such an analysis does not, however, demonstrate anything uniquely pathological about Africa or its military history. Contested political authority and a multilayered framework for determining the legitimate use of force are commonplace features of practically every region on Earth for most of human history. In European history the assassination of Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1634 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is often posited as the end of ‘private’ armies in European warfare. Armed forces nevertheless continued to blur lines of state legitimacy in various forms, from Clive’s forces in India to Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba. The rise of privatization in contemporary armed forces, especially those of the United States, reminds us clearly that blurred lines of legitimacy in the use of armed forces is not the mark of weak, decentralized, or ‘pre-​modern’ states. Rather, the blurring of politico-​military legitimacy seen throughout the last century of African history represents a common tension between competing incentives and power centres within societies that has countless analogues across history. African military history is not a thing set apart from the mainstream of the history of war, which still remains overwhelmingly, and indefensibly, Eurocentric. The tensions, pressures, and opportunities that have moulded the shape of African warfare over the past century represent universal challenges that human societies periodically deal with. A more thorough integration of African history into the broader history of war will only further elucidate the complexities of authority, legitimacy, power, and influence that come into sharp relief during times of war.

Select Bibliography Abbink, Jon, Mirjam de Bruijn, and Klass Van Walraven (eds.), Rethinking Resistance: Revolt and Violence in African History (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2003). Branch, Daniel, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Ellis, Stephen, The Mask of Anarchy (London: Hurst, 2001). Honwana, Alcinda, Child Soldiers in Africa (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Killingray, David, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2010). Klein, Martin A., ‘Slaves and Soldiers in the Western Soudan and French West Africa’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 45/​3 (2011), 566–​568. Lecocq, Baz, Disputed Desert: Decolonisation, Competing Nationalisms and Tuareg Rebellions in Northern Mali (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

Twentieth Century African Warfare    43 Reid, Richard J., Frontiers of Violence in North-​East Africa: Genealogies of Conflict since c. 1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Reid, Richard J., Warfare in African History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Reno, William, Warfare in Independent Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Reyntjens, Flip, The Great African War: Congo and Regional Politics, 1996–​ 2006 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Strachan, Hew, The First World War in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Chapter 2

C ounter-​I nsu rg e nc y a nd t he Ru ssian ‘Way of Wa r’ Alex Marshall Counter-​insurgency and the Russian Way of War is a topic of major contemporary relevance. It is relevant both because it offers a sidelight, by way of the ‘other’, on the whole discipline of counter-​insurgency writings that have flourished with renewed vigour since 2003, and because it intersects with the supposedly new phenomenon of ‘hybrid warfare’, which is again in many quarters being portrayed as a uniquely Russian take on the political conduct of modern war.1 This chapter seeks to explore both the praxis of Russian military campaigns within which counter-​insurgency formed a significant element, and the Western analysis which has sought to recategorize that same Russian praxis as either uniquely brutal—​as the ‘authoritarian model’ of counter-​insurgency, something that is the opposite of Western praxis—​or as so incoherent as to be in practice almost non-​existent. Three case studies are used in this chapter to examine these presumptions. They are the Soviet Central Asian campaign against the basmachestvo in the early 1920s, the policies practiced in Lithuania between 1944 and 1946, and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 (the largest and last attempt at independent state-​building in the Western sense in recent Russian historical practice). The chapter’s purpose is therefore two-​fold: to examine representative examples of Russian counter-​insurgency campaigns, in order to analyse whether the ‘authoritarian model’ paradigm describing Russian praxis is useful and meaningful; and secondly, to critique not only Western typologies, by which that same Russian praxis is categorized and critiqued, but by proxy the whole discipline of counter-​insurgency theory and doctrine writing itself. I will argue that whilst elements of the critique of Russian praxis aligned with the ‘authoritarian model’ typology ring true, they do not convincingly distinguish Russian praxis as

1  On the latter: Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ has itself recently been typologized as a ‘new type’ of state-​ sponsored insurgency somehow separate and distinct from Western practice and experience. See, for example: Ofer Fridman, Russian ‘Hybrid Warfare’. Resurgence and Politicization (Oxford: OUP, 2018), or A. Lanoszka, ‘Russian Hybrid Warfare and Extended Deterrence in Eastern Europe’, International Affairs, 92/​1 (2016), 175–​195.

The Russian ‘Way of War’    45 distinctive and uniquely brutal compared to standard Western praxis in warfare of this type. American praxis alone, for example, has also exhibited a recurring tendency to fund and support police forces that have engaged in widespread violence and systematic and deliberate human rights violations.2 There therefore remain more similarities than dissimilarities between Russian praxis and the practices of other armies in other times, but similar situations, not least in the very significant political dimension to warfare of this type. This will hopefully become even more obvious when comparing the structural challenges facing external actors attempting state-​building in (for example) Afghanistan, a specific challenge that remains relevant in general for all counter-​insurgent practitioners even today. This raises broader questions about the value and intellectual integrity of much Western writing on the ‘art’ of counter-​insurgency in general, and not just the presumption of a ‘Western model’. In particular it should pose questions as to whether a ‘liberal’, ‘global’, or ‘post-​modern’ model of counter-​insurgency even exists, or is currently being practised anywhere.3 In re-​examining this whole discourse, I will ultimately argue that the consistent Russian refusal to treat counter-​insurgency as a distinctive form of warfare, seeing it rather as part of the spectrum of war as a whole, arguably represents a more balanced paradigm than the traditional Western dichotomy between ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ war. The latter typology arguably exists only to keep various special interest groups’ income streams and publication profiles healthy. Here this author would certainly also agree with the recent critique by M.L.R. Smith, who has argued that ‘codifying insurgency as a separate category, or as subcategories, of war is an intellectually limiting, and ultimately self-​defeating exercise’ and that ‘what we call guerrilla operations is a form of fighting that can be employed by any belligerent in any type of war’.4 The purpose of this chapter is therefore also to illustrate how the Russian intellectual conceptualization of such conflicts offers a potentially more fruitful template of analysis than those ‘Coindinistas’ who would see themselves as the modern day heirs of Lyautey, Galula, and Frank Kitson.5

2 Jeremy Kuzmarov, ‘Modernizing Repression: Police Training, Political Violence, and Nation-​ Building in the “American Century”’, Diplomatic History 33/​2 (2009), 191–​221. 3  The need for a ‘global’ model of counter-​insurgency was of course advanced by David Kilcullen, who contrasted such a design with state-​centric models of counter-​insurgency used in the past, whose levels of associated violence he argued now rendered them non-​viable in a more globalized media environment: ‘Countering Global Insurgency’, Journal of Strategic Studies 28/​4 (2005): 597–​617, and his monograph Counterinsurgency (New York: OUP, 2010). 4  M.L.R. Smith, ‘Coin and the Chameleon: The Category Errors of Trying to Divide the Indivisible’, in C.W. Gventer, D.M. Jones, and M.L.R. Smith (eds.), The New Counter-​insurgency Era in Critical Perspective. Rethinking Political Violence series. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and M. L. R. Smith, ‘Guerrillas in the Mist: Reassessing Strategy and Low Intensity Warfare,’ Review of International Studies, 29/​1 (2003), 22, 29. 5 On this phenomenon in general, see: Colleen Bell, ‘Celebrity Power and Powers of War: The Rise of the COINdinistas in American popular media’, Critical Military Studies, 4/​3 (2018), 244–​263; Tim Shorrock, ‘Making COIN. The Modern History of an Unstoppable Bad Idea’, (2016), https://​ the​baff​ler.com/​sal​vos/​mak​ing-​coin-​shorr​ock#; and Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York/​London: The New Press, 2013); and David Ucko, The New Counterinsurgency Era: Transforming the US Military for Modern Wars (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009).

46   Alex Marshall

On the Supposed ‘Authoritarian Exceptionalism’ of Russian Counter-​Insurgency To begin, it is worth summarizing the existing state of analysis in Western writings about Russian counter-​insurgency warfare. Broadly speaking, the existing Western literature can be broken down into two schools of thought. The first are those that seek to categorize all Russian praxis in irregular warfare as evidence of the ‘authoritarian model’ of counter-​ insurgency. A recent and high-​profile description of the ‘authoritarian model’ of counter-​ insurgency is Daniel Byman’s 2015 article, ‘ “Death Solves All Problems”: The Authoritarian Model of Counterinsurgency’, descended from a 2005 study inspired by the US-​led ‘war on terror’.6 Byman posited four factors that distinguished the model of counter-​insurgency practiced by ‘authoritarian’ states like Russia and the USSR from Western democracies like France or America: authoritarians often repress on a scale difficult for democracies to consider, at least in today’s world, enabling them to crush many revolts effectively if brutally. Similarly, they may transfer populations or otherwise seek to control them in a comprehensive way in order to fight insurgents. Intelligence penetration is often more immediate and all-​consuming, offering important tactical advantages and making it easier to create information campaigns. Finally, authoritarian regimes have ways to counter war weariness that are not available to democracies and thus are often able to sustain domestic morale.7

The ultimate purpose of Byman’s studies, whilst orientalizing an ‘us-​and-​them’ dichotomy, was to explain and sanitize what he also felt were unpleasant but often necessary realities confronting Western governments. Perhaps channelling the spirit of Jeane Kirkpatrick, whose 1979 article ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’ famously provided intellectual top cover for the Reagan administration’s subsequent counter-​insurgency efforts in Latin America during the 1980s, Byman in 2015 wrote that: We should not forget that authoritarian regimes are repugnant, and the conditions they impose on their people disgraceful. US, European, and other democratic countries’ policies in general should try to promote a world where democracies are strong and numerous, and when in doubt they should be on the side of freedom. But the world is rarely simple. Some authoritarian countries, like Saudi Arabia, are vital to the democratic world for security reasons. In other cases the alternative to a friendly authoritarian is an unfriendly authoritarian regime—​ or the collapse of a country into chaos. In such circumstances aiding a dictator is the least worse of several bad policy options.8

6  Daniel Byman, ‘ “Death Solves All Problems”: The Authoritarian Model of Counterinsurgency’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 39/​1 (2015), 62–​93. The 2005 piece was: Going to War with the Allies You Have: Allies, Counterinsurgency, and the War on Terrorism, published by the U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute.. 7  Byman, ‘Death Solves All Problems’, 63. 8  Byman, ‘Death Solves All Problems’, 88–​89.

The Russian ‘Way of War’    47 Byman’s general typology of ‘authoritarian counterinsurgency’ has since been adopted and explicitly applied to a study of the Soviet campaign against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).9 Yuri Zhukov, in a separate study, also refined analysis of Russia’s use of violence according to the ‘authoritarian model’ of counter-​insurgency to draw a useful distinction between two key characteristics of the proposed model: collective punishment, and indiscriminate killing. In this study, Zhukov argued that collective punishment in fact occurred when the Russian state historically was at its strongest and most autocratic, whereas indiscriminate violence was more characteristic of weaker transitional regimes, such as Yeltsin’s Russia in the 1990s.10 Crucially, the ‘authoritarian model’ utilizes Russian experiences to argue for a more general underlying theoretical proposition, namely, that regime type matters when it comes to counter-​insurgency. By this reasoning, western liberal democracies are inevitably bound to conduct counter-​insurgency differently, given their own values and the role of public opinion within them, than authoritarian regimes which are less constrained about the use of coercion or public concern around casualties. This theory clearly complements, but also complicates, traditional analytical approaches that draw a further distinction between ‘population-​centric’ and ‘enemy-​centric’ counter-​insurgency.11 The most recent iteration of this hypothesis is a recently published comparative study of ‘national styles’ in counter-​ insurgency in general.12 In this study, the Russian ‘national style’ is characterized as having two ‘main models’: direct suppression, via the overwhelming use of force, and an imperial cooption policy towards local elites. The second model is identified as being employed historically only when the first model was perceived to have failed, but little effort is made to then demonstrate why this differed from European practice elsewhere.13 The notion that Western counter-​insurgency today is somehow distinctly different from the ‘authoritarian’ model naturally also presumes that it has somehow magically transcended the root legacy that unites all counter-​insurgency theory, namely the imperial experience.14 Counter-​insurgency practices historically arose across the globe in the context of empire, and military operations of this type date back to at least the Roman empire, if not before. Within this framework, both the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the present-​day Russian Federation are clearly ‘types’ of empire, in the sense of being both multinational and multicultural large-​scale polities, governed by a combination of direct and indirect rule. The Russian Empire was in many ways however a pre-​modern rather than modern empire, given

9  Yuri Zhukov, ‘Examining the Authoritarian Model of Counter-​Insurgency: The Soviet Campaign Against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 18/​3 (September 2007), 439–​466. 10  Yuri Zhukov, ‘Counterinsurgency in a Non-​ Democratic State: The Russian Example’, in Paul B. Rich and Isabelle Duyvesteyn (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counter Insurgency (London: Routledge, 2012). 11  On the distinction’s flaws: Christopher Paul et al., ‘Moving Beyond Population-​Centric vs. Enemy-​ Centric Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 27/​6 (2016), 1019–​1402. 12 B. Heuser (ed.), Insurgencies and Counter-​ Insurgencies. National Styles and Strategic Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 13 Stephen Blank, ‘Russian Counterinsurgency in Perspective’, in Heuser (ed.), Insurgencies and Counter-​Insurgencies, 75–​95. 14  In an earlier article I have highlighted this as the key ‘liberal lie’ of the modern period: Alex Marshall, ‘Imperial Nostalgia, the Liberal Lie, and the Perils of Post-​Modern Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 21/​2 (2010), 233–​258.

48   Alex Marshall that its imperial identity pre-​dated nationalism in the modern sense by several centuries. In this sense it therefore had more in common with the Ottoman or Chinese empires than with the British or French archetypes, and it encountered similar challenges when confronting accelerated modernization and industrialization in the nineteenth century. The Soviet Union by contrast clearly conceived of itself as an ‘empire of justice’ or, as some have termed it, an ‘Affirmative Action Empire’, in which (rhetorically at least) minority ethnic groups were both self-​governing and enjoyed equal legal rights, including (as ultimately proved significant) the formal right to secede, if they so desired, from the union itself.15 This did not, however, alter many of the impulses that the Soviet Union also inherited from late Tsarist imperialism, including the sense of ‘mission civilisatrice’ that led Soviet politicians to engage in gigantic transformative infrastructure projects to ‘tame nature’, or their impulse to enforce and police major social change at the same time, such as the 1920s campaign to support the mass unveiling of women in Soviet Central Asia.16 The complicated legacy from the Soviet period, conjoined with the inherited ‘pre-​modern’ collective identity that predominantly characterized the Russian Empire, in turn shapes current Russian ‘postcolonial identity’, in which many Russians feel part of a ‘subaltern empire’.17 That Russian counter-​ insurgency is informed by imperial experiences and practices is therefore undeniable; it also means however that whilst it contains genuine national nuances that were informed by Russian and Soviet identity politics, these are not necessarily sufficient to distinguish it from broader European and American experiences and practices, or, in other words, as some distinct type of ‘authoritarian model’.

On the ‘Non-​E xistence’ of Russian Counter-​Insurgency Although this chapter argues that the central proposition to the ‘authoritarian model’ of Russian counter-​insurgency contains significant flaws, not least in regards to the supposed 15  On these two terms, see: Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–​1939 (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2001) and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War. Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 2. Westad finds the closest comparison to the Soviet Union in world affairs at the time to be in fact the United States; both countries were ‘founded on ideas and plans for the betterment of humanity, rather than on concepts of identity and nation. In historical terms, much of the twentieth century can be seen as a continuous attempt by other states to socialize Russia and America into forms of international interaction based on principles of sovereignty. In these efforts there were some successes, but many failures’. 16  On the unveiling campaign, see: Marianne Kemp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling under Communism (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2008); Adrienne Lynn Edgar, ‘Emancipation of the Unveiled: Turkmen Women under Soviet Rule, 1924–​1929’, The Russian Review, 62/​1 (2003), 132–​149; Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–​1929 (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1974); and Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2004). 17  On this topic, see: V. Morozov, Russia’s Postcolonial Identity. A Subaltern Empire in a Eurocentric World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

The Russian ‘Way of War’    49 gulf between this approach and both contemporary and historical ‘Western’ praxis, this model does at least acknowledge the existence of a continuum of counter-​insurgency experience within Russian military history. A second school of thought by contrast contends that the Russian armed forces throughout history have been constitutionally incapable of adopting and applying counter-​insurgency at all. This conclusion usually derives from the dogma of counter-​insurgency as ‘doctrine’—​that without the existence of military doctrine manuals, written by well-​educated military professionals, with an accompanying dedicated learning cycle, no military force can legitimately claim to be an effective counter-​insurgent actor. Thus Scott R. McMichael noted in 1989 that: When the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in the fall of 1979, it did so without any counterinsurgency military doctrine’.18

This approach is far too reductive and, I would argue, less useful for understanding Russian praxis than the first school of thought. It suffers from two interconnected obsessions. First is the contention that counter-​insurgency is a predominantly military art, measured primarily by the use and perceived effectiveness of special forces, light infantry, and paramilitary formations. Second is the assumption that an army without a relevant doctrine manual devoted to counter-​insurgency cannot be categorized as an effective COIN practitioner. Both preconceptions present significant hindrances to understanding Russian counter-​ insurgency in historical perspective. The first presumption is problematic, since it ignores the role that other Russian government actors played in shaping counter-​insurgency policy (most notably the KGB and the CPSU in the Soviet period). As the case studies below illustrate, counter-​insurgency practice in the Soviet period was most often formulated in forums where military or internal security representatives were but one, often subordinate, element. The formative Soviet experiences in this regard were arguably the Turkkommissiia (in the case of Central Asia) and the South-​East Bureau (in the case of the North Caucasus) in the early 1920s, and the role of such party-​led organs in generating stabilization policies was consciously reinvoked by leaders such as M.A. Suslov in Lithuania in 1944–​1946. An excessive focus on the military level therefore neglects the role of policy debates and discussions that occurred in other branches of government, and which were in fact more consequential to the twentieth-​century Russian experience. The second and related charge—​of doctrinal illiteracy—​is also problematic. Firstly, it assumes the Russian military have been more inept and indiscriminate than other militaries in this regard. Yet when one considers even just one example—​the inappropriateness and irrelevance of applying the coordinated and massive use of airpower, armour, and artillery to a country like Afghanistan—​it becomes difficult to distinguish Soviet practice from even very recent American or British operations in the same country after 2001.19 Similar 18 Scott

R. McMichael, ‘The Soviet Army, Counterinsurgency, and the Afghan War’, Parameters, December 1989, 23. 19  In 2010 the US military in fact began propagandizing the utility of more widely using and deploying 72-​ton main battle tanks in Afghanistan, a country which continues to have a scanty and poorly maintained road system: http://​edit​ion.cnn.com/​2010/​WORLD/​asia​pcf/​11/​19/​afgh​anis​tan.tanks/​index. html. In reality, US armour in Afghanistan was as much about force protection and political signalling as actual utility—​much like Soviet armour in the earlier period: https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2010/​11/​ 24/​tanks-​but-​no-​tanks/​. For a telling review of the more recent UK experience, see: Anthony King, ‘Understanding the Helmand Campaign: British Military Operations in Afghanistan’, International

50   Alex Marshall challenges arise if one then seeks to distinguish Soviet policies of population displacement, or the related creation of ‘free fire’ zones, from similar British or French practices in Kenya, Malaya, and Algeria in the 1950s. Second, this charge also ignores how the Russian military themselves have historically analysed irregular warfare as simply one part of a spectrum of conflict, rather than a discrete field of study. This Western tendency of looking for material evidence of relevant ideas in the wrong place extends furthermore to nomenclature issues; there is no direct Russian language equivalent for ‘counter-​insurgency’, but there is a wealth of Russian literature dating back to at least the eighteenth century—​much of it ignored by Western scholars—​on ‘small wars’, ‘partisan warfare’, and ‘anti-​bandit operations’.20 Consequently, Russian military campaigns have in practice been woefully ignored by Western military academic institutions. As Joss Meakins for example notes, Western scholars have seemed reluctant to engage with Chechnya as a COIN success. Such hesitancy may be partly due to the extreme unpalatability of Russian tactics, as well as a sense of consternation and bewilderment at their efficacy. Russian counterinsurgency methods in Chechnya read like a checklist of ‘Bad COIN Practices’, as defined by the RAND Corporation’s ‘Counterinsurgency Scorecard’.21

The Soviet Experience: Practical Examples In light of the misunderstandings and mischaracterizations noted above, this chapter attempts an alternative approach to understanding the Russian experience of counter-​ insurgency, one that goes beyond the dead end of the ‘authoritarian school’. In order to identify some of the key characteristics of Russian counter-​insurgency in practice over a sufficiently long historical timescale, it begins by examining two key case studies to identify the classic characteristics of early Soviet counter-​insurgency campaigns. The first is the campaign against the basmachestvo in Central Asia, which ran from 1918 until at least 1933 (although arguably the most effective leader of the basmachi movement, Ibrahim Bek, was captured and executed in 1931). The second is the Soviet campaign to re-​establish direct control of Ukraine, Moldova, and the Baltic states between 1944 and 1959.22 In both cases, I will Affairs, 86/​2 (March 2010), 311–​332. On the Soviet military experience in Afghanistan there are multiple studies, but a good starting point in terms of both chronology and tactical examples is the Russian General staff ’s own study: Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress (eds., trans.), ‘The Russian General Staff ’, in The Soviet-​Afghan War. How a Superpower Fought and Lost (Kansas: University of Kansas, 2002). 20 A recent Russian text reprints the most fundamental nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century texts in this field: V.I. Marchenkova (ed.), Groznoe Oruzhie. Malaia voina, partizanstvo i drugie vidy asimmetrichnogo voevaniia v svete nasledstiia russkikh voennykh myslitelei (Moscow: Voennyi Universitet Russkii Put’, 2007). The collection includes writings by Russian partisan leader Denis Davydov, a hero of the Napoleonic wars, as well as prominent writers within the Russian General Staff of the nineteenth century such as V. Klembovskii and N. Golitysyn, as well as post-​war studies of Soviet partisan activity in 1941–​1945. 21  Joss Meakins, ‘The Other Side of the COIN: The Russians in Chechnya’, Small Wars Journal, available at: https://​small​wars​jour​nal.com/​jrnl/​art/​the-​other-​side-​of-​the-​coin-​the-​russi​ans-​in-​chech​nya. 22  The latter campaign has recently benefited from an independent study: Alexander Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

The Russian ‘Way of War’    51 argue that the close combination of military with political action illustrates approaches to counter-​insurgency which are remarkably similar to Western practices of the same period, placing a question mark over the value of categorizing them as examples of a distinct non-​Western school of ‘authoritarian’ counter-​insurgency. At the same time however, as Alexander Statiev has argued, Soviet ideology unquestionably leant the political aspect of counter-​insurgency practice during this era certain unique characteristics. The most notable of these was the replacement of traditional imperial ‘divide-​and-​rule’ policies with the deliberate generation of class warfare in the countryside. Consequently: [u]‌nlike counterinsurgents elsewhere, the Bolsheviks did not pursue political stabilization while fighting peasant rebels; on the contrary, they escalated social tensions, seeking to split peasants along class lines and attract most of them during a crucial period of the power struggle while repressing the kulak minority and intimidating the rest into neutrality. Deportations, preventive arrests, hostage taking, amnesties, and covert operations became the standard tools of Bolshevik counterinsurgents . . . 23

The basmachi movement in Central Asia proved to be one of the earliest and most difficult examples of peasant rebellion faced by the new Soviet government after 1917, emerging as one of the many consequences of the Tsarist collapse. Grievances generated by rising indebtedness and social hardship in the Central Asian provinces during wartime had already contributed to a mass revolt in 1916, before local unrest was swiftly compounded by the collapse of central authority in Petrograd itself in February 1917.24 The basmachi insurgency in this sense formed one of the many ‘civil wars’ unfolding within the Russian Civil War as a whole, and remains part of a wider pattern which has caused scholars studying the period to redefine how this conflict is categorized.25 The extent of local social and political turmoil at the time was most obviously reflected by geographical maps that exhibited radically shifting political and ethnographic frontiers. Often these maps became outdated in a matter of months. The territory of what would ultimately become the five Soviet Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan was delimited before 1917 into two indirectly ruled protectorates, the Emirate of Bukhara and Khanate of Khiva, as well as the directly ruled Tsarist Governorships of the Steppe and Turkestan krais. In contrast to other territories within the Tsarist Empire that were presided over by the Interior Ministry, the Turkestan territory was directly governed, effectively as a colonial possession, by the Russian War Ministry. This whole system was however thrown into disarray by the collapse of the central government in Petrograd and the isolation from central authority that followed, Turkestan being effectively cut off administratively and logistically from both Moscow and Petrograd until Red Army forces advancing eastwards

23 Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands, 33.

24  For good general histories of the era, see: A.S. Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868–​1910. A Comparison with British India (Oxford: OUP, 2008) and Marko Buttino, Revoliutsiia Naoborot. Sredniaia Aziia mezhdu padeniem tsarskoi imperii i obrazovaniem SSSR (Moscow: “Zven’ia”, 2007). 25 Jonathan Smele, The ‘Russian’ Civil Wars, 1916–​ 1926: Ten Years That Shook the World (London: Hurst & Company, 2015); Peter Holquist, ‘Violent Russia, Deadly Marxism? Russia in the Epoch of Violence’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 4/​3 (Summer 2003), 627–​652; Eric C. Landis, Bandits and Partisans: The Antonov Movement in the Russian Civil War (Pittsburgh: 2008).

52   Alex Marshall drove back General Kolchak’s forces and broke through local pro-​White Cossack groups around Orenburg in 1919. Whilst still isolated from Moscow, the establishment of a new communist society in Turkestan exhibited a peculiar local dynamic of its own. In the Turkestan krai, the emergence of a Tashkent Soviet of Soviet and Workers’ Deputies in 1917 quickly produced conflict between the new ethnic Russian-​dominated government in Tashkent on the one hand, and, on the other, both the Kokand Autonomous Government, dominated by native Muslim intelligentsia, and the still feudally structured survival of the Emirate of Bukhara further south. All three entities had conflicting views about the future territorial and political alignment of the region. In February 1918, however, the Kokand Autonomous Government was effectively destroyed, after barely three months of existence, by forces loyal to the Tashkent Soviet. In September 1920 the Emir of Bukhara was also overthrown and driven into exile by the recently arrived Red Army. From exile in Afghanistan, the Emir then remained a patron and mentor for the basmachi insurgent movement that rapidly emerged in Bukhara, most notably supporting Ibrahim Bek, the basmachi leader most active in the Lokai valley in western Bukhara. Between 1920 and 1924 there were subsequently established three new (and as time proved, temporary) autonomous political-​territorial entities in the former Tsarist colony; the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (TASSR), the Bukharan People’s Soviet Republic (BNSR, the former Bukharan emirate), and the Khorezmian People’s Soviet Republic (KhNSR, the former Khivan khanate).26 Amongst the factors contributing to ongoing unrest in these territories were the unfolding consequences of the empire’s economic collapse and the legacies of the Russian settler population’s racist views. Early on in the revolution, the latter’s representatives within the Tashkent Soviet had reinterpreted Marxism to classify those of Russian ethnicity as the only true ‘proletariat’ within the region, and accordingly as the only group qualified to govern under the new regime. This had produced the split between the Tashkent Soviet and the Kokand Autonomous Government, which led to the former ultimately militarily destroying the latter. Up to 14,000 civilian residents died in the fighting in Kokand, and survivors took refuge in the Fergana valley from where they mounted guerrilla activities against Tashkent.27 These events fed ongoing antagonism amongst the non-​Russian Muslim majority in the region, and served as a recruiting agent for the bands of horseback-​riding anti-​Soviet insurgents that came to be generically known as basmachi. By the summer of 1918 two major basmachi groups had emerged—​one under Madamin Bek associated with the pre-​war jadid (new course) liberal Muslim intelligentsia, the other under the more conservative former Kokand chief of militia, Irgash, who assumed the title of ‘Commander of the Faithful and Khan of Fergana’. British intelligence accounts from the period credit Madamin Bek with leading a force of 4,000 men,

26  On the national delimitations in Central Asia that occurred after 1924, see: Arne Haugen, The Establishment of National Republics in Soviet Central Asia (London: Palgrave, 2003); Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire; and Jeremy Smith, Red Nations. The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The connections between border-​drawing, state building, and counterinsurgency in this period are obviously a rich territory for research (and richly contested), but as a vast independent subject remain beyond the scope of this chapter. 27  Glenn L. Roberts, Commissar and Mullah. Soviet-​Muslim Policy from 1917 to 1924 (Dissertation. com: Boca Raton, 1990/​2006), 58.

The Russian ‘Way of War’    53 and Irgash with mustering around 1,500 men.28 The challenge presented by these guerrilla formations after 1920 became the central concern of the Soviet government organs charged with re-​establishing stability in the Turkestan region: the Turkestan Commission (TK), or Turkkommissia, and its successor after 1922, the Central Asian Bureau (CAB).29 Amongst the first acts of the Turkestan Commission formed on 10 October 1919 was to disband the Armenian military units associated with the earlier 1918 massacres in Kokand, and to purge the local political organs of those ethnic Russian railroad workers who had earlier supported the racialized Marxism of the Tashkent Soviet, replacing them on an increasingly large scale with local Muslim political actors. By May 1920 the local Red Army military commander, Mikhail Frunze, had concluded that the central problem in the region was not the military defeat of the basmachi, but rather convincing the local population that the basmachi were their enemy—​in other words, political pacification. This insight produced a range of measures over the following years. These ranged from amnesties for former insurgent leaders (Madamin Bek was successfully persuaded to change sides, only to be killed during amnesty negotiations with fellow insurgents) to land reform; distributing seed for farmers; organized political propaganda, including cinemas and magic lantern shows; and coopting local clergy and tribal leaders. Red Army tactics meanwhile sought to coordinate the repression conducted by flying columns of cavalry with the consolidation of fortified positions—​blockhouses and fixed encampments. The overall objective was to constrain basmachi freedom of action and destroy their agrarian supply chains, on a pattern not dissimilar to British measures in the latter stages of the Second South African War. Communications between cavalry and fortified garrisons was achieved by heliograph stations and, increasingly, by telephone and telegraph lines. This strategy of gradual political and territorial asphyxiation of the basmachi movement culminated in the first exile of Ibrahim Bek, after a string of defeats in his own native Lokai valley during 1924–​1926. The definitive Soviet study of the 1923–​1924 campaign in the Lokai valley ascribed major successes there not primarily to military feats of arms—​the local Red Army cavalry was in fact short of horses, and dogged by high recruitment turnover—​but to political and social measures. The first large-​scale local tribal congress (kurultai) in the Lokai valley ever to be addressed by a Soviet representative managed to gather around 650 representatives of the local tribes in August 1923, and successfully set out a framework for local tax collection.30 At the same time the leadership of the local Revkom, the primary local Soviet governance organ, was reorganized in October 1923, and its administrative-​territorial responsibilities reallocated, the intention being to increase the representation of local tribes as well as, where necessary, drawing upon the expertise of former local bureaucrats from the Emirate of Bukhara era in order to further underpin the Revkom’s legitimacy and effectiveness.31 On 25 December 1923, this same newly reorganized local authority successfully convened

28 Robert Baumann, Russian-​ Soviet Unconventional wars in the Caucasus, Central Asia and Afghanistan (Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, Combat Studies Institute, 1993), 105. 29  On these organizations, see: Shoshana Keller, ‘The Central Asian Bureau, an Essential Tool in Governing Soviet Turkestan’, Central Asian Survey 22/​2–​3 (2003), 281–​297; and Anna Shukman, ‘The Turkestan Commission, 1919–​1920’, Central Asian Review, 12/​1 (1964), 5–​15. 30 F. Il’iutko, Basmachestvo v Lokae (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo Otdel Voennoe Literatury, 1929), 73–​78. 31  Ibid., 89–​93.

54   Alex Marshall a gathering of local mullahs. After a day of uninterrupted consultation over the Koran, the mullahs formally declared the basmachi movement to be opposed to Islam, and appealed to all the inhabitants of the Lokai valley to assist the Red Army in their struggle with the basmachestvo.32 Ibrahim Bek sought to combat this turn in the psychological tide by intensifying the physical pressure on local villages exerted by his own forces. Local Red Army troops were, however, increasingly well informed of his movements through local informants, and were able to undertake corresponding counter-​measures to limit his freedom of action. On 20 January 1924, a further kurultai of clergy and tribal leaders from each village in the Lokai valley was assembled, numbering 1,528 delegates in all. It agreed to despatch a delegation to encourage Ibrahim Bek to surrender. This amnesty offer had the potential to end the entire war, as Ibrahim Bek remained the last major insurgent leader active in the field. Negotiations continued until 11 February. Ibrahim Bek ultimately refused to surrender and disarm, but instead offered a year’s ceasefire, provided that he and his bands were allocated a territory where they could reside undisturbed. Only after this period of neutrality would he commit to revisiting the question of a formal surrender to the Soviet authorities. This obviously unsatisfactory response was rapidly rejected, and a military attack on his forces followed instead, killing seventy-​five of his followers.33 Although the negotiations did not terminate the conflict, their duration and seriousness, conjoined with the degree of political mobilization that the related organizational processes engendered in the Lokai valley, signified the final, decisive shift in the conflict in the Red Army’s favour. Ibrahim Bek was forced to flee across the border to find safe haven in Northern Afghanistan in 1926, and although Soviet collectivization policies after 1928 sowed sufficient dissent and local turmoil for him to attempt a return, his cause never again presented the same level of threat, or acquired the momentum, that he had enjoyed between 1920 and 1924. The legacy of stabilization policies applied by the Soviet party-​state during the Russian Civil War(s) was consciously revisited and reapplied to the USSR’s western borderlands in the closing years of the Second World War, demonstrating the existence of a ‘universal model’ of Soviet counter-​insurgency. On Stalin’s personal orders, as the German army was rolled back, special five-​man Central Committee bureaus were organized for each of the Baltic republics, as well as for Moldova, all four territories being thought likely to contest the re-​establishment of Soviet governance post-​war. These four territories had only been incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939, and much like Central Asia after 1917, each also remained contested ground both politically and territorially. Massive population transfers, not least of Germans and Poles, were another significant aspect of the post-​war settlement, conducted alongside the redrawing of historical frontiers. In Lithuania, the Central Committee bureau appointed in 1944 to oversee stabilization measures and manage the Lithuanian Communist Party was led by a rising star within the Soviet political system, Mikhail Suslov (1902–​1982).34 Suslov explicitly compared the policy and tasks facing his bureau in 1944–​1946 to the Central Asian Bureau (Sredazbiuro) under Lenin in the post-​civil war period, again underlining that those looking to study the architects of counter-​insurgency practice in the Soviet period 32 

Ibid., 102–​103. Ibid., 110. 34  This section draws from a major new biography of Suslov’s career on which the current author is engaged. 33 

The Russian ‘Way of War’    55 during the twentieth century need to look beyond the military. Suslov was also a curious example of poacher turned gamekeeper, since as party secretary of the Stavropol district on the North Caucasus front, he had formally at least been in charge of leading the local partisan movement against the German occupiers—​a role in which he does not appear to have greatly distinguished himself.35 In Lithuania, he was by contrast now charged at least in part with suppressing the indigenous Lithuanian insurgent movement devoted to resisting the re-​establishment of Soviet power—​the ‘forest brothers’, as they were known in all three Baltic states, who would continue an underground resistance struggle well into the 1950s. Suslov’s period of office in Lithuania (he departed, having been promoted once more, this time to the Politburo, in the spring of 1946) is traditionally associated today with large-​scale repression and deportations.36 This was indeed the case, as large numbers of Germans and Poles were deported westward, in line with the redrawing of borders (Vilnius, annexed by Poland in 1922, had only become the new Lithuanian state capital in 1939), and Lithuanian families who were considered politically unreliable were also deported eastwards, to Siberia. However, the majority of deportations did not in fact occur during Suslov’s own term in office. As early as June 1945, the NKVD had requested permission to exile 20,000 guerrilla relatives from Lithuania, but the government cut that quota to 5,479 persons in 1945, 2,082 in 1946, and 3,938 in 1947. The scale of deportations in fact only rose dramatically in the two years following 1947, so that between 1941 and 1952 overall, the Soviet authorities deported 120,924 persons from Lithuania. Deportees included the relatives of guerrillas, but also those elements judged ‘socially dangerous’, such as former politicians, high ranking civil servants, criminals, German collaborators, and, above all, wealthy farmers. The deportation of the latter was a critical aspect of Soviet land reform, the dual aim of which was both to reduce local resistance to collectivization, and to confiscate enough property to enable major land redistribution.37 Counter-​insurgency was therefore once again seen as an explicitly political task, and Suslov’s pronouncements on the job at hand during his period in office in Lithuania focused not on military tactics, but on the social-​political programme to remould the country. These policies were again informed by the Soviet Union’s own self-​image as an ‘empire of justice’. Though sometimes later portrayed as a Russifier, one of Suslov’s greatest concerns was in fact to give the forces and processes of local repression a Lithuanian face; in May 1945 he complained that NKVD troops in the region needed to be reinforced, ‘in the first instance by Lithuanians’. He also recommended transparent court procedures to ensure that ‘bandits’ were tried and, if necessary, executed in the very places where their crimes were committed. Court proceedings should not only to be held in public for maximum demonstrative effect, but, as he also emphasized, should be conducted in the Lithuanian language.38 Suslov also regarded lack of progress in land reform as an obstacle to effective counter-​insurgency; the 35 

On this period in Suslov’s career, see: Kazi Magomet Aliev, ‘Zavedomaia Lozh’, Molodoi Kommunist, 5 (1990), 69–​76. 36  See, for example: Donal O’Sullivan, ‘Reconstruction and Repression: The Role of M.A. Suslov in Lithuania, 1944–​1946’, Forum fürosteuropäischeIdeen-​und Zeitgeshichte, 4 (Jahrgang, 2000), or the 1978 samizdat document‚ Mikhail Suslov—​The Second Hangman of Lithuania’, available at: http://​www.litua​ nus.org/​1978/​78_​1​_​06.htm. 37 Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands, 176–​177. 38 Mindaugas Pocius, Lietuvos Sovietizavimas 1944–​ 1947m.: VKP(b) CK dokumaentai (Vilnius: Lietuvosistorijos institutas, 2015), 224.

56   Alex Marshall poorer peasants to whom land was being redistributed were a crucial reservoir of recruits for the local paramilitary forces, or ‘destruction battalions’ (istrebitel’nye batal’ony) that were tasked with occupying strategic terrain, and thereby constraining insurgents’ freedom of movement. Suslov maintained that ‘banditry cannot be destroyed and the bourgeois-​ nationalist underground cannot be successfully eradicated by police and army operations alone, without raising the masses against them’.39 Recruitment efforts in Lithuania accordingly intensified over the course of 1945, with 2,442 men on the rolls of the destruction battalions in January 1945 compared to 8,216 by January 1946. That said, destruction battalions in Lithuania suffered significant attrition rates in 1945, with the ratio of dead to wounded in these battalions running at 3:1.40 That year the Lithuanian destruction battalions claimed to have killed 3,490 guerrillas and to have arrested 6,077 more, in addition to 3,571 guerrilla ‘accomplices’, all for the loss of 822 battalion personnel.41 Knowing the political significance of such units, and valuing the local knowledge they brought to the struggle, the Soviet authorities in Lithuania and the other Western borderlands continued to recruit and employ them, despite official reports acknowledging that they were also frequently ill-​trained, poorly equipped, and prone to pursuing private vendettas or conducting local rampages. Soviet counter-​insurgency in the Western borderlands in the post-​war years therefore remained political warfare par excellence, with much in common with western military practice during the same period.

Soviet Policy in External State-​Building: An ‘Authoritarian Exception’? For all its Marxist-​Leninist inflection on promoting class warfare, much in Soviet internal practice in the 1920s and 1940s therefore mirrored Western colonial counter-​insurgency of the same era. Moving forward, the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 was marked by contrast as the most explicit comparator to Western ‘state-​building’ efforts in an expeditionary context undertaken before the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991. This Soviet endeavour has only recently been reassessed in this light, as parallels between the Soviet state-​building effort and ISAF efforts in the same country since 2001 have become increasingly apparent. At the same time, this often neglected state-​building aspect of the Soviet invasion did not arise ex nihilo in 1979, but was instead a logical corollary of the Soviet Union’s own relationship with Afghanistan prior to the intervention of its military forces in December 1979. Most obviously, Soviet investment and developmental aid to Afghanistan had been growing exponentially since the 1950s.42 This aid effort effectively began in January 39 Statiev, The Soviet Counterinsurgency in the Western Borderlands, 214. 40 

Ibid., 216–​217. Ibid., 225. 42  To date the only major studies of this aspect of the conflict are by Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan 1978–​1992 (London: Hurst & Company, 2000); Paul Robinson and Jay Dixon, Aiding Afghanistan. A History of Soviet Assistance to a Developing Country (London: Hurst & Company, 2013); and the four 2010 articles by Anton Minkov and Gregory Smolynec in the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, in particular ‘4-​D Soviet Style: Defence, Development, Diplomacy and Disengagement in Afghanistan During the Soviet Period Part I: State Building’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 23 (2010), 41 

The Russian ‘Way of War’    57 1954, with the provision of $3.5 million of credit to build two grain silos, a flourmill, and a bakery in Kabul. By October that same year, the Soviet Union had already extended a further $2.1 million of credit for Afghan road-​building.43 The Afghan military were also direct beneficiaries of this earlier Soviet aid programme, modernizing their capabilities with Soviet-​produced military equipment, training, and advice; after 1956, Afghan officers received training in the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries, with over 3,000 officers a year going to the USSR alone. Some 4,500 Soviet trainers and advisers also went to Afghanistan, in phased shifts, between 1961 and 1967, with their numbers growing further after 1973.44 Results from such mentoring, however, were mixed. By the early 1970s, Soviet experts were already noting that these foreign aid and advisory missions had failed to break Afghanistan’s developmental cul de sac, producing instead only isolated industrial enclaves alongside wider underdevelopment. A growing proportion of Afghanistan’s national income was now also being allocated to debt repayment, as the country evolved in the direction of a ‘rentier state’. Land and livestock taxes by the 1970s provided less than 2% of domestic revenue, whilst over 40% of state revenue derived from foreign aid and natural gas sales to the USSR.45 The country’s agrarian crisis also became glaringly apparent in the famine of 1972, in which up to 8,000 Afghans were believed to have died.46 This striking reassessment of Afghan economic progress led Soviet economists to reassess growth theory in general from a more holistic perspective. Their conclusion was that economic growth was not purely the result of technical development or capital accumulation, but reflected the evolution of social processes and institutions as well. The irony here, as Robinson and Dixon have pointed out, was that Soviet experts arrived at the same conclusion about development and aid policies as their Western counterparts would do later; namely, that aid and investment required social and political change to be truly effective.47 The Afghan PDPA’s seizure of power in 1978, and the large-​scale Soviet intervention that followed after December 1979 (the latter conducted primarily to change the leadership of the PDPA itself48), in principle created the opportunity for the Soviet Union to more directly reform the governance structures of the Afghan state. Counter-​insurgency was not an early priority for the Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces (LCOSF) in the country. Soviet strategic planning was instead predicated on the expectation that the Afghan army would bear the burden of fighting the mujahidin, who by now were increasingly emerging in rural areas to challenge the authority of Kabul. Massive desertion within the Afghan armed forces nonetheless forced the LCOSF to play more of a role here, at which stage failings in Soviet military training, doctrine, and equipment quickly became apparent, as the conscript-​based 306–​327. See also, however, Olga Oliker at RAND, ‘Building Afghanistan’s Security Forces in Wartime. The Soviet Experience’, (2011), available at: https://​www.rand.org/​cont​ent/​dam/​rand/​pubs/​mon​ogra​phs/​ 2011/​RAND​_​MG1​078.pdf. 43 

Robinson and Dixon, Aiding Afghanistan, 50. Giustozzi et al., Missionaries of Modernity. Advisory Missions and the Struggle for Hegemony in Afghanistan and Beyond (London: Hurst & Company, 2016), 182–​183. 45  Barnett Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan. State Formation and Collapse in the International System, 2nd ed. (Yale: Yale University Press, 2002), 65. 46  Robinson and Dixon, Aiding Afghanistan, 71. 47 Ibid., 88. 48  Hafizullah Amin was assassinated and replaced by Babrak Karmal, head of the more moderate Parcham faction of the PDPA. 44 Antonio

58   Alex Marshall Soviet 40th Army group were dragged into fighting a guerrilla force who for the most part rigorously avoided decisive battle. The learning curve of the 40th Army in this type of warfare was hampered by the shortage of appropriate tactical doctrine at the start of the conflict, and by large quantities of inappropriate equipment. Matters were made worse by the Soviet army’s two-​year conscription cycle, which inevitably meant that any lessons learned had to be reinculcated in the next draft of conscripts after every two years of fighting. 40th Army operations were, however, only intended to buy breathing room for the Afghan state itself to rebuild its governance capacity; the most critical aspect of the Soviet experience in retrospect was therefore the sharp shift of goals when it came to the Afghan state-​building project. Until at least 1986, much of this state-​building project was designed to rebuild the Afghan state in the Soviet Union’s own image, most notably via nationalization of industry and the expansion of the public sector. The GNP share of the public sector accordingly increased from 9.5% in 1975 to roughly 20% in 1989. By 1986, about 100 industrial enterprises had been built with Soviet and other socialist countries’ assistance, accounting for more than 70% of the country’s total industrial output.49 Agriculture, however, was catastrophically affected by the war, exacerbating the urban–​rural divide, and leaving Afghanistan’s urban areas by the end of the 1980s dependent on Soviet wheat imports to survive. As rural areas faced depopulation, rising violence, and the mining or destruction of irrigation wells and fields, Afghan wheat imports increased from 74,000 tonnes in 1982 to about 250,000 tonnes in 1985 alone. Dependency on foreign aid therefore continued, and in fact accelerated; in 1988, 75% of the state’s revenues were derived from sales of natural gas and financial aid, and only 25% were generated from direct and indirect taxes.50 The withdrawal of Soviet aid and financial assistance in 1991 then triggered the final collapse of the Najibullah regime in 1992. The financial non-​sustainability of the state building project as the conflict escalated also forced a Soviet reassessment of the kind of state that they were trying to create. On 10 May 1988, the Soviet party leadership admitted that to date in Afghanistan they had ‘essentially . . . put our bets on the military solution, on suppressing the counterrevolution with force’.51 Until 1986 these efforts were accompanied by a political programme that effectively sought to turn Afghanistan into the equivalent of a Soviet Central Asian republic. This first phase therefore followed a pattern earlier seen in Central Asia; efforts to create a disciplined and centralized party-​state were accompanied by initiatives to coopt local clergy, to implement a local nationalities policy that encouraged political mobilization, and, at the same time, to expand local education, emancipate women, and pursue land reform and redistribution.52 Each of these efforts were by 1986 recognized to have encountered severe setbacks. The PDPA remained faction-​riven, whilst the less centralized nature of Islam in Afghanistan also presented severe obstacles to coopting local clergy compared to Central Asia. Early efforts to expand the PDPA regime’s social base in the countryside, via militia forces like the Groups for Defence of the Revolution (GDR), were stillborn, whilst the impact of Soviet agitprop units, created to offer medical aid and to distribute free fuel, medicine, and food in rural areas, only reached 12–​15% 49 

Minkov and Smolynec,‘4-​D Soviet Style’.

50 Ibid., 610, 614. 51 

Minkov and Smolynec, ‘4-​D Soviet Style’, 394. Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending. Afghanistan: 1979 to the Present (London: Hurst & Company 2000), 173–​191. 52 Gilles

The Russian ‘Way of War’    59 of the rural population at best.53 Corruption also blighted the distribution of Soviet aid, whilst the reshaping of the Afghan government to mirror the three major Soviet ‘power ministries’—​the Defence Ministry, Intelligence Service (KHAD), and Interior Ministry—​ produced yet further bureaucratic infighting. In 1985, during one of his first meetings with Babrak Karmal, Mikhail Gorbachev signalled a shift in Soviet policy that reflected the end of this early state-​building design. Noting that Soviet forces were destined to leave Afghanistan, Gorbachev urged his Afghan counterpart to share power with ‘oppositional and even currently hostile forces’ and to ‘give up all ideas of socialism’.54 After 1986, Soviet attention increasingly focused on managing a staged withdrawal, a process which also involved an explicit rejection of the earlier effort to create a centralized party-​state. The buildup of conventional Afghan security forces was now accompanied by a new emphasis on decentralization and increased funding of local militias, as well as hesitant steps towards economic liberalization and a multiparty government. All these efforts were executed under the umbrella of the ‘National Reconciliation Policy’ associated with the new leader of the PDPA, Mohammad Najibullah. Such steps secured breathing room for the Soviet military withdrawal to occur, but they did little to consolidate a new social base for the Kabul regime before the ending of Soviet aid in 1991 triggered the collapse of the Najibullah government, and the onset of an Afghan civil war.

What to Do With the ‘Authoritarian Model’ of Counter-​Insurgency? The failure of the Soviet state-​building project in Afghanistan dealt a severe blow to the Soviet project in general, not only in terms of the universal Soviet counter-​insurgency model first fostered by the Russian Civil War(s), but also in terms of broader international credibility. However, these failures were not merely a characteristic symptom of the last stages of the Cold War, when the Marxist-​Leninist model of governance was increasingly seen to have lost the battle of ideas. They also mirrored the wider challenges facing state-​building and expanding hegemony that would continue to be experienced by western governments after 2001. Few phenomena illustrate the abiding nature of this dilemma as much as the problems facing advisory missions in general. Soviet advisors in Afghanistan were repeatedly trapped by both their conscious and unconscious instincts to export the Soviet model of government to the unpromising and unfertile terrain of Afghanistan. During the early stages of the Soviet intervention, their role was critical to holding together those elements of Afghan state power that subsisted; by mid-​1980, Soviet advisers were estimated to number between 6,000–​8,000.55 Intended to

53 

Minkov and Smolynec, ‘4-​D Soviet Style’, 402. Halliday, ‘Soviet Foreign Policymaking and the Afghanistan War: From “Second Mongolia” to “Bleeding Wound” ’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), 683; Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye. The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), 83. 55  Henry S. Bradsher, Afghan Communism and Soviet Intervention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 122. 54  Fred

60   Alex Marshall advise the PDPA, Soviet advisers under these circumstances at times verged on becoming the country’s de facto government. As Najibullah later recalled of one meeting of the Afghan Council of Ministers: We sit down at the table. Each minister comes with his own [Soviet] adviser. The meeting begins, the discussion becomes heated, and gradually the advisers come closer and closer to the table, so accordingly our people move away, and eventually only the advisers are left at the table.56

This cultural reflex to arrogate power continued to shape Soviet advisers’ mentalities, even as they verbally emphasized the need for local actors to reach local solutions. The very scale and nature of the Soviet advisory mission therefore arguably fostered from a very early stage an unintended form of hybrid governance, which made stabilization all the more unattainable. Despite the supposedly special nature of the Soviet ‘authoritarian’ model of counter-​ insurgency, the same problem has replayed itself in Afghanistan after 2001, where Western governments have assumed the role of mentoring and advising the Afghan ministries. With the collapse of the Western-​backed government in Kabul in 2021 in the space of barely three weeks, we can now state that the twenty-​year Western state-​building project in Afghanistan was in some ways even more artificial and doomed to failure—​even more of a ‘Potemkin village’—​than the ‘authoritarian’ Soviet model for that country. This chapter has looked extensively at Russian counter-​insurgency campaigns in historical perspective in order to critique an emerging literature that has recently used that experience to support the notion of a so-​called ‘authoritarian’ model of counter-​insurgency. The typologization of such a model, in which Russia serves as the key exemplar, has at least three goals, although writers who have contributed to this field generally choose to emphasize one of these to the exclusion of others: (1) To establish an ‘other’ for the Western counter-​insurgency experience. Put simply, the ‘authoritarian’ model designation is designed to make Western counter-​insurgency look good by comparison. Central to this presumption is the principle that counter-​ insurgency is influenced by regime type, and that liberal democracies naturally conduct counter-​insurgency differently from authoritarian regimes. This argument, as has been noted, is substantially decoupled from study of actual Western counter-​ insurgency praxis in the post-​Second World War period, in which population displacement, collective punishment, and the routine use of torture for intelligence gathering were recurrent features of almost every European democracy’s wars of decolonization. It furthermore posits a ‘liberal’ contemporary alternative to traditional counter-​insurgency practice which it has yet to be proven actually exists, either in Iraq or Afghanistan. It in addition carefully sidesteps any discussion of contemporary Israeli practice, in which a functioning modern multiparty democracy has regularly conducted counter-​insurgency by methods involving permanent population displacement, targeted assassination, and indiscriminate collective punishment. Byman’s own separate analysis of Israeli methods interestingly ascribed the

56 

Giustozzi et al., Missionaries of Modernity, 210.

The Russian ‘Way of War’    61 acknowledged drawbacks of Israeli practice as a matter of bad strategy and poor information operations, rather than as a product of regime type.57 (2) To provide a framework for normalizing collaboration with authoritarian regimes in joint counter-​insurgency endeavours. As was noted above, this was arguably Daniel Byman’s central purpose in his 2015 article. This intellectual device has normalized Western support, for example, for the recent Saudi intervention in Yemen, which has involved Western military aid being used to indiscriminately slaughter thousands of civilians, but it was also critical to the later drawdown stages of the Iraq conflict. In this context, the ‘authoritarian model’ again provides a cover story for what has in reality been a relatively normal feature of all counter-​insurgency practice by all nations, namely supporting and selling arms to repressive client regimes. (3) To demonize the ‘other’—​in this case Russia—​for wider political purposes. This agenda probably requires the least interrogation, since it is more than obvious, given the tensions in the contemporary international landscape. It has multiple direct and indirect consequences however, not least the dismissal of Russian military experience in this field in most modern Western military academies, plus the perpetuation of stereotypes, which assert that the Russian armed forces either do not understand or are incapable of practising counter-​insurgency. The result is to perpetuate flawed understandings of what counter-​insurgency actually comprises, namely the fact that it is always and everywhere a means of governance by violence. A recent study of the traditional distinctions made in counter-​insurgency literature between ‘population-​ centric’ and ‘enemy-​ centric’ counter-​ insurgency concluded by condemning the emergence of this ‘caricature’, given that ‘most historical COIN campaigns blend the two options’.58 This chapter similarly seeks to dismiss, as a false dichotomy, the division between an ‘authoritarian’ and a ‘liberal’ model of counter-​insurgency. The appearance of such typologies nonetheless highlights the dilemmas of studying and talking more honestly about Western power in general. They also hinder progress towards an understanding that the Russian military has already reached, thanks to their own more dispassionate assessment of their own counter-​ insurgency experiences. This is that counter-​insurgency represents only one vector of the wider spectrum of war, an activity that by its very nature inescapably and inevitably involves coercion and the sometimes disproportionate use of force. Few of the Russian campaigns discussed in this chapter did not at certain stages involve large-​scale and often indiscriminate repression, coercion, and population displacement. However, most of them also frequently featured extensive political activity of the type traditionally associated with more ‘population-​centric’ approaches, including large disbursements of aid to the civilian population, in the form of food aid, tax relief, or land redistribution. Other ‘population-​centric’ measures included support for local pro-​regime militias, infrastructural investment (in roads and bridges, electrification, and health services), plus amnesties for former enemies. In the case of Afghanistan, the Soviet counter-​ insurgency effort even extended to attempting client state-​building in an expeditionary

57  Daniel Byman, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 58  Paul et al., ‘Moving Beyond Population-​Centric vs. Enemy-​Centric Counterinsurgency’, 1020.

62   Alex Marshall context, something usually associated with more recent Western expeditionary campaigns.59 The classification of such campaigns as ‘authoritarian’ therefore breaks down entirely if one examines tactics and operational practices in comparative perspective. The only classification that remains is that these Russian campaigns conform to counter-​insurgency praxis in general; that all counter-​insurgency remains governance by violence, with a ‘liberal’ or ‘global’ alternative notable by its absence.60 That liberal regimes engage in broadly the same practices as non-​liberal regimes when it comes to warfare, but require vast intellectual apparatuses such as modern counter-​insurgency theory and writings to deny that they do so, speaks more to the intellectual malaises afflicting liberalism itself than it does of the realities of war.61

Select Bibliography Byman, Daniel, ‘ “Death Solves All Problems”: The Authoritarian Model of Counterinsurgency’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, 39/​1 (2015), 62–​93. Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending. Afghanistan: 1979 to the Present (London: Hurst & Company, 2000). Giustozzi, Antonio, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan. 1978–​1992 (London: Hurst & Company, 2000). Giustozzi, Antonio, Artemy Kalinovsky, Paul Robinson, Bob Spencer and Alfia Sorokina, Missionaries of Modernity. Advisory Missions and the Struggle for Hegemony in Afghanistan and Beyond (London: Hurst & Company, 2016). Hazleton, Jacqueline L., ‘ “The “Hearts and Minds” Fallacy. Violence, Coercion and Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare’, International Security, 42/​1 (Summer 2017), 80–​113. Marshall, Alex, ‘Imperial Nostalgia, the Liberal Lie, and the Perils of Post-​ Modern Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 21/​2 (2010), 233–​258. Mayall, James, and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (eds.), The New Protectorates. International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States (London: Hurst & Company, 2011). Robinson, Paul, and Jay Dixon, Aiding Afghanistan. A History of Soviet Assistance to a Developing Country (London: Hurst & Company, 2013). Rubin, Barnett, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan. State Formation and Collapse in the International System, 2nd ed. (Yale: Yale University Press, 2002).

59 On the latter, see James Mayall and Ricardo Soares de Oliveira (eds.), The New Protectorates. International Tutelage and the Making of Liberal States. (London: Hurst & Company, 2011). 60 For a study which dismisses the ‘good governance’ theory of counter-​ insurgency success entirely, see: Jacqueline L. Hazleton, ‘The “Hearts and Minds” Fallacy. Violence, Coercion and Success in Counterinsurgency Warfare.’ International Security, 42/​1 (Summer 2017): 80–​113 61  On liberalism’s wider ‘false accounting’ practices, see: Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism. A Counter-​ History (London: Verso, 2011), or my article ‘Imperial Nostalgia, the Liberal Lie, and the Perils of Postmodern Counterinsurgency’.

Chapter 3

F ire as Rebel l i on a nd Repressi on Revolutionary Ireland in Perspective Gemma Clark Introduction: ‘Revolution’, c.1912–​1923, and Irish Resistance against the British Empire Epitomized perhaps most famously by the phoenix of classical mythology, fire is an enduring symbol of new beginnings. In an artistic rendering of Ireland’s early-​twentieth-​ century independence struggle, the subject of this chapter, a shock of orange flames provides an appropriate backdrop to the ‘birth’ of a new state.1 Fire rises around the rebels in Dublin’s General Post Office (GPO), the Sackville (now O’Connell) Street landmark seized by a republican militia, the Irish Volunteers, and James Connolly’s socialist Irish Citizen Army (ICA), in a week-​long rising fiercely quashed by Britain. From the GPO, on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, Patrick Pearse (and other signatories of the ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’, including Connolly, Thomas Clarke, and Joseph Plunkett—​all recognizable in Walter Paget’s painting) declared freedom for all of Ireland from centuries of colonial rule and a severing of political and economic ‘Union’ (enacted in 1801) between the islands. Paget captures the chaotic and smoke-​filled scene three days later; on Thursday 27 April, the British Army launched incendiary shells at the insurgent-​held building and ‘fire spread to and from the GPO and adjacent buildings, accelerating the timetable of the Rising as rebel headquarters threatened to collapse’.2 The revolutionary leadership withdrew into an adjacent building on Moore Street before Patrick Pearse, accompanied by Elizabeth O’Farrell, a nurse and member of the Volunteers’ female support organization, Cumann na mBan, left to negotiate a surrender 1  Walter Paget, The Birth of the Irish Republic, 1916–​ 1918, monochrome, watercolour on paper, 20 x 12 inches, National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks site. Colour reproductions are in wide circulation. 2  Justin Dolan Stover, ‘The Destruction of Dublin’, Century Ireland, https://​www.rte.ie/​cen​tury​irel​ and/​index.php/​artic​les/​the-​eas​ter-​ris​ing-​and-​dest​ruct​ion-​of-​Dub​lin.

64   Gemma Clark with Brigadier General William Lowe, on Saturday 29 April. Indeed, while ‘airbrushed’ from a famous photograph of the cessation of hostilities,3 it might be that one of the nurses in the painting is O’Farrell (perhaps the woman tending to a stretcher-​bound Connolly). The British illustrator’s work, likely commissioned as a commemorative poster,4 ‘speaks to the immediacy’ and potency of burning as an agent for change in modern Ireland;5 fire, along with bullets and bombs, ‘destroyed numerous commercial buildings, residences and public spaces’ in the ‘second city of the [British] empire’.6 The longer-​term ‘transformative influence’ of the Easter Rising, by contrast, was initially ignored. However, ‘[s]‌lowly . . . the sombre mood changed as the execution of key leaders articulated the rebellion as tragedy. Unlike the devastation of Louvain or Rheims, treated only as negative, the British destruction of Dublin quickly developed a counter-​ narrative—​that it signalled the resurrection of Ireland’.7 As new regimes rise, like the phoenix, from the ashes of the old, so did a bungled military coup become—​following the martyring of the rebels and mass internment of (suspected) supporters—​a milestone of the Irish Revolution. ‘Revolution’ describes the ten or more years, beginning c.1912, of mass mobilization and radical politics resulting in a transfer of state power, to part of the island, via the Partition of UK-​controlled Northern Ireland (comprising six of Ulster’s nine counties) from twenty-​ six counties established, by the Anglo-​Irish Treaty, as the Irish Free State, in 1922.8 Various forms of violence characterized this transformative decade and, while the historiography of the period was long mired in ideological squabbles related to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland, scholars are increasingly willing to interrogate the character and function of a range of harmful acts. David Fitzpatrick, Fearghal McGarry, Anne Dolan, Marie Coleman, et al. show that the intense urban warfare of 1916 was not typical of the Revolution, which incorporated military conflict (a guerrilla War of Independence, 1919–​1921, and Civil War, 1922–​1923, over the treaty with Britain), as well as occurrences of agrarian, labour, and sectarian violence that defy neat periodization. Broadly speaking, Irish insurgents—​ especially but not exclusively Volunteers fighting for an independent republic—​favoured assassination and intimidation of state targets and British loyalists (policemen, soldiers, and civil servants, as well as others ascribed the shadowy labels ‘spy’ and ‘informer’), coupled with low-​level harassment of wider civilian populations, often through non-​lethal violence

3 Catherine Cox, ‘Elizabeth O’Farrell: The Woman Airbrushed from History’, Independent.ie, 4 February 2016, https://​www.inde​pend​ent.ie/​irish-​news/​1916/​rank-​and-​file/​elizab​eth-​ofarr​ell-​the-​ woman-​air​brus​hed-​from-​hist​ory-​34413​628.html. 4  Robert Ballagh, ‘Paget’s Birth of the Irish Republic Re-​imagined’, History Ireland, 21/​5 (2013), https://​ www.his​tory​irel​and.com/​18th-​19th-​cent​ury-​hist​ory/​pag​ets-​birth-​irish-​repub​lic-​re-​imagi​ned/​. 5  Stover, ‘The Destruction of Dublin’. For another, more contemporary, artistic response to this theme, see the West Belfast mural, ‘We Bleed That the Nation May Live’, https://​ext​ramu​rala​ctiv​ity.com/​2016/​ 03/​28/​we-​bleed-​that-​the-​nat​ion-​may-​live/​. A phoenix rising from the flames of a burning GPO is one of many nationalist symbols in this striking street art; thank you to Constantin Torve for the introduction. 6  Justin Dolan Stover, ‘ “Shattered Glass and Toppling Masonry”: War Damage in Paris and Dublin’, in Pierre Joannon and Kevin Whelan (eds.), Paris—​Capital of Irish Culture: France, Ireland and the Republic, 1798–​1916 (Portland: Four Courts Press, 2017), 176, ProQuest Ebook Central. 7  Stover, ‘ “Shattered Glass and Toppling Masonry” ’, 178. 8  Niall Whelehan, ‘The Irish Revolution, 1912–​23’, in Alvin Jackson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​oxfor​dhb/​978019​ 9549​344.001.0001.

Fire as Rebellion and Repression    65 against property.9 Incumbent (British and, later, Irish Free State) forces countered threats via legal measures (including execution and mass incarceration) and vicious extra-​legal ‘reprisals’. While numbers of dead were relatively low by global standards,10 emerging scholarship on trauma11 and gender-​based violence12 adds to our understanding of the long-​ lasting impact of these years on thousands of ordinary men and women. By isolating for analysis a single aggressive act—​property destruction through fire—​this chapter thus speaks not only to global trends in violence studies (thematic histories of, for example, rape, execution, and ‘atrocity’),13 but also, in the British colonial context, engages with a mode of violence deployed by both insurgents and counter-​insurgents, during the (partially successful) revolution in Ireland’s governance. It is worth noting here that while Ireland’s relationship with the British Empire is complex and contested, and of course has changed over time, I view the subject of insurgency and counter-​insurgency (COIN) through a colonial history lens. Ireland’s ‘ostensible constitutional equality’ with Britain during the main period of study, 1801–​1922, ‘mask[ed] the reality of its colonial status’;14 the topics of policing and state violence, explored in this chapter, support this historiographical position. Further, placing Ireland in a comparative-​international framework, and addressing its sometimes ambiguous colonial relationships, are valuable approaches not only intellectually, but also reflect political and public interest in the Revolution during Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries.15 Despite the strong cultural association between fire and protest, as seen in Paget’s painting, I argue that incendiarism functioned as a prevalent and powerful mode of both insurgency, committed largely by the Irish Volunteers (or Irish Republican Army, IRA), and COIN, executed chiefly by British soldiers and civil authorities. The efficacy of fire-​setting as insurgency/​COIN lies not only in its physical capacity to destroy infrastructure and/​or resources that enemy forces might use. Burning or threatening to burn property also works well—​though arguably better for one side more than for the other—​as intimidation, to control behaviour and territory, as well as to communicate hostility in a more abstract sense. 9 Brian Hughes, Defying the IRA? Intimidation, Coercion, and Communities during the Irish Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016). 10 Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, The Dead of the Irish Revolution, online ed. (Yale Scholarship Online, 2021), https://​doi.org/​10.12987/​yale/​978030​0123​821.001.0001. 11 Síobhra Aiken, Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War (Newbridge, Co. Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2022). 12  Gemma Clark, ‘Violence Against Women in the Irish Civil War, 1922–​3: Gender-​based Harm in Global Perspective’, Irish Historical Studies, 44/​165 (2020), https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​ihs.2020.6; Susan Byrne, ‘ “Keeping Company with the Enemy”: Gender and Sexual Violence Against Women during the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, 1919–​1923’, Women’s History Review, 30/​1 (2021), https://​doi. org/​10.1080/​09612​025.2020.1719​649. 13 Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (London: Virago, 2007); Yang Su, Collective Killings in Rural China during the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Kieran Mitton, Rebels in a Rotten State: Understanding Atrocity in the Sierra Leone Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 14  Kevin Kenny, ‘Ireland and the British Empire: An Introduction’, in Kenny (ed.), Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1, https://​doi:10.1093/​acp​rof:oso/​978019​9251​ 841.003.0001. 15  Ronan McGreevy, ‘Michael D Higgins: Some Irish Were Willing Participants in British Empire’, Irish Times, 25 February 2021, https://​www.iri​shti​mes.com/​news/​irel​and/​irish-​news/​mich​ael-​d-​higg​ins-​ some-​irish-​were-​will​ing-​parti​cipa​nts-​in-​brit​ish-​emp​ire-​1.4495​353.

66   Gemma Clark These interconnected practical, psychological, political, etc. functions of incendiarism are key findings in a growing scholarly field that traces the evolution of arson from an individual malicious act to a prominent mode of collective violence and modern conflict.

Defining Arson: Meanings and Functions of Fire as Collective Violence Arson (as defined in law, in most jurisdictions) is the act of setting fire to property with the intent to cause damage. People destroy things that do not belong to them for various reasons; what different forms of violence against property have in common is their adverse impact (financial, practical, psychological, etc.) on the owner. Given the close link between property and privacy (one’s ownership or even tenancy of a house, say, makes it inaccessible to others), the destruction of personal possessions can be seen as an attack on an individual’s ‘sense of safety’ and self-​worth. Damaging public spaces or ‘cultural property’ (monuments, archaeological sites, artworks, etc., which often hold special value to a particular ethnic or national group) similarly signals danger for all members of that larger group. Destruction also disrupts the functioning of the state, which, by definition, is the means of rule that holds the monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within a certain territory—​and is expected to use that power to protect people and property.16 Indeed, the modern state, as theorized by Michel Foucault, draws its authority from its ability to control society not through dramatic displays of strength, but rather more subtle forms of coercion (incarceration, police brutality, etc.) and consent. As an intrinsically public spectacle (fire emits heat, light, and smoke, and ‘attracts widespread attention’),17 arson thus appears to be particularly well suited to non-​state forces that do not hold formal power.18 Agents of political violence and especially ‘terrorism’ seek instead to provoke the authorities into action by targeting ‘civilians’ and ‘state institutions’ to ‘spread insecurity and win sympathy’ for an ideological cause and—​perhaps—​to extract concessions from government.19 Burning works particularly effectively as intimidation (that might in turn shape behaviour and/​or policy) because of its potential not only to kill, but also to turn to dust all signs of life. Described by Donald Horowitz as an ‘emblem of complete hostility’, fire historically and symbolically has served to ‘cleanse’ religious, political, ethnic, racial, etc. enemies.20 16 Emmanuel Melissaris, ‘Criminal Regulation of Property Relations’, in Peter Cane and Joanne Conaghan (eds.), The New Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), https://​ doi.org/​10.1093/​acref/​978019​9290​543.001.0001. 17 Gemma Clark, ‘Arson in Modern Ireland: Fire and Protest before the Famine’, in Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild (eds.), Crime, Violence and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 215, https://​doi:10.2307/​j.ctt​1ps3​2jz. 18  Thanks to Katie Oliver for sharing ideas on fire and power. Thank you to all my students, at the University of Exeter, whose enthusiasm for learning about violence inspires my research. 19  Heinz-​Gerhard Haupt and Klaus Weinhauer, ‘Terrorism and the State’, in Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds.), Political Violence in Twentieth-​ Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 176, https://​doi-​org.uoe​libr​ary.idm.oclc.org/​10.1017/​CBO97​8051​1793​271. 20  Gemma Clark, ‘Dangerous but Rarely Deadly: Fire as Protest in Modern Ireland’, Forged by Fire blog, 14 September, 2020, https://​forge​dbyf​i res​ite.wordpr​ess.com/​2020/​09/​14/​danger​ous-​but-​rar​ely-​dea​ dly-​fire-​as-​prot​est-​in-​mod​ern-​irel​and/​.

Fire as Rebellion and Repression    67 This notion that fire sends a message is central to our understanding of arson’s evolution, in modern Britain and Ireland, from individual crime to collective action. From the late eighteenth century, arson became an increasingly frequent weapon of rural protest: peasants opposed the privatization of common land by burning newly enclosed forests and deer parks.21 Property burning also featured prominently during the ‘Swing’ and anti-​Poor Law Riots in England during the 1830s, and during peaks (1813–​1816, 1819–​1823, and 1831–​1834) of unrest in rural Ireland. The burning of homes and crops marked out farmers, magistrates, tithe collectors, and others who were seen—​by ‘secret societies’ operating at this time (including the ‘Rockites’, see below)—​to benefit from or perpetuate unfair (British colonial) economic, legal, and landholding structures. The emergence of Irish nationalism as a mass political movement, after the Great Famine, drew great strength from its association with campaigns for agricultural reform; Charles Parnell led a dual strategy of parliamentary pressure and land agitation via his presidency of both the Irish Parliamentary Party and Land League. The British state in Ireland certainly saw incendiarism as an attack on its authority, calling arson an ‘outrage’ (a category of crime denoting political intent) during the Irish Land War (1879–​1882) and into the twentieth century.22 Indeed, from sugar communities during Cuba’s wars of independence from the 1860s,23 to estate workers in 1950s Indonesia,24 anticolonial movements around the world have historically originated among workers well accustomed to fire as not only one of agriculture’s oldest tools,25 but also as a means of resistance against authority. James C. Scott calls arson a ‘weapon of the weak’:26 few tools and little expertise quickly create a big flare-​up, which also explains the usage of fire in slave revolts.27 With advances in technology, fire became more portable and incendiarism consequently even easier as social and political violence. John Walker’s friction matches, first sold in 1827, ‘gradually replaced the cumbersome tinderbox, and although expensive at the time, they eventually developed into the modern, mass-​produced safety match, which could be bought very cheaply’.28 Nonetheless, 21  Robert Kuhlken, ‘Settin’ the Woods on Fire: Rural Incendiarism as Protest’, Geographical Review, 89/​3 (1999): 345, https://​doi:10.2307/​216​155. 22 Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 151. 23  Gillian McGillivray, Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–​ 1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 24 Lisa Tilley, ‘  “A Strange Industrial Order”: Indonesia’s Racialized Plantation Ecologies and Anticolonial Estate Worker Rebellions’, History of the Present, 10/​1 (2020): https://​doi.org/​10.1215/​21599​ 785-​8221​425. 25  Johan Goudsblom, ‘ “Fire and Fuel in Human History’, in David Christian (ed.), The Cambridge World History Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 195, https://​doi-​org.uoe​libr​ary. idm.oclc.org/​10.1017/​CBO97​8113​9194​662. Thank you to Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless for ideas and examples that I incorporated in this section; thanks indeed to Martin and Gareth for their intellectual and moral support throughout the writing of the chapter, which was inspired further by meetings of the Leverhulme-​funded network that they coorganized, ‘Understanding Insurgencies’. 26  James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 27  Albert C. Smith, ‘ “Southern Violence” Reconsidered: Arson as Protest in Black-​Belt Georgia, 1865–​ 1910’, The Journal of Southern History 51/​4 (1985). 28  Christopher F. Lindsey, ‘Walker, John (1781–​1859), Chemist and Inventor of a Friction Match’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://​doi-​org.uoe​ libr​ary.idm.oclc.org/​10.1093/​ref:odnb/​28503.

68   Gemma Clark despite the understandable association of arson with pre-​modern patterns of unrest, as explored also in imperial Russia,29 the next section will argue for the particular and ongoing prominence—​even power—​of incendiarism as anti-​state (especially anticolonial) insurgency since the nineteenth century.

Fire as a Weapon of (Weak?) Insurgents: Nationalism and Anticolonialism during the Irish Revolution Irish revolutionaries, c.1916–​1923, traded on both the accessibility of fire and its long history as a tool of terror and icon of resistance. On 21 January 1919, the Volunteers (or IRA, as they were increasingly becoming known) fired the first shots in the War of Independence, killing two policemen in an ambush in Soloheadbeg, County Tipperary; on the same day, Dáil Éireann (a revolutionary parliament of Sinn Féin MPs abstaining from Westminster) sat for the first time. In this simultaneously military and political undoing of British rule in Ireland, IRA activity continued to focus, during 1919, on arms seizures and harming individual policemen.30 However, a successful attack on a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks at Carrigtwohill, County Cork, in January 1920, began a more ambitious campaign of ambushes, raids, and assassinations.31 Since the British established a county-​based police force in Ireland in 1836, renamed the RIC in 1867, this colonial infrastructure had long served administrative and surveillance functions in local communities. Thus not only did attacks on police personnel (and their families) eradicate the ‘spies in our midst’, in the words of Dáil president Éamon de Valera, but also the burning of their quarters served the wider ‘strategic and psychological’ purposes of weakening British authority in Ireland, with 700 of the 1,300 barracks operational in January 1919 closed by January 1921.32 After evacuating small outlying barracks, from spring 1920 the British ‘concentrated on the larger barracks where the garrisons had been strengthened and the buildings forfeited with steel shutters and barbed wire entanglements’.33 Hollyford, County Tipperary, was one such ‘tough nut to crack’; in May 1920, Dan Breen’s South Tipperary Brigade used ladders ‘spliced together with ropes’ and ‘sods of turf . . . soaked in paraffin oil’, as well as hand-​grenades and home-​made bombs, to reach—​then smash—​the roof, and set the barracks ablaze.34 Breen’s men—​like the Rockites one hundred years before them—​used basic technologies to harm a (militarily, 29  Cathy A. Frierson, All Russia is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). 30  On IRA ideology, tactics, etc., especially in its later manifestation as the Provisional IRA, see Rachel Kowalski in this Handbook. Thanks also to Rachel for comments on a chapter draft. 31  Michael Hopkinson, The Irish War of Independence (Montreal; Ithaca: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2002), 109. 32 David M. Leeson, ‘The Royal Irish Constabulary, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries’, in John Borgonovo et al. (eds.), The Atlas of the Irish Revolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017), 377. 33  Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom: Dan Breen’s Autobiography (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1981), 117, ProQuest Ebook Central. 34  Ibid., 121–​123.

Fire as Rebellion and Repression    69 politically) more powerful enemy. Named for the pseudonymous ‘Captain Rock’, this rural secret society placed smouldering lumps of coal or turf in the thatched roofs of the homes of those who resisted calls for lower rents and an end to evictions by Anglo-​Irish landlords.35 Fire is evidently quite easy to produce, which was important for a ‘woefully under-​ equipped’ insurgent force; ‘with over 70,000 Volunteers on its rolls, the IRA had far more men than guns’.36 IRA activities in England, during this period, show a clear preference for low-​technology methods of war (keeping precious weapons in Ireland).37 On the other hand, it could be difficult to apply fire to targets and contain its spread. Experienced fighters Séamus Robinson and Ernie O’Malley got ‘severely burnt’ in the attack on Hollyford, above.38 Other paramilitary memoirs record terrible burns and dramatic near losses of life in the firing of near-​impenetrable stone courthouses and barracks with iron-​barred doors and windows.39 On balance, though, arson served well the IRA’s war against the British authorities, as evidenced by not only the mass closure of police barracks (above), but also other practical and propaganda victories throughout the War of Independence and Civil War. In May 1921, two months before a truce with Britain and the beginning of negotiations for the treaty, the burning of Custom House, Dublin, which held all local government including tax records, destroyed the ‘last symbol of British civil administration in Ireland’. Images of another Dublin landmark engulfed in flames, just a few years since the fiery altercation at the GPO, also attracted ‘attention’ from around the world.40 Gaining international recognition of the Irish Republic (declared in 1916 and upheld by the Dáil) was indeed a crucial plank of Sinn Féin strategy; since the Irish Revolution ‘coincided with the birth of mass democracy in an age when the press was perceived to be a decisive factor shaping the political world’, international journalists, reporting on dramatic acts of violence on both sides, played an important role in expanding the recognition of the alternative republican state.41 Evidently the symbolic and strategic functions of arson were closely entwined during the Irish Revolution, as seen also in the IRA’s campaign in Northern Ireland. This new state was created in June 1921 following the 1920 (Government of Ireland) Act that partitioned six Protestant-​majority counties, largely loyal to Britain and remaining under UK control, from the twenty-​six southern counties that became the Irish Free State (a self-​governing dominion within the British Commonwealth). Burning Unionist-​ owned homes and businesses threatened the stability of James Craig’s nascent government, while fire was also emblematic of much longer ethnic and religious tensions in Ulster’s urban centres.42 From

35 

Clark, ‘Arson in Modern Ireland: Fire and Protest before the Famine’, 215–​216. Hanley, ‘ “Very Dangerous Places”: IRA Gunrunning and the Post-​war Underworld’, in Tommy Graham, Brian Hanley, and Fearghal McGarry (eds.), The Irish Revolution, 1919–​21: A Global History, a History Ireland supplement (Dublin: The Wordwell Group, 2019), 23. 37  Gemma Clark, Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 60, https://​doi-​org.uoe​libr​ary.idm.oclc.org/​10.1017/​CBO97​8113​9568​364. 38 Breen, My Fight, 124. 39  Michael O’Suilleabhain, Where Mountainy Men Have Sown (Tralee: Anvil Books, 1965), 148–​156. 40  Liz Tillis, ‘May 25th, 1921: How Burning the Custom House Made Ireland Ungovernable by the British’, Irish Times, 25 May 2021, https://​www.iri​shti​mes.com/​cult​ure/​herit​age/​may-​25th-​1921-​how-​burn​ ing-​the-​cus​tom-​house-​made-​irel​and-​ungov​erna​ble-​by-​the-​brit​ish-​1.4557​390. 41 Maurice Walsh, ‘Shredding the Paper Wall: Republican Propaganda and International Press Coverage’, in The Irish Revolution, 1919–​21: A Global History, 44–​45. 42 Clark, Everyday Violence, 57–​60. 36 Brian

70   Gemma Clark 1922, Irish republicanism appeared to shift ideological focus from war with Britain to an internal conflict between the Provisional Government of the new Free State and anti-​treaty republicans (who rejected the oath of allegiance to the crown, demanded of representatives in the Irish parliament, and held out for full separation). However, during these latter stages of the Revolution, the fighting nonetheless followed earlier patterns. According to Breen, a ‘policy’ of reprisal and counter-​reprisal . . . continued in ever-​growing intensity until the end of the [civil] war’: ‘Executions on one side were followed . . . by counter-​executions on the other side while mansions and houses of prominent supporters of the Irish Free State were given to the flames. Tullamaine Castle and other Tipperary mansions had been burned in the closing months of 1922. The campaign was continued in 1923, one of the first victims being Senator John Bagwell whose beautiful residence at Marlfield was completely destroyed on January 9th’.43 The IRA leader thus describes the intensification of the revolutionary routing of Anglo-​ Irish influence via the burning of their ancestral seats, that is, the ‘big houses’ at the historic heart of many rural Irish communities. That more big houses were burned during the Civil War (199) than during the War of Independence (76)44 adds weight to the interpretation of Ireland’s internal conflict as the end stage of a longer war of decolonization. Huge Palladian and Georgian mansions had historically asserted an ‘imperial domestication of a wild Irish countryside’;45 after centuries of haphazard colonization, since the twelfth-​century Norman invasion, Ireland came under more formal control of the English monarch and parliament from the fifteenth century. Violent land seizures and sectarian violence were followed eventually by peace and prosperity for a small Protestant Ascendancy class (a stability bought largely at the price of the civil rights of the majority population of native Catholics); art and architecture flourished in the eighteenth century, as seen especially in the grand country houses that sprang up on the sites of Old English castles. The burning of these homes thus brought the Plantations of Ireland to an end, practically and symbolically, as republican and rural agitators reclaimed land from the charred ruins of Anglo-​Irish privilege.46 Breen’s testimony also sheds some light on insurgent attitudes towards arson as a tactic; however brief, such perspectives are valuable given the difficulties accessing motivations for harmful and/​or illegal acts in general, and the particular challenges in studying a usually nocturnal crime that likely destroys physical evidence of its occurrence. Breen’s idiosyncratic phrasing—​houses submissively were ‘given to the flames’, rather than actively burned by republican agents—​might originate in the Irish language.47 Yet I also read the statement 43  Defence Forces Ireland, Military Archives: Online Collections, Bureau of Military History, Witness Statement 1763 (Daniel Breen), 137, https://​www.milit​arya​rchi​ves.ie/​coll​ecti​ons/​onl​ine-​coll​ecti​ons/​bur​ eau-​of-​milit​ary-​hist​ory-​1913-​1921/​reels/​bmh/​BMH.WS1​763.pdf. On the burning of Tullamaine: Gemma Clark, ‘23 October 1922: The Burning of Tullamaine Castle. Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War’, in Darragh Gannon and Fearghal McGarry (eds.), Ireland 1922: Independence, Partition and Civil War (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2022), 278–​281. 44  Terence Dooley, The Decline of the Big House in Ireland (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2001), 286–​287. 45  Vera Kreilkamp, ‘Fiction and Empire: The Irish Novel’, in Ireland and the British Empire, 175, https://​ doi.org/​10.1093/​acp​rof:oso/​978019​9251​841.003.0006. 46 Clark, Everyday Violence, 73–​ 89; Terence Dooley, Burning the Big House: The Story of the Irish Country House in a Time of War and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), https://​doi. org/​10.2307/​j.ctv​29sg​05q. 47  Thanks to Georgina Laragy.

Fire as Rebellion and Repression    71 as a shirking of responsibility for the dirty, if necessary, method of arson. On the infamous practice, by conquering French forces, of ‘smoking out’ resistance groups and civilians hiding in cave networks in Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s, William Gallois has similarly interpreted the ‘frequent resort to the passive voice as a means of imputing responsibility for the deaths of Algerians to inanimate forms such as smoke, flames or the environment more generally’.48 Breen seems to lament further the loss by the burning of Marlfield, of a ‘beautiful’ landmark,49 which contrasts with more pragmatic, often boastful, reminiscences of the ‘military contest’ against the British, as recorded in his popular memoir, My Fight for Irish Freedom. Published ‘hastily’, in 1924, to sate the appetite for ‘Kiplingesque adventure stories about the revolution’,50 timing and genre (the much later recording of the witness statement that incorporated the burning of Senator Bagwell’s home)51 might explain the different treatments of killing using firearms and burning property. Yet, recent research on republican gun culture,52 and the relative scarcity of sexual violence during the Civil War,53 also suggests a wider interest in military propriety among Irish republicans, that is, a concern with being seen as a proper army, using proper weapons (despite the problems the IRA faced acquiring arms).

Flames of Revenge: British Counter-​Insurgency in Ireland in Historical Perspective On the one hand, the prior section proves the potency of incendiarism as an assertion of communal identity and expression of grievance—​a public claim to power that undermines the authority of the state to control society through more subtle means. On the other, we detect—​including in insurgents’ remembrances of the Irish Revolution—​an equation of fire-​setting with a loss of control and/​or lack of strategy. This characterization (or, perhaps, mischaracterization) of arson as military failure also persisted via contemporary responses to fire-​setting by crown forces in Ireland, as well as some subsequent historiography, which is surprising given the efficacy of arson as state violence in other contexts.

48 William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 98, https://​doi.org/​10.1057/​978113​7313​706. 49  BMH, WS 1763 (Breen), 137. 50 Frances Flanagan, Remembering the Revolution: Dissent, Culture, and Nationalism in the Irish Free State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 20–​21, https://​doi:10.1093/​acp​rof:oso/​978019​8739​ 159.001.0001. 51  The Irish Free State became a republic (Éire) in 1937 and left the Commonwealth altogether in 1949. In this context of further constitutional change in Ireland, the Defence Forces’ Bureau of Military History collected Witness Statements from those involved (on the nationalist side—​chiefly the IRA and Cumann na mBan) in the earlier independence struggle, c.1916–​1923. The BMH archives were open to the public in 2003 and are now available online. 52  Anne Dolan, ‘Killing in “the Good Old Irish Fashion”? Irish Revolutionary Violence in Context’, IHS 44/​165 (2020), https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​ihs.2020.2. 53  Clark, ‘Violence against Women’, 84–​85.

72   Gemma Clark For millennia, warring armies have used fire ‘to weaken the enemy, to pressure him to submit, and in some cases to draw him into battle’.54 Especially relevant to this chapter are its connected functions as colonization and COIN, which, of course, can take place during a period of mass violence codified as ‘war’. Indeed, while ‘language changed over time’ (from ‘small wars’ of the 1890s via ‘imperial policing’ to post-​Second World War ‘counter-​ insurgency’), Kim Wagner argues that ‘the abiding belief in both the efficacy and necessity of exemplary force against anti-​colonial movements and rebellions persisted’ through the twentieth century.55 In this context—​the repression of threats to empire via punitive violence—​arson can be used both selectively (to prevent the enemy using a particular building for shelter/​barracks, for example, or to destroy a weapon store) and indiscriminately (when ‘people are collectively targeted, especially during reprisals where people are found guilty by association’, which happened often during the Dutch-​Indonesian War of 1945–​1949, for example, when ‘an entire kampong [native village] was burned down because a Dutch patrol was attacked in its vicinity’). Mischa Frenks rightly points out the difficulty, ‘in [the] case of arson’, in drawing a meaningful distinction between selective and indiscriminate violence.56 I argue, further, that while Ireland’s damp climate historically allowed for targeted attacks against, for example, the hay stack of a British loyalist or landlord,57 the intrinsic value of incendiarism as intimidation (and, in turn, coercive violence) is that fire has the potential to spread quickly out of control. ‘Selective’ versus ‘indiscriminate’ (or ‘scorched earth’) are not opposing categories of burning, then, but applying Stathis Kalyvas’s theories on the ‘logic’ of violence to arson is nonetheless a useful way to analyse motivations for this prevalent, but surprisingly under-​researched, instrument of colonial violence.58 Oliver Cromwell’s troops destroyed crops, livestock, and buildings during his short but brutal conquest of Ireland, 1649–​c.1652. The burning to death of Catholic personnel inside a church in Drogheda was also seen as revenge for the massacre of Protestant settlers during the 1641 rebellion. Indeed, given its connotations as religious/​spiritual purification,59 fire has a long association with retribution and punishment of enemies: as an inefficient and especially cruel means of murder, death by fire (or the burning of a corpse after killing by other means) communicates complete hostility towards and social rejection of the target.60 The 1798 insurrection is another important example of the use of fire as state violence and 54 

Clifford Rogers, ‘Fire’, in Rogers (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), https://​ doi.org/​ 10.1093/​ acref/​ 978019​ 5334​ 036.001.0001. 55  Kim A. Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal 85 (Spring 2018), 230, https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​hwj/​dbx​053. 56 Mischa Frenks, ‘Arson in the Archipelago: Burning and Destruction by Dutch Armed Forces during the Dutch-​Indonesian War 1945–​1949’, Master’s thesis (Leiden University, 2019), 15, https://​hdl. han​dle.net/​1887/​82569. 57  See section 2. 58  Frenks, ‘Arson in the Archipelago’, 7–​8. 59  Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-​Century France’, Past & Present, 59 (1973), 82, https://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​650​379. See section 2 on ‘cleansing’ fire. 60  Clark, ‘Dangerous but Rarely Deadly’. See also, for example: the Lari massacre during the Mau Mau uprising: David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Phoenix, 2006), location 150/​51–​165/​67 of 471, Kortext; and death by fire in South Africa: Joanna Ball, ‘The Ritual of the Necklace’, research report (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 1994), https://​www.csvr.org.za/​the-​rit​ual-​of-​the-​neckl​ace/​.

Fire as Rebellion and Repression    73 counter-​revolution (again, with ethnic and denominational hatreds mixed in). In the 1790s, inspired by the French and American Revolution, a patriotic, middle-​class, and largely Protestant society for parliamentary reform (the United Irishmen) expanded and fused with the Defenders, a largely Catholic agrarian society with wider social and economic revolutionary concerns. Together these Protestant and Catholic insurgents mounted an unsuccessful but large-​scale and violent rebellion against English control and in pursuit of an ‘Irish Republic’. Republicans clashed with military forces comprising full-​time militia and part-​ time yeomanry drawn from the local ‘loyal’ (chiefly Protestant) population. Significantly, the ‘white terror was not directed solely against the persons and property of defeated rebels. Instead, Catholic society as a whole was targeted’ (as illustrated clearly by the burning of Catholic chapels).61 The rebels perpetrated sectarian atrocities too, including the burning to death of Protestant civilians in a locked barn in Scullabogue. Yet, it is notable that even a loyalist captured by the French-​aided rebels, Church of Ireland Bishop of Killala Joseph Stock, regarded British pillaging as the worst of the conflict: Early on Saturday morning, the loyalists were desired by the rebels to come up with them to the hill . . . in order to be eye witnesses of the havoc a party of the king’s army was making, as it advanced towards us from Sligo. A train of fire too clearly distinguished their line of march, flaming up from the houses of unfortunate peasants. ‘They are only a few cabins,’ remarked the bishop; and he had scarcely uttered the words when he felt the imprudence of them. ‘A poor man’s cabin,’ answered one of the rebels, ‘is to him as valuable as a palace’.62

The relationship between housing (wooden ‘cabins’, in the early-​modern Irish case) and arson is important to our wider understanding of incendiary COIN and particularly the damage it wreaks against ‘non-​western’ (and/​or ‘pre-​industrial’) societies that are sustained by the natural ‘resources’ most susceptible to fire.63 While colonizers often impose themselves physically through construction in stone and brick (see previously on Irish big houses), on the other hand destruction—​especially of native vegetation and plant-​based structures—​is a key form of the ‘extreme’ violence closely associated with this form of rule.64 Wholesale environmental destruction was used, for example: to weaken resistance against Dutch forces during the Aceh War, 1873–​1904; in the ‘pacification’ of French Morocco, 1912–​ 1925; and, similarly, to extend British territorial control of Africa as seen, for example, during the First Chimurenga (an uprising in Southern Rhodesia, 1896–​1897) and, most prominently, the South African War, 1899–​1902. What began there with selective burning, of the farms 61 James Patterson, ‘White Terror: Counter-​ Revolutionary Violence in South Leinster, 1798–​1801’, Eighteenth-​Century Ireland /​Iris an Dá Chultúr 15 (2000), 45, http://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​30071​441. 62 Joseph Stock and Grattan Freyer, Bishop Stock’s ‘Narrative’ of the year of the French, 1798 (Ballina: Irish Humanities Centre, 1982), 87. Thank you to Liam Alex Heffron for help with this section; thanks also to all conveners/​participants of seminars where I presented aspects of this research. 63 Emmanuel Kreike, ‘Genocide in the Kampongs? Dutch Nineteenth Century Colonial Warfare in Aceh, Sumatra’, Journal of Genocide Research 14/​3–​4 (2012), 298, http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1080/​14623​ 528.2012.719​367. 64  Thanks to Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bart Luttikhuis for inviting me to participate in their NIAS theme group conference, ‘Comparing the Wars of Decolonization’ (Amsterdam, June 2019), which developed my understanding of ‘extreme’ violence; see also section 5. The wider research programme (https://​www.ind45-​50.org/​en) recently published its findings: Zaalberg and Luttikhuis (eds.), Empire’s Violent End: Comparing Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization, 1945–​1962 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2022), http://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​10.7591/​j.ctv​310v​kx1.

74   Gemma Clark of Boer commandos, developed as a blanket policy to cut off guerrillas’ support and food supply. ‘Farm-​burning turned vast stretches of territory into blackened, deserted wastelands incapable of supporting life’, the efficacy of the policy being ‘amplified’ by the confinement of the civilian population in concentration camps.65 Indeed, while heavy-​handed COIN at first only galvanized Boer guerrillas in their independence struggle, their relatively small population and geographical area of operation meant that indiscriminate violence succeeded, from the British perspective, in quelling the resistance and taking control of the Orange Free State and Transvaal. Fearing ‘international condemnation’ and trial by public opinion much closer to home, the British Government could not roll out similar measures ‘to militarily crush the IRA’.66 However, there are some strong parallels between usages of arson as COIN in Ireland and in zones of more extreme colonial violence, as seen in the setting of fires not to annihilate completely resources (or even lives), but rather terrorize and seek revenge against civilian populations. The retributive character of arson, mentioned already, has been seen around the globe, during military spectacles (firebombing in the Second World War; uses of incendiary gel (napalm) in Malaya, Indochina, Algeria, and Vietnam) and in more routine instances of colonial administration. A British handbook (Lord Lugard’s ‘Instructions’, published in 1906 and 1919) recommended ‘hut burning’ as punishment of defiant local ‘chiefs’ and was used ‘as late as [the] 1940s and 1950s’ in British Cameroon, for example.67 In the vicious cycle of attack and reprisal that characterized Ireland’s anticolonial struggle, British state forces also and often avenged the loss of colleagues (at the hands of the IRA) via punishment attacks including murder and arson. Crucial to this story are the temporary recruits added to the ranks of an increasingly demoralized RIC. Avowing famously that ‘you do not declare war against rebels’, UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George favoured the criminalization of political violence in Ireland, referring publicly at least to the IRA as ‘murder gangs’ rather than the armed wing of a political movement with an electoral mandate.68 Between January and November 1920, 9,500 British-​born ex-​soldiers and sailors were sworn in as constables to reinforce county RIC stations (a uniform shortage meant that recruits were issued with khaki military trousers and dark green police tunics, earning them the nickname ‘Black and Tans’). These inexperienced policemen earned a terrible reputation for brutality, which further distanced the population from the whole (domesticated) colonial police force. While the ‘sobriquet Black and Tans was often applied to the Auxiliaries’ as well, the Auxiliary Division RIC (ADRIC) 65  Alexander B. Downes, ‘Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves: Investigating the Effectiveness of Indiscriminate Violence as a Counterinsurgency Strategy’, Civil Wars 9/​4 (2007), 427, https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​136982​4070​1699​631. 66  Thomas Earls Fitzgerald, Combatants and Civilians in Revolutionary Ireland 1918–​1923 (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge Press, 2021), 56, https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978042​9319​341. 67  Bridget A. Teboh, ‘Science, Technology and the African Woman During (British) Colonization, 1916–​1960: The Case of Bamenda Province’, in Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell (eds.), Landscape, Environment and Technology in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (New York: Routledge, 2012), 105, https://​doi.org/​10.4324/​978020​3806​760. On ‘farm burning’ in even earlier (COIN) contexts, see Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare’, 222. 68 T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, ‘The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics’, in Ashplant et al. (eds.), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2013), 56, VLEBooks.

Fire as Rebellion and Repression    75 was a smaller, ‘highly mobile’ force of 1,900 former British Army officers assembled between July 1920 and November 1921.69 Typically more disciplined, the ADRIC were also nonetheless responsible for extreme violence against civilians, as seen especially in the ‘sack’ of the north County Dublin town of Balbriggan, September 1920, and the burning of Cork city, December 1920. Head Constable Peter Burke had been training Black and Tans at the RIC depot in Phoenix Park, Dublin. On 20 September 1920, he was ‘travelling in plain clothes’, with his brother Sergeant William Patrick Burke, and colleagues, from Dublin to Gormanstown, a military camp in use by the RIC, when they stopped for a drink in Balbriggan. An altercation in the pub with the local IRA led to the fatal shooting of the Burke brothers. On hearing the news, a party of Black and Tans, based in Gormanstown and supported by a detachment of Auxiliaries visiting the camp, ‘immediately’ avenged the deaths. Two local men associated with the republican movement, Lawless and Gibbons, were arrested, questioned, and killed, apparently for refusing to give up information on the Burkes’ killings (their bodies were ‘found with bayonet wounds’ the next day, near the police barracks). By the morning of 21 September 1920, twenty-​five houses, four public houses, two groceries, a news agency, and hosiery factory had been burned and destroyed by British policemen. ‘Some of the victims were . . . prominent republicans or implicated in outrages’, but ‘most of the targets had no confirmed association with the IRA or republican movement’.70 British COIN forces, in Balbriggan and elsewhere, thus suppressed the IRA not by neutralizing known perpetrators of violence against their colleagues, but rather by deploying ‘copious counter-​violence’ against whole populations. An ambush at Dillon’s Cross, in Cork’s northern suburbs, on 11 December 1920, in which the IRA killed one Auxiliary and wounded eleven others, ‘sparked off ’ the torching of six civilian homes near to the ambush site, ‘as an official reprisal for “failure to give warning of an ambush against the police” ’.71 Crown forces ‘then proceeded to burn the major buildings on the east and south side’ of the city’s main street, St Patrick’s, as well as business premises on adjoining streets, and public buildings across the river (Carnegie Free Library, on Anglesea Street, and the nearby City Hall). ‘Fifty-​ seven premises were destroyed by fire, twenty were badly damaged and twelve were wrecked and looted. Five acres of property in total were destroyed’,72 causing £2.5 million of damage (almost £143 million in today’s terms);73 over 2,000 shop assistants and others lost their jobs and Cork’s reconstruction was ‘slow and costly’.74 Destruction on this scale cannot be seen simply as a byproduct of the armed conflict between the IRA and Britain; rather, the ADRIC targeted civilians en masse as potential supporters of insurgency. ‘The people’, said the RIC County Inspector for Cork, in December 1920, might not have been for the ‘Sinn Féin 69 Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘Auxiliaries’, in The Oxford Companion to Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), https://​www-​oxfo​rdre​fere​nce-​com.uoe​libr​ary.idm.oclc.org/​view/​10.1093/​acref/​ 978019​9234​837.001.0001/​acref-​978019​9234​837-​e-​85. 70  Ross O’Mahony, ‘The Sack of Balbriggan and Tit-​for-​Tat Terror’, in David Fitzpatrick (ed.), Terror in Ireland 1916–​1923 (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2012), 100–​104, ProQuest Ebook Central. 71  Pat Poland, ‘The Burning of Cork, December 1920: The Fire Service Response’, History Ireland 23/​6 (2015), https://​www.his​tory​irel​and.com/​revolu​tion​ary-​per​iod-​1912-​23/​the-​burn​ing-​of-​cork-​decem​ber-​ 1920-​the-​fire-​serv​ice-​respo​nse/​. 72  Leeson, ‘The Burning of Cork’, in Borgonovo et al. (eds.), Atlas of the Irish Revolution, 382. 73  Poland, ‘The Burning of Cork, December 1920: The Fire Service Response’. 74  Leeson, ‘The Burning of Cork’, 382.

76   Gemma Clark organisation’, but they were not against them, which was just as bad, in official eyes; ‘they would be digging their own graves in coming forward to assist the [British] police, hence it is that many of the grave crimes that are committed go unpunished’.75 Arguably it was the civilians themselves who were punished—​with intimidation, property destruction—​for IRA ‘crimes’ (assassinations and ambushes). Indeed, fire served well this blanket use of COIN because of its power—​known well also to insurgents (as discussed earlier in the chapter)—​to intimidate and control behaviour. Yet, rather than defend the burning of Cork as necessary counteraction to a guerrilla campaign that had already inflicted severe blows against British morale and personnel, as seen in barrack closures and the death/​ resignation of many policemen,76 the government shirked their responsibility for the fires set in Cork, initially blaming instead the ‘Anti-​Sinn Féin Society’.77 In police reports, the name of this alleged loyalist conspiracy is attached specifically—​and rather conveniently—​ to the burning of republican meeting places (such as ‘premises known as the ‘Thomas Ashe Sinn Féin Hall’’) and other buildings with ‘connections with’ Sinn Féin. For example, the fire that destroyed two drapers and a shoe shop in Cork, on 28 November 1920, that is, before the major conflagrations of December, ‘had its origin in the house of Mr Ryan who is an ardent Sinn Féiner’.78 The County Inspector provides no evidence of this republican ardour, nor motive for the burning. Indeed, it is now accepted that no such counter-​revolutionary group existed: ‘threatening murder and arson’ notices ‘signed by the Anti-​Sinn Féin Society’, and forcibly inserted in local nationalist newspapers, as reported by the Manchester Guardian, were in fact propaganda, fabricated by the RIC as cover for their attacks on civilians.79 Tacit approval (and outright denial) of reprisals gave way to official policy, by December 1920, ‘when the British Army’s military governors began imposing them on districts that were under martial law’.80 The report of the ‘Court of Enquiry, convened 16–​21 December 1920, by Major-​General Sir E. P. Strickland, Commander of the British Sixth Division at Cork, privately admitted the responsibility of K Company [Auxiliaries] and several members of the RIC for some of the destruction’ in the city, but the ‘Strickland Report’ was never officially published (although in 1922 the British Government took financial responsibility for the burning of Cork via a £3 million compensation payment to the Free State).81 Yet, in defending publicly, and even in private reports, the policy of reprisal, which was 75 

The National Archives (TNA), CO 904/​113 (Records of the Colonial Office, Police Reports, 1914–​ 1921: Inspector General’s and County Inspectors’ Monthly Confidential Reports, October–​December 1920), 835, Gale Primary Sources, Archives Unbound, Document Number GALE SC5101796748. 76  Four hundred and ninety-​three were killed in the discharge of duty, 1919–​1922: Richard Abbott, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919–​1922 (Cork: Mercier Press, 2000). 77 Our Parliamentary Correspondent, ‘Government Repudiate Responsibility for Cork Fires’, The Manchester Guardian, Dec 14, 1920, 10, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The Guardian and The Observer. 78  TNA, CO 904/​113, 841–​42. Ashe was a 1916 rebel leader who died at the hands of British prison authorities in 1917, while on hunger strike, becoming another republican ‘martyr’ whose death was used by Sinn Féin for propaganda purposes. 79  John Borgonovo, Spies, Informers and the ‘Anti-​Sinn Féin Society’: The Intelligence War in Cork City, 1920–​1921 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006). 80  Leeson, ‘Reprisals’, in Borgonovo et al. (eds.), Atlas of the Irish Revolution, 384. 81 Martin Frederick Seedorf, ‘The Lloyd George Government and the Strickland Report on the Burning of Cork, 1920’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 4/​2 (1972), 60, https://​ www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​4048​122.

Fire as Rebellion and Repression    77 abandoned on 3 June 1921, the government continued to downplay the significance of fire as COIN, holding the line that ‘any acts of arson were entirely reactive’ and blaming the IRA for ‘starting the trouble’. There was ‘nothing of a calculated nature’ about reprisals, said British army veteran General Sir Henry Lawson.82 In a similar vein, Chief Secretary for Ireland, Hamar Greenwood, earlier explained the burning of Tubbercurry and Anchonry creameries, in County Sligo, on 1 October 1920, by some members of the police, as ‘an outburst of passion evoked by the brutal murder’, on the previous day, of a RIC District Inspector.83 Perhaps it is to be expected that the British pinned the wanton destruction of civilian property on a reckless few. These men who were recruited to keep order, but instead escalated further conflict, might also be seen as part of a wider British, even European, culture of paramilitarism—​veterans who continued a life of violence, on behalf of both rebel and counter-​revolutionary causes, on their return from the First World War. There is an obvious difference of scale: men, women, and children in defeated Central Europe suffered much more viciously at the hands of counter-​revolutionary formations, such as the Freikorps, than did British and Irish publics after the war.84 The involvement of ‘brutalised’ ex-​servicemen in violence in UK cities was ‘exaggerated’ by the press;85 the post-​war moral climate, notably a desire to distance British militarism from recent German atrocities,86 also placed limits on COIN in Ireland. Britain has not been the only liberal democracy to fail to enforce its will against a militarily weaker opponent because of unease about the material and moral costs of war among key sectors of civil society (including the media and middle classes).87 State arson, in Balbriggan, Cork, Tralee, Bandon, and elsewhere,88 was also largely counter-​ productive, British abuses strengthening rather than weakening Irish nationalist resolve as Sinn Féin (with both electoral backing from the people and armed support from the IRA) brokered the truce, July 1921, that led to an independence settlement (the Dáil ratified the treaty in January 1922). Yet, what is more surprising is that the motif of ‘Drunken Tans’,89 operating in a policy vacuum rather than as agents of a government strategy of intimidation, has also persisted in the historiography. ‘Historians have generally portrayed mass reprisals as blind, idiotic, indiscriminate’;90 Thomas Earls Fitzgerald accuses even revisionist scholars of overemphasizing the context (‘frustration’, ‘hardships’) in which British paramilitaries committed reprisals.91 82 

Earls Fitzgerald, Combatants and Civilians, 130–​132. Party (Great Britain), Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland (London: Caledonian Press Ltd, 1921), 13, https://​arch​ive.org/​deta​ils/​rep​orto​flab​ourc​o00l​abou​oft. 84 Clark, Everyday Violence, 179, 192. 85  Jon Lawrence, ‘Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post-​ First World War Britain’, The Journal of Modern History 75/​3 (2003), https://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​10.1086/​ 380​238. 86  Edward Madigan, ‘ “An Irish Louvain”: Memories of 1914 and the moral climate in Britain during the Irish War of Independence’, IHS 44/​165 (2020), https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​ihs.2020.7. 87  Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), https://​doi-​org.uoe​libr​ary.idm.oclc.org/​10.1017/​CBO97​8051​1808​227. 88  Report of the Labour Commission, 13–​23. 89  Louise Ryan, ‘ “Drunken Tans”: Representations of Sex and Violence in the Anglo-​Irish War (1919–​ 21)’, Feminist Review 66 (2000), http://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​1395​833. 90 David M. Leeson, The Black and Tans: British Police and Auxiliaries in the Irish War of Independence, 1920–​1921 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 172, https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​ acp​rof:oso/​978019​9598​991.001.0001. 91  Earls Fitzgerald, Combatants and Civilians, 133. 83  Labour

78   Gemma Clark The problem is that mitigation of individual actions obscures the overarching logic of fire as COIN. Attacks by crown forces against (including the burning of) creameries, April 1920 to January 1921, were not a ‘centrally organised campaign of reprisal per se’, but rather fuelled by revenge and justified, in the eyes of the police, by their alleged use as republican meeting places and weapons stores. However, these apparently distinct burnings functioned collectively as techniques of punishment and control. The post-​famine shift in Irish agriculture from tillage to pasture had placed these units for processing milk and distributing dairy products at the heart of many local economies. Arson thus undermined the IRA support base (by penalizing farmers, whose sons were likely to join republican movements) and economically damaged whole rural communities, as demonstrated further by the fact that cooperatives were more likely to be targeted than individually owned businesses.92

Conclusions on Fire and/​as Power The British are . . . a people well practised down the centuries in the use of fire as an instrument of terror. It has been said that they reached the peak of perfection in this art in Ireland after the Rising of 1798, but I do not think this is correct. Surely they excelled in the war for the conquest of South Africa, when they failed to defeat in the field a handful of Boer riflemen, but succeeded in forcing their surrender by the mass burnings of Boer homesteads and the imprisonment, under appalling conditions, of Boer women and children, many thousands of whom died.93

So self-​declared IRA ‘guerrilla’ Tom Barry mocks the mighty British Empire for recourse to primitive technologies (and cruelty to civilians) in the face of a mere ‘handful’ of insurgents in South Africa. And thus, this self-​congratulatory and sometimes fantastical memoir of Irish rebellion, first published in 1949, inadvertently captures British embarrassment and ambivalence—​discussed in the previous section—​towards arson as a COIN tactic. (Though it might also be that Barry, like Breen, was concerned with appearances and military propriety on behalf of the IRA; see earlier in the chapter.) In suppressing resistance against its rule, the British state made—​and continues to impose, in Northern Ireland—​a range of ethical, practical, strategic, etc. decisions, which are the subject of a vast literature that also incorporates French, Dutch, and other imperialisms. By focusing on the use of fire by state forces, then, this chapter not only addresses wider questions of selective vs. indiscriminate violence against civilians, for example, but also adds to our understanding of a single category of violence (arson) that is universally familiar, and fascinating, but rather under-​theorized. It is difficult to ‘establish the gravity’ of this form of violence compared to others.94 By definition, arson is violence against property; yet, whether or not incendiaries also aim to hurt people, fire often harms excessively its targets and bystanders, wrecking livelihoods and forcing displacement. It is useful to think about if/​why we see arson as less grave than 92 

Proinnsias Breathnach, ‘Creamery Attacks’, in Borgonovo et al. (eds.), Atlas of the Irish Revolution, 555–​557. 93  Tom Barry, Guerilla Days in Ireland (Cork: Mercier Press, 2013), 68, VLEBooks. 94  Frenks, ‘Arson in the Archipelago’, 13.

Fire as Rebellion and Repression    79 killing, say, but more serious than looting, because these questions reveal the political/​military functions and social/​cultural meanings of malicious fire setting in particular contexts. Failing to get Lloyd George to agree to an independent inquiry into abuses by crown forces in Ireland, the Parliamentary Labour Party commissioned its own report, published in 1921, which named murder, mistreatment of children, ‘incendiarism’, and theft as ‘crimes and offences against the moral law, even when they are committed under the auspices of the British Empire and in the name of law and order’.95 Rémy Limpach’s major study of the Dutch-​Indonesian War, appropriately titled in English The Burning Kampongs of General Spoor, similarly classifies arson—​alongside torture and rape—​as extreme violence, by which (though he avoids the term ‘war crime’) he means acts that are considered unacceptable according to the laws of war. ‘When it comes to the survival of a soldier or unit . . . there is . . . no urgent and immediate necessity to . . . burn down villages’.96 Limpach brings to light the systematic and structural nature of Dutch colonial violence by meticulously rebutting the old, official narrative that abuses of power were perpetrated by standalone individuals, which was also the line taken by Britain in Revolutionary Ireland. But his taxonomy of violence has also been challenged; citing Limpach, apologists for empire and/​or those charged with seeking justice for its victims might remove from consideration instances of colonial violence ‘on the grounds of (perceived) military necessity’. As seen in the Irish case study, atrocities do in fact serve a military purpose—​to intimidate civilians—​ even if burnings and killings are politically ‘counterproductive’.97 Indeed, this chapter has explored the special capacity of fire to terrorize, on which both insurgents and incumbents have drawn, regardless of having access to more sophisticated weaponry. Fire is not simply a ‘weapon of the weak’ nor an impulse of a ‘drunken Tan’, in other words. Nonetheless, in modern conflict, arson is seen as more acceptable as a tool of rebellion, rather than repression; the perceptions of perpetrators, victims, and wider audiences are relevant here because performance is central to this highly visual and visceral form of violence. By burning private property and/​or natural or cultural resources, incumbents are seen to have pushed beyond the boundary of accepted illegality (in and outside war) and shown weakness by failing to enforce the will of the state through more subtle means. For insurgents, by contrast, the striking of a match expresses a new strength, a shift in the power balance between state and society, and potential to enact change practically and opportunistically, but also, crucially, symbolically. In the Irish case, fire transcended its immediate purpose (destruction of enemy-​held buildings and disruption of infrastructure) to realize the undoing of Plantation and the purging of British loyalists.

95 

Report of the Labour Commission to Ireland, 52–​53. ‘Debate on De brandende kampongs van Generaal Spoor by Rémy Limpach, with Bart Luttikhuis, Abdul Wahid, Robert Cribb, Harry Poeze’, in Bijdragen tot de taal-​, land-​en volkenkunde /​Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia 173/​4 (2017), 575, https://​doi.org/​10.1163/​22134​379-​ 17304​016. 97  Ibid., 567. 96 

80   Gemma Clark

Select Bibliography Borgonovo, John, John Crowley, Donal Ó Drisceoil, and Mike Murphy (eds.), The Atlas of the Irish Revolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 2017). Clark, Gemma, ‘Dangerous but Rarely Deadly: Fire as Protest in Modern Ireland’, Forged by Fire blog (14 September 2020), https://​forge​dbyf​i res​ite.wordpr​ess.com/​2020/​09/​14/​danger​ ous-​but-​rar​ely-​dea​dly-​fire-​as-​prot​est-​in-​mod​ern-​irel​and/​. Clark, Gemma, Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), https://​doi-​org.uoe​libr​ary.idm.oclc.org/​10.1017/​CBO97​8113​9568​364. Frierson, Cathy A., All Russia is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002). Hinds-​Aldrich, Matt, ‘The Seductions of Arson: Ritualized Political Violence and the Revelry of Arson’, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 16/​1 (2009), 103–​135. Miller, Stephen M., ‘Duty or Crime? Defining Acceptable Behavior in the British Army in South Africa, 1899–​1902’, Journal of British Studies 49 (2010), 311–​331, https://​www.jstor.org/​ sta​ble/​23265​204. Neer, Robert M., Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), https://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​j.ctt2jb​vv3. Pyne, Stephen J., World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). Townshend, Charles, ‘In Aid of the Civil Power: Britain, Ireland and Palestine 1916–​48’, in Daniel Marston and Carter Malkasian (eds.), Counterinsurgency in Modern Warfare (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2008), 19–​36. .

Chapter 4

Insurgencies i n E a rly P ost -​C ol onial I nd one sia Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid In the 1950s, after independence from the Netherlands in December 1949, Indonesia experienced a series of insurgencies. Some rebels hoped to create a separate state; some aimed at changing government policies, while others were inexplicit about their objectives. These rebellions have been studied as struggles for national power or demands for regional autonomy. We instead will turn our eyes on an aspect ignored for early 1950s Indonesia: how insurgencies and crime affected the state’s monopoly of violence during the period of parliamentary democracy (1950–​1957). Problems of effective governance and exercising the monopoly of violence after periods of war and decolonization were by no means typically Indonesian phenomena. In the 1950s and 1960s, many newly established nation-​states in Asia and Africa faced similar problems. We will explore how, in response to rebellion and widespread criminal activity, the outsourcing of security by the state to non-​state actors developed during this period of Indonesian state-​building. We will start with a bird’s eye view of Indonesia during the period of parliamentary democracy. This will serve as a general context for three selected cases of insurgency that follow: the Battalion 426 mutiny in Central Java (December 1951–​May 1952), the politico-​ criminal gangs in the MMC region of Central Java (1950–​1955), and the Bulumario incident in Central Sumatra (1956). These obscured cases are of interest, firstly because they demonstrate that the transition from revolution to an independent state was a less rigid turning point than is generally assumed. From a political and moral point of view, Indonesian independence was obviously a major achievement; the transfer of sovereignty, however, as we will see throughout this chapter, did not mark the end of inter-​communal violence.1 Secondly, and important for our main argument, is that our three cases reveal important insights about the continuities of violence. During the Indonesian revolution, guerrilla 1  On the long-​term dynamics of violence in Indonesia, see Freek Colombijn and J. Thomas Lindblad (eds.), Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002).

82    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid groups allied loosely with the infant Indonesian Republican army in fighting the Dutch. After independence this collaboration was revived and transformed, as our cases will illustrate, into the state selectively delegating security functions to private citizens. Thirdly, the three cases demonstrate that all the ‘rebellions’ in 1950s Indonesia involved similar social groups, often demobilized veterans and guerrillas of the revolution. And fourth and finally, the three cases show more clearly than the major recorded rebellions discussed in the general section that the boundaries between insurgent, peaceful veteran, bandit, vigilante, and self-​defence groups were often blurred. After fighting off their former colonizers in an intensive four-​year war, the biggest challenge for the new Indonesian government in the 1950s was to establish its sovereignty throughout an ethnically and religiously diverse and predominantly rural society of around ninety-​seven million people, spread out over an archipelago. By extension, without a sufficient number of qualified legal officers and security forces it proved difficult to punish lawbreakers. Given this weakness in effectively enforcing its claimed monopoly of violence, the government chose to rely on private citizens outside the army and police to assume security tasks. This strategy created the paradox of the proliferation of private ‘violence workers’, who became active in spaces where the state continued to claim nominal control over the monopoly of violence. In other words, the Indonesian state started to ‘subcontract’ some of its security tasks to strategically chosen non-​state actors.2 Viewing matters more broadly, from such situations, and depending on political and social-​economic circumstances, various groups of violence workers may emerge. These groups may differ in aims and violent methods, from relatively passive night guards to death squads actively engaged in covert killings.3 Such violence workers sometimes come very close to, and in practice sometimes overlap with, vigilantes: people who sometimes with and often without the consent of state agencies act violently in defence of the state and seek to protect social norms and their own lives and property.4 The three cases under consideration demonstrate that insurgencies and a wave of crime in early independent Indonesia gave impetus to state and non-​state actors to share policing and security tasks. It led to the revival of village guards and self-​defence groups, some of which became actively involved in counter-​insurgency operations. Insurgency and crime also gave rise to vigilante activity and virtually unchecked violence, particularly in rural areas. From 1955 onwards, the army and police gradually established and consolidated their monopoly of violence in large parts of the country through relatively 2  Current debates on the outsourcing of security tasks very much focus on the development of a private sector security industry. See Rita Abrahams and Anne Leander (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies (London: Routledge, 2016). 3  For a discussion of types of violence workers’ groups and their relationship to the state, see, for example, Yelena Biberman, ‘Self-​Defense Militias, Death Squads, and State Outsourcing of Violence in India and Turkey’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 41/​5 (2018), 751–​781. On death squads as a distinct category, see Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner, Death Squads in Global Perspectives. Murder with Deniability (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 4  On the phenomenon of vigilantism, see Ray Abrahams, Vigilant Citizens: Vigilantism and the State (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1998). On the delicate and ambiguous nature of the relationship between the state and vigilante groups, see Thomas Kirsch and Tilo Grätz, ‘Vigilantism, State Ontologies and Encompassment. An Introductory Essay’, in Thomas Kirsch and Tilo Grätz (eds.), Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2010), 1–​25.

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    83 successful counter-​insurgency measures, but only by simultaneously formalizing security arrangements with certain selected private citizens, thus reducing the space for vigilante violence.

Indonesia in the 1950s: State-​Building Amidst Insurgencies On 27 December 1949, after four years of bitter fighting and acrimonious diplomatic negotiations following the original proclamation of independence by Sukarno and Mohamad Hatta on 17 August 1945, the transfer of sovereignty took place from the Netherlands Indies to the independent Republik Indonesia Serikat (RIS, Republic of the United States of Indonesia). The RIS, a compromise in the form of a Federal State to appease the departing Dutch, was dismantled shortly afterwards, to be replaced on 17 August 1950 by the unitary Republik Indonesia. After independence, Indonesia struggled with problems typical of a fledgling state born from centuries of European colonialism, Japan’s Second World War occupation, and a violent revolution shortly after.5 Scholars of Indonesian history have been drawn to the increased intervention in politics and society by the military after 1957, when parliamentary democracy was replaced by an autocratic system of government and a strong corporatist state, a period known as Guided Democracy (1957–​1965).6 The difficulties confronting Indonesia in the liberal democratic period (1950–​1957) were myriad, and guided democracy is often explained as a response to what is considered a failed democratic experiment of the previous period.7 Immediately after independence, the Indonesian government had to deal with strong centrifugal forces within its borders, not only from a number of federal states that resisted integration into the unitary state, but also from power centres in many other regions. The Republik Indonesia that became the core of the unitary state in August 1950 had, since the revolution, retained its power base, principally on Java (especially Central Java), as well as in a few selected regions of Sumatra. Although, as Feith puts it, the years of the revolution had engendered ‘a powerful sense of collective solidarity which checked the divisive effects of active group competition’, the unifying force of the revolution had also papered over many political, ideological, regional, and class differences that could now come to the

5  On decolonization and nation-​building in Southeast Asia, see Nicholas Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia IV: From World War II to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 6  Guided democracy has been studied as the precursor of the late authoritarian New Order military regime (1966–​1998) under President Suharto, see David Bourchier and John Legge (eds.), Democracy in Indonesia 1950s and 1990s (Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1992). On civil–​military alliances in Indonesia since 1957, see Loren Ryter, Youth, Gangs, and the State in Indonesia, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2002, 35–​129. 7  Ruth T. McVey, ‘The Case of the Disappearing Decade’, in Bourchier and Legge (eds.), Democracy in Indonesia 1950s and 1990s, 1–​15.

84    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid fore—​reflected in the endless parade of new parties, trade unions, and youth, peasant, and veterans’ organizations.8 A struggle for political, social, and economic influence developed between the political parties, President Sukarno, and the army, leading to a failed military coup in October 1952, and a series of cabinet crises throughout the 1950s. Important disputes arose over the composition of regional councils and local autonomy, the position of feudal rulers within the bureaucracy, economic development and the nationalization of foreign enterprise, citizenship and minorities, the liberation of (Papua) New Guinea from the Dutch, and, critically, the demobilization of the army and the maintenance of internal security.9 Due to these pressing political, legal, and socio-​economic problems, the first general elections were postponed several times, and were finally held in September 1955, five years after independence. The 1955 elections proved that, of the political parties, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) was the fastest growing, competing fiercely with its three foremost political rivals: the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI, Partai Nasional Indonesia), and two Islamic parties, the Masyumi and Nahdlatul Ulama.10 Political instability and conflict were exacerbated by the challenges associated with economic reconstruction. Indonesia was a predominantly agriculture-​based society, unable to offer off-​farm employment to a growing rural and urban population without access to land and simply uninterested in farm labour. The economy, particularly the highly important and largely foreign-​owned plantation sector in Java and Sumatra, was meanwhile recovering from devastating years of occupation and war. In parts of Java and Sumatra, peasants converted estates into subsistence agriculture smallholdings and dismantled estate factories to sell spare parts on the black market. Tensions over the restitution of plantations to their rightful owners and access to land intensified between the peasantry and foreign estate owners. Plantations also suffered from arson, theft, and assaults by criminal gangs.11 Plantation managers employed private security forces, a practice dating back to colonial times.12 Trade unions demanded better wages and labour conditions, leading to a number of large strikes in the plantation as well as in the manufacturing sectors. The commercial sector, particularly import trades, was negatively affected by smuggling and corruption.13 Unemployment was a major issue, particularly for those who due to the Japanese occupation and the revolution had been unable to finish or pursue an education and had joined guerrilla

8  Herbert Feith, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962), 17. 9  Ibid., 165–​188. 10  Herbert Feith, The Indonesian Elections of 1955 (Interim report series Modern Indonesia Project. Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program. Department of Far Eastern Studies. Cornell University, 1957), 57–​79. 11  Peter Keppy, The Politics of Redress: War Damage Compensation and Restitution in Indonesia and the Philippines, 1940–​1957 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010), 210–​213. 12 Roel Frakking, ‘  “Who Wants to Cover Everything, Covers Nothing”: The Organization of Indigenous Security Forces in Indonesia, 1945–​50’, in Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses (eds.), Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 111–​132. 13 J. Thomas Lindblad, Bridges to New Business. The Economic Decolonization of Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), 129–​136, 154–​157.

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    85 groups or the infant national Indonesian army to fight the Dutch. Many of these young men were illiterate. In light of these factors, it may not come as a surprise—​though this is rarely mentioned in the literature on Indonesia in the 1950s—​that apart from economic and political problems, perhaps the most vexing difficulty facing Indonesian government and society was the process of demobilization and reintegration into society of hundreds of thousands of former freedom fighters. Next to the army proper, there were militias and auxiliaries of various types and allegiances, some more or less integrated into the army, others operating independently, totalling approximately 500,000 men.14 An army reorganization programme was drawn up, popularly known as Re-​Ra (Reorganisasi-​Rasionalisasi), which sought to professionalize and slim down the army. The programme, first introduced in 1948, was revised throughout the early 1950s. Ever since negotiations opened with the Dutch colonizers over the terms of independence, former Indonesian combatants had become increasingly antagonized by government policies. From 1948, one major bone of contention was the reorganization of the Indonesian national army and its antagonist the Dutch colonial army (KNIL). After independence, the two militaries were merged into a single army. In 1950, a number of ‘KNIL-​revolts’ occurred partly in alliance with regional politicians from East Indonesia, who resisted integration in an Indonesian unitary state dominated (in their eyes) from Java by Javanese politicians and military personnel.15 These rebellions played out as classic examples of the notoriously difficult integration of former ‘loyalists’ into a post-​colonial state and society.16 The Indonesian government recognized the problem of demobilizing and reintegrating former freedom fighters into society and established the National Reconstruction Bureau (BRN, Biro Reksonstruksi Nasional) in 1950 to handle the process. The problem, as high crime rates and recurrent insurgencies demonstrated, proved too big for the government to solve. By that point, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, plus freedom fighters not formally associated with the army, had already ‘returned to society’. Many felt abandoned by the nation-​state they had helped create. The state could only accommodate a small proportion of them, albeit still several thousand strong, through education and vocational training projects, as well as through credit schemes for small businesses. Short of funds, the BRN could not offer the majority of former freedom fighters effective educational and employment opportunities.17 Freedom fighters responded by forming local, regional, and supra-​ regional networks of loyalty to commanders and fellow fighters, which in times of crisis or conflict could be rekindled to secure a job and income. Such groups also formed a pool of 14 Feith, Decline, 77–​78.

15  The three KNIL-​related revolts in 1950 are the Angkatan Perang Ratu Adil coup in West Java, the Andi Azis affair in Makassar, and the Republik Maluku Selatan, a separatist insurgency in Ambon. KNIL soldiers were disillusioned with independence, which confronted them with an uncertain military career and a degraded social position in Indonesian society. See Richard Chauvel, Nationalists Soldiers and Separatists: The Ambonese Islands from Colonialism to Revolt, 1880–​1950 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1990), 335, 338–​392. 16  David Anderson and Daniel Branch (eds.), Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists, and the Cold War, 1945–​76 (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). 17  Peter Keppy, ‘Twisted Roads to Employment: Revolution, Independence and the Fate of Indonesian Freedom Fighters’, in H. de Jonge and T. van Meijl (eds.), On the Subject of Labour. Essays in Memory of Frans Hüsken (Nijmegen: In de Walvis, 2010), 17–​21.

86    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid potential ‘violence workers’ available for remobilization, either by the state, or by former freedom fighters in charge of politico-​criminal gangs, as in Central Java, who promised veterans a better future. This pool of restless, potentially violent, and discontented men—​female guerrilla fighters were never reported as a source of dissatisfaction—​is one of the most important factors explaining the proliferation of crime and insurgencies that shook the very core of the Indonesian Republic throughout the 1950s. To quell crime and rebellion, the government made extensive use of the colonial-​era War and Siege regulations (SOB, Staat van Oorlog en Beleg), which remained in force after independence across Indonesia.18 One of the measures taken under the SOB regulations was massive arrest, which often included local leaders from major political parties such as those from the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and Masyumi. These political detainees shared prison cells with criminals, insurgents, and people held without clear charges, some arrested in counter-​insurgency sweep operations by the army and police. With poor conditions of incarceration exacerbated by the slow legal process and overloaded prisons, the SOB became a crucial bone of contention among the political parties as well as between them and the authorities. Alongside these repressive measures, a nation-​building programme was launched simultaneously, which targeted rural populations in crime-​and insurgency-​ ridden regions. Local branches of the Department of Information offered ‘edutainment’, i.e. itinerant theatre plays and film screenings, that explained to villagers what the new nation-​ state and its security apparatus were about. This was obviously meant to prevent villagers from siding with insurgents, to give them a sense of security, and to motivate villagers to actively assist state institutions in curbing rebellion and crime. In addition to this, the government introduced developmental projects in the fields of education, agricultural production, health care, and infrastructure (communications, roads, etc.). Intra-​Indonesian conflicts were already part and parcel of the Indonesian Revolution.19 These so-​called social revolutions of inter-​communal violence have rarely been interpreted as ‘insurgencies’, because there was, as yet, no consolidated central Republican authority against which to rebel. Only after 1947, when the Republic of Indonesia had clearly established itself as the central authority of the new state, could such contestations enter the realm of ‘revolt’. The first of the events to be interpreted in these terms was the ‘Madiun Affaire’ of September 1948, which anticipated events in early post-​independence Indonesia.20 In 1948, during the war with the Dutch, the Republic started its army demobilization programme. This sparked a violent response within the leftist-​leaning Division IV of the Indonesian army, which refused to demobilize and in protest occupied the city of Madiun, East Java. Loyal Republican army units put down the rebellion in December 1948.

18  SOB was the acronym of the Dutch colonial legal provision of Staat van Oorlog en Beleg (State of War and Siege) and was perpetuated by the Republic of Indonesia. 19 Benedict R. O’G Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972); Robert Cribb, Gangsters and Revolutionaries: The Jakarta People’s Militia and the Indonesian Revolution, 1945–​1949 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991); Harry Poeze, ‘Walking the Tightrope: Internal Indonesian Conflict, 1945–​49’, in Luttikhuis and Moses (eds.), Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence, 176–​197. 20  Ann Swift, The Road to Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of 1948 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Harry Poeze, Verguisd en vergeten: Tan Malaka, de linkse beweging en de Indonesische revolutie, 1945–​1949, Vol. I–​III (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), 1079–​1391.

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    87 According to the Republican leadership, a total of 35,000 communist troops were arrested, several thousand killed, and their leaders executed. The second major insurgency against the Indonesian state was the Darul Islam (House of Islam) rebellion. Like the Madiun revolt, its roots were in the revolution, but it would last until the early 1960s and spread through a number of regions. Like most insurgencies in Indonesia, it was largely rural and aimed to offer a religious alternative to the secular Republic of Indonesia. The Darul Islam insurgency is of relevance, as it also inspired disillusioned soldiers to rebel in a similar way, as in the case to be discussed below: the Battalion 426 mutiny in Central Java. The origins of Darul Islam lie in West Java.21 Its leader, an Islamic mystic called Sekarmadji Maridjan Kartosuwirjo (1905–​1962), was one of the founders of the West Javanese branch of Masyumi. He recruited followers from the Hizbullah and Sabililah, two prominent Masyumi-​affiliated anti-​Dutch militias with branches on Java and Sumatra. Throughout the revolution, Hizbullah and Sabililah came into conflict with the Republican army over issues of authority, resource control, and arms distribution. On 7 August 1949, Kartosuwirjo proclaimed the Negara Islam Indonesia (NII, Indonesian Islamic State). After independence, the Negara Islam Indonesia steadily lost its grip over urban West Java. In November 1950, as an act of reconciliation, the Minister of Defence reached out to insurgents with an Indonesia-​wide ultimatum to hand in weapons. The response was negligible. Intensive rural guerrilla actions continued for many years. Kartosuwirjo was finally captured and executed in 1962, after a brutal two-​year counter-​insurgency campaign. South Sulawesi was another centre of Darul Islam. In 1950, former guerrilla groups, united by the Republican army into the South Sulawesi Guerrilla Unit, demanded full incorporation into the army. Their new leader, Kahar Muzakkar, originated from South Sulawesi, but during the revolution had spent most time in Central Java. His ambition to be appointed army commander of South Sulawesi was thwarted, as the Republican army leaders deemed his lack of any formal military training a problem. In January 1952, Muzakkar accepted Kartosuwirjo’s offer of the position of the Sulawesi command of the Tentara Islam Indonesia (TII, Indonesian Islamic Army). While formally joining forces with Darul Islam in West Java, contacts between the two were distant. Muzakkar took his rebellion in an explicitly separatist-​regionalist direction. When in March 1957 another separatist rebellion, known as Permesta, broke out in North Sulawesi, joining forces with the separatist PRRI rebellion in Sumatra in February 1958 (see below), Muzakkar decided to throw his lot in with them. The Indonesian army defeated Permesta within six months, but Muzakkar managed to hold out. Negotiations with the Republic collapsed in 1962. Muzakkar was finally killed during military operations in 1965, ending his South Sulawesi DI rebellion with him.

21  The

seminal work on Darul Islam is Cornelis van Dijk, Rebellion Under the Banner of Islam: The Darul Islam in Indonesia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). Other important literature: Chiara Formichi, Islam and the Making of the Nation: Kartosuwiryo and Political Islam in Twentieth-​century Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012); Pusat Sejarah dan Tradisi TNI, Sejarah pemberontakan DI/​TII di Jawa Barat dan penumpasannya (Jakarta: Pusat Sejarah TNI, 2012). On Indonesian counter-​insurgency against this rebellion: David Kilcullen, ‘Political Effects of Military Operations in Indonesia 1945–​99’, PhD dissertation, University of NSW, 2001.

88    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid Events in South Kalimantan followed a remarkably similar path to those in South Sulawesi. Over the course of 1950, local commander Ibnu Hadjar united several hundred poorly armed former guerrillas under his leadership. They were frustrated by impending demobilization, inadequate incorporation into the army, and the gathering perception that outsiders, and particularly Javanese, were seizing the key administrative positions in their region. Hadjar accepted an offer from Kartosuwirjo in 1954 of the position of minister without portfolio in the cabinet of the Indonesian Islamic State. After a 1956 amnesty offer by the government, many of Hadjar’s most trusted commanders deserted. Hadjar himself managed to hold out with a small group of followers until 1963. He was sentenced to death in March 1965. The final and most successful Darul Islam-​inspired revolt took place in Aceh, North Sumatra. The movement mapped onto tensions dating back to the late-​colonial era between the traditional feudal elite (partly tainted by collaboration with the Dutch) and increasingly vociferous Islamic leaders. As in other regions, from 1948 the central government fomented new tensions resulting from its partially unsuccessful attempts to demobilize guerrillas as well as its practice of firing prominent local commanders and bringing in replacements from outside Aceh. In September 1953, violence erupted. After consultation with Kartosuwirjo, Daud Beureu’eh, a prominent leader of the religious elite and a respected guerrilla commander, announced that Aceh was joining the Islamic State of Indonesia. He criticized the Indonesian government for supporting a secular state based on nationalism and for ignoring pleas for Acehnese autonomy. As in the other regions, the fundamental clash between regional demands for autonomy and the imperatives of central government control provoked conflict. Beureu’eh’s movement was well organized. Although the insurgents were quickly driven from the towns, they succeeded remarkably well in levying taxes, administering justice, supervising religious observance, and mounting frequent attacks on towns, plantations, and industrial plants. In contrast to many regional centres of dissent, the government took a relatively conciliatory approach in Aceh, contemplating amnesties and ultimately offering increased autonomy. While Beureu’eh fought on until 1962, most insurgents accepted a peace agreement offered in 1959. The central government made Aceh into a Special Region allowed to enact Islamic law, and incorporated part of the Islamic army into the army of the Republic. This peaceful resolution makes the Aceh revolt an outlier among the Darul Islam movements. It is worth sharing the chronicler of Darul Islam, Kees Van Dijk’s reflections on the central question of why people joined the Darul Islam. The issue of religious inspiration can obviously not be dismissed. According to Van Dijk, however, a more decisive cause was the resentment of former commanders and former fighters at being forcibly demobilized.22 These sensitivities, combined with fears of Javanese political domination and loss of control over regional economic resources, contributed to the outbreak of these rebellions. Such anxieties occurred in the context of the state’s inability either to comprehend or to accommodate the claims made by both veterans and regional political representatives on local administrative positions and material resources.

22 

Van Dijk, Under the Banner of Islam, 340–​396.

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    89 The Darul Islam movement was a collection of loosely connected revolts in various regions rather than a centrally coordinated insurgency with a clear-​cut ideology. For this very reason, the series of insurgencies that have collectively become known as Darul Islam illustrate in microcosm the interpretative problem that we aim to highlight here: the proliferation of insurgencies in 1950s Indonesia was interconnected, but not primarily by ideological affinity, or by military or political organization, but rather by the underlying difficulties that the Indonesian state faced in mitigating the grievances of former combatants as well as in establishing state control and a monopoly of violence. These shortcomings created opportunities for the establishment of alternative authorities from below. Similar issues can be identified in the PRRI rebellion. The ‘PRRI-​Permesta rebellion’ started in December 1956 in Sumatra. Like Darul Islam, the PRRI-​Permesta was a set of affiliated regional insurgencies demanding autonomy. Each had its own dynamics, and grievances. Their heyday lasted until mid-​1958, and remnants lingered on into the early 1960s. This case is of particular interest as it reveals how, in the late 1950s, the mobilization of private citizens into militias occurred on all sides of the conflict. The revolt was initiated by a number of regional army commanders in Sumatra nursing grievances against ‘Jakarta’: reduced to their essence, they found the central army leadership too centralist and the political class in Jakarta too left-​leaning.23 Their constituencies of support were among disgruntled freedom fighters, as well as among certain sections of regionalist politicians, especially from the Islamist Masyumi party. In February 1958, after attempts at reconciliation with Jakarta failed, regional commanders in West Sumatra and North Sulawesi proclaimed the Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia (PRRI, Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia): an alternative government for the Indonesian Republic claiming closer adherence to the principles of ‘1945’, rather than a secessionist state. Aided by loyal groups within the regions, the Republican army quickly retook the main political and economic centres in West Sumatra. The army recruited students as Tentara Pelajar (Student Army) and allied with the youth organization of the Indonesian Communist Party, the Pemuda Rakyat, who were eager to hunt down PRRI rebels. Hence, new militia groups emerged, offering another example of the subcontracting of violence by the state to paramilitary organizations. Low-​intensity guerrilla warfare continued for several years, with the rebels, in a desperate attempt to rally support in February 1960, even proclaiming secession as the Republik Persatuan Indonesia (Unitary Republic of Indonesia). A generous central government amnesty programme in the following year managed to bring most of the insurgents back into the fold.

23  Much has been written about PRRI-​Permesta, though much of this literature is dated. Important works are: Audrey Kahin, Rebellion to Integration: West Sumatra and the Indonesian Polity, 1926–​1998 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999); Daniel S. Lev, Transition to Guided Democracy (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2009 [1966]); Barbara Harvey, Permesta: Half a Rebellion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); John R.W Smail, ‘The Military Politics of North Sumatra December 1956–​October 1957’, Indonesia, 6 (October 1968), 128–​ 187; R.Z. Leirissa, PRRI, Permesta: strategie membangun Indonesia tanpa Komunis (Jakarta: Pustaka Utama Grafiti, 1991). On US involvement with the movement, see Kahin and Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy.

90    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid

The Monopoly of Violence Contested: Three Case Studies Similar demands to surrender fell on deaf ears among the insurgents-​cum-​criminals in the three cases that follow.24 In contrast to the well-​studied rebellions discussed above, these cases are all much less well known, but as examples of run-​of-​the mill security challenges to the Indonesian state in the 1950s they provide some important lessons. Each one offers further evidence that the Indonesian state’s monopoly of violence was not only contested by insurgents. The state itself was willing to subcontract violence to non-​state actors in order to combat crime and rebellion. The first case to be discussed is that of the Battalion 426 mutiny in Central Java in December 1951. This is followed by a case of former freedom fighters who remobilized their former comrades in arms into politico-​criminal gangs, which sought refuge in the mountainous zone of Central Java, known as the Merapi-​Merbabu Complex. These two first insurgencies occurred in the region in which one would least expect revolts to occur: Central Java, with the city of Yogyakarta its political centre. This was considered one of the epicentres of resistance against the Dutch and a bastion of support for the Republic of Indonesia. The third case takes us to the village of Bulumario in Central Sumatra in 1956, where a small group organized a short-​lived revolt.

The Battalion 426 Uprising The Batallion 426 uprising took place from early December 1951 until early May 1952, and engulfed Central Java. The Indonesian government and the Indonesian army (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, TNI) initially viewed the insurgency as an internal military conflict to be resolved through persuasion rather than force. But dialogue failed, and the revolt developed into armed conflict as the rebels sided with the Darul Islam insurgency. Battalion 426 was one of nine constituent infantry formations of the Pragolo Brigade, which was stationed in the cities of Kudus and Magelang, and was, in turn, part of the provincial army of Central Java, the Diponegoro Division. Battalion 426 was established by the Diponegoro Division to accommodate former members of Hizbullah and Sabilillah, two prominent Islamic militia groups actively involved in guerrilla actions in and around the city of Surakarta during the Indonesian revolution. By November 1951, under the leadership of Major Munawar and Captain Sofyan, this battalion consisted of 855 soldiers. The official TNI view was that Battalion 426’s insurgency stemmed from their ideological affinity with the Darul Islam rebellion led by Kartosuwirjo. Some Battalion 426 officers were believed to support the Darul Islam covertly. Evidence of such sympathies surfaced in 1951, when some officers defected after their unit was deployed to suppress Darul Islam in Brebes and Tegal, northwest Central Java. Islamic ideology and solidarity, however, were not the sole motivations to rebel. Another important contributory factor was resentment against the 24  The cases are built on materials from the National Archive of the Republic Indonesia in Jakarta and on newspapers published in 1950s Indonesia: Kedaulatan Rakjat, Suara Merdeka, De Locomotief, and Waspada.

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    91 government’s army reorganization and rationalization programme. Under the Re-​Ra programme, many unit members would be dismissed or demoted to lower ranks. The Battalion’s officers felt humiliated, particularly considering their record, reputation, and past contribution to the revolution. Apart from the suppression of the Darul Islam rebellion in the Brebes-​Tegal area, Battalion 426 had also been involved in cracking down on the communist army uprising of 1948 in Madiun and—​interestingly—​had also helped suppress the rebellion of Angkatan Umat Islam (The Army of the Islamic Nation), in Kebumen, Central Java, in mid-​1949. Problems worsened in early 1950 when high-​ranking commanders of the Diponegoro Division received reports about secret meetings between Battalion 426 officers and Darul Islam leaders. Considering the Hizbullah background of this Battalion and their social roots in Central Java, commanding officers of the Diponegoro Division were reluctant to take action. Only after having found solid evidence of insubordination did the Division command intervene. In early December 1951, commanders summoned the leaders of Battalion 426, Major Munawar and Captain Sofyan, to headquarters for interrogation. Munawar came to Semarang, and was arrested. Sofyan refused, and declared himself ‘ready to fight’ if headquarters took further action. Responding to this, the Diponegoro Division launched a military attack against Sofyan’s base in the city of Kudus. Sofyan and his soldiers managed to escape with the help of the local population. At this point, two other companies under the command of Captain Alip, who were confined at Magelang, threw in their lot with Captain Sofyan. Several soldiers of Battalion 426, stationed at Salatiga, followed suit. This group planned to control the geographical area between the regional hubs of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, and moved to Klaten, situated between Surakarta and Yogyakarta, for that purpose. Klaten held special significance, having been their original Hizbullah militia base and the point from where the rebels had fought the Dutch in 1949 and stockpiled weapons. It was reported that in this area, as well as in Surakarta, Sofyan and his men gained support from local elites and trained cadres of local youths. By this point, the Battalion 426 rebels numbered some 600 men. For some officers at the Diponegoro headquarters, Sofyan’s rebellious attitude was unsurprising. For example, Lieutenant-​General Rahmat, the divisional Chief of Information, describes Captain Sofyan, who was born in Ceper-​Klaten in 1926, as a swaggering, ambitious young officer. During the revolution, according to Rahmat, Sofyan and his Hizbullah unit were notorious for violent indiscipline: kidnappings and killings. To finance their movement, Sofyan and his men robbed villagers, collecting money and valuables by force. To feed themselves the rebels seized rice, cassava, and livestock from peasants. They also engaged in extortion, kidnapping, and murder, adding to socio-​political instability across Central Java and in the border area with West Java. Their actions were indistinguishable from criminal activity, which was rampant in Central Java at the time. At the height of the rebellion, on 1 January 1952, the regional governor of Surakarta invoked the War and Siege regulations (SOB) in his administrative district. Reports poured in from different parts of Central Java, documenting the destruction wrought by Battalion 426 rebels as they moved around the province, sabotaging local infrastructure such as bridges, dams, and roads in their effort to impede their TNI pursuers. The TNI launched a series of counter-​insurgency campaigns to suppress the rebellion. A significant strategical innovation in combatting the rebellion was the efforts made by the Diponegoro Division Command to secure active support from the local government

92    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid apparatus and the wider civilian population. The army command specifically called for reviving the revolution-​era People’s Security Agencies (Badan Keamanan Rakjat, BKR) and the People’s Defence Organizations (Organisasi Pertahanan Rakyat, OPR). These civilian organizations had become dormant after the revolution. As a result of this remobilization, several OPR members, often ill-​trained and poorly armed, engaged in armed conflict with the rebels, sometimes managing to capture or kill insurgents. On 9 January 1952, the Diponegoro Division launched a large-​scale military offensive, ‘Operasi Merdeka Timur’, to crush the rebellion. After approximately five months of operations, the Republican army succeeded in quashing the Battalion 426 insurgency in May 1952, at a cost of hundreds of casualties, including civilians. Jatinom district, located between Surakarta and Yogyakarta, was severely affected. Captain Sofyan and his deputy were reported to have died in battle. Surviving rebels joined the Darul Islam forces in the northwestern reaches of Central Java and West Java. Other parts of the province, particularly the mountainous area known as the Merapi Merbabu Complex (MMC), were home to groups of insurgents quite different from those of Battalion 426.

‘Troublemakers’: Self-​Defence Groups and Vigilantes in the MMC On 28 October 1951, a group of former guerrilla fighters in a village in Semarang regency, Central Java, founded the League of the Victims of Rationalization (Persatuan Korban Rasionalisasi, PKR). This ‘official’ founding in 1951 seems to have represented a merger of previously smaller and independently operating criminal gangs and radical veterans’ associations. In fact, as early as June 1950, a group of militant veterans going under a similar name of T(entara) K(orban) R(asionalisasi) was already active in the city of Surakarta. During a combined police and army raid in Java in August 1951 targeting subversive leftist activists, PKR’s architect and main leader, Umar Junani, was arrested, but managed to escape. He would continue to lead a gang for the next four years. Junani’s and other gangs formed significant groups in Indonesia’s insurgency landscape, given their tight organizational structure and their mixed political-​criminal agenda. Disagreement over the terms of independence and over the government’s demobilization policy was their raison d’etre. Political discontent, however, was channelled into criminal activity, leading to a reign of terror in Central Java, enduring for a period of five years from 1950 to late 1955. In 1953, a split occurred resulting in at least three factions or politico-​ criminal organizations, each under separate leaders: PKR, under Sujud Krisnosardjono; Organisasi Pembela Proklamasi Republik Indonesia (OPPRI, Defenders of the Proclamation of the Republic of Indonesia), under Umar Junani; and Pembela Keamanan Rakjat Muda (PKR-​ Muda, The Young PKR), under Multajat. To what extent collaboration between these groups continued remains unclear. Although relatively small-​sized, typically 200 to 300 individuals, PKR, and other politico-​criminal gangs of similar membership, together comprised an estimated 2,000 to 2,500 men. These politico-​criminal groups were active in the vast area encircling Mount Merapi and Mount Merbabu in the heart of Central Java. In the early 1950s, it was known as the Merapi-​ Merbabu Complex (MMC), best imagined as an axis running from the city of Surakarta

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    93 in the south northwards to the port of Semarang. Due to the activities of PKR, OPPRI, and other smaller and loosely organized gangs, often labelled as gerombolan pengacau (troublemakers), the MMC became synonymous with a crime-​infested area. The local population, the vast majority of whom were of peasant background and lived in rural settlements, had little understanding of the abstract idea of the nation-​state and equally little trust in its institutions, such as the police force, which were supposed, in theory if not in practice, to protect them. MMC acquired the characteristics of a ‘frontier zone’, where state authority was weak and contested.25 The name PKR suggests that the founders considered themselves victims (korban) of the Republican government’s reorganization of the Indonesian national army. PKR, however, was more than a protest movement of disillusioned veterans. Vague as their declared intentions may have been, its leaders wished to continue the revolution to achieve the aims of the 17 August 1945 Proclamation of Independence. They felt the Republican government had compromised the goal of complete independence from the Dutch. Some historians have suggested that the PKR and similar groups adhered to a leftist ideology, and that communist insurgents who had escaped the repression of the Madiun affair in 1948 had teamed up with gangs in the MMC.26 Unlike conventional smaller criminal bands active in Central Java, PKR was hierarchically organized into army units with a command structure sub-​divided into geographical sectors of operation. From their strategically located mountain hideouts, uniformed and heavily armed, gangs descended into the lowlands to raid hamlets, plantations, and cities, before returning to their mountain redoubts. Compared to the majority of criminal bands, PKR also conducted a broader repertoire of activities, choosing targets that blurred the boundaries between banditry, political activism, and insurgency. PKR bands invested in propaganda, in building up military and peasant cadres, and in tax collection and redistribution of wealth, as well as attacking police posts, and kidnapping or killing district and village officials. Taxes were collected in money and in kind. After successful robberies, the PKR would share its ‘profits’ with villagers to ease their tax burden. Weapons were secured by coordinated raids on police and military outposts, and through illicit contacts with individual army personnel known to sympathize with the veterans. Aside from their similar local backgrounds, the PKR, OPPRI, and PKR-​Muda leaders shared a history as freedom fighters. Umar Junani was a former Company Commander of a TNI Batallion ‘Soeadi’ under Major Maladhy. Ironically, Maladhy, with his privately run veterans’ foundation, actively prepared former combatants for a return to society. These social efforts were, however, lost on former comrade in arms Umar Junani. Sujud Krisnosardjono was a native of Ungaran, Semarang regency. He received his military training as a heiho, an auxiliary force established during the Japanese occupation.27 During the revolution Sujud

25 On the notion of ‘frontier zone’, see Abrahams, Vigilant Citizens, 9, 24–​ 25. Mark Rifkin, ‘The Frontier as (Movable) Space of Exception’, Settler Colonial Studies, 4/​2 (2014), 176–​180. 26  On the left-​wing orientation of MMC gangs, see Julianto Ibrahim, Dinamika Sosial dan Politik Masa Revolusi (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 2014), 147; Poeze, Verguisd en vergeten, vol. 3, 1564–​1565. 27  On heiho and similar militias established in Indonesia under the Japanese during the Second World War , see Peter Post et al. (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Indonesia in the Pacific War (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 132–​142.

94    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid joined a guerrilla organization. Around 1950 he was accepted in the official national army of the Republic of Indonesia. Not long after he also turned against his master, coestablishing PKR and attracting a following in the MMC made up of his former guerrilla comrades and local criminals. The wave of criminality that swept urban and rural central Java from mid-​1950 onwards, with the Darul Islam insurgency spilling into Central Java from West Java, and the Batallion 426 mutiny gaining ground, compelled the authorities to act. The Diponegoro command called for the revival of the civilian militia, OPR. In early 1952, village youths haphazardly re-​established village defence groups. Formal training and arms supplies were to come later. It is important to note that this development proved to be a watershed in the exercise of the monopoly of violence by the state. In subsequent years the self-​defence organizations offered a model for a more systematic way of outsourcing security to non-​state actors. Meanwhile, throughout 1951 and early 1952 the authorities and OPR, with limited success, conducted a small number of clean-​up operations in the MMC area, including the previously mentioned Operasi Merdeka Timur. From June 1952, the Diponegoro Division moved towards a comprehensive and more effective counter-​insurgency strategy, establishing a special commando unit, the Banteng Raiders, that focused on eliminating the Darul Islam movement and related organizations in the Tegal-​Brebes area in the northwest of the province. In early 1953, the army also launched a separate counter-​insurgency programme specifically aimed at eradicating gang activity in the MMC. Known as Operation Trinity (Operasi Tritunggal), this operation, a hybrid alliance between the army, police, and local self-​defence organizations, would bear fruit in late 1955. As its name suggests, Operasi Tritunggal was based on the previous call for collaboration between three state institutions—​the army, police, and local administration—​but, significantly, also private citizens. The operation gave new impetus to the already existing, yet weakly developed, system of the OPR self-​defence organizations. The army and civil administration intensified and ‘professionalized’ the training, providing equipment (uniforms and arms), and recruiting village youths in particular. OPR activities included night watch duties, intelligence gathering, arrests of suspects, arms confiscation, and engaging in joined army–​police–​OPR sweep operations. In early 1953, the Police Mobile Brigade detected PKR leader Sujud’s jungle hideout located between the cities of Salatiga and Ambarawa. Sujud had hastily evacuated a cave, leaving crucial documents behind. A few days later, TNI troops killed his chief of staff and arrested the gang’s ‘tax collector’. In spite of fostering goodwill among villagers by redistributing ‘taxes’, PKR’s enduring terror had alienated the peasantry, nullifying any chance of popular support. Villagers did not report to the authorities for fear of retaliation. With local army and police units unable to protect them sufficiently, villagers turned to self-​help, collectively resisting gang raids and detaining suspects, sometimes leading to brutal executions. There is little evidence that these extra-​legal executioners were brought to book, leading to a form of vigilante justice which bordered on local anarchy, and putting the rule of law in doubt. These vigilante killings also occurred under the cloak of the OPR self-​defence organizations, a situation that would continue into late 1955. In December 1954, during a clearance operation in a village south of Ambarawa, an army unit killed PKR leader Sujud. A month later, in January 1955, the Diponegoro Division commander requested the MMC rebels to surrender. Only a hundred or so rank-​and-​file complied. Six months later, PKR mastermind and OPPRI leader Umar Junani was caught

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    95 and beaten to death by villagers in the Boyolali area. By August 1955, all of the major leaders of the three main politico-​criminal gangs were gone, either killed in shoot-​outs with the authorities, lynched by villagers, or under arrest. After years of violence and instability following the Japanese occupation, it was to general relief and amazement that the long-​ awaited general elections of September 1955 passed off peacefully in the MMC. In December, with effective rebel leadership eliminated, the Diponegoro Division command announced that politico-​criminal gang activity in the MMC was finally terminated. The OPR self-​ defence organizations, however, remained in place. In the following years, OPR and similar groups were founded elsewhere, for example in West Java to fight the Darul Islam, and in West Sumatra as part of counter-​insurgency operations in 1959 to end the PRRI rebellion. They also featured, in a slightly different form, in the effort to combat a small-​scale insurgency in Tapanuli, Central Sumatra, to which we now turn.

The Bulumario Gang, South Tapanuli Compared to the two cases of insurgencies described above, the last of our cases was even smaller and short-​lived. This case revolves around a group of just under a hundred members that was vaguely connected to Darul Islam in Aceh and that centred on the village of Bulumario in South Tapanuli, Sumatra. The group was active for a few months in 1956. Although the Bulumario group may have been relatively modest, it reveals many of the same traits as our previous cases: the failure of the Indonesian state to monopolize violence; the pivotal role of disgruntled veterans; the blurring between banditry, rebellion, and the usurpation of state functions; and the steps made towards a solution for these kinds of problems in subcontracting the monopoly of violence to civilian non-​state actors. This case also reveals the changing strategy of the Indonesian state in the late 1950s in dealing with challenges to its authority: from all-​out confrontation to a more strategic use of alliances. The first report on the Bulumario group dates from late August 1956. Newspapers in the region reported that eighteen gang members from Bulumario village in the subdistrict of Sipirok, South Tapanuli, had been arrested. Their detention followed the murder of an off-​ duty Police Mobile Brigade member and the sabotage of telephone lines around the town of Sipirok. These events sparked widespread fear in the following months. In and around the nearby harbour town of Sibolga, well-​known youth gang leaders were taken into custody, and veterans’ and Islamic political groups were monitored. In the days after the initial events, forty people were arrested, after which another forty-​three people were detained and further confiscations of weapons hidden in nearby villages took place over the weeks that followed. The group’s leader, Sahala Siregar, was captured in late September. While seventeen of the detainees were swiftly released without charge, the others ultimately received jail sentences of between eight months and three years. Although the Bulumario group was modest in size, its organization was sophisticated. It is not clear how long they had actually been active, but they certainly were more than a criminal network. There were members responsible for provisioning, an ‘information officer’, and a ‘youth lieutenant’. The organization not only engaged in highway robbery, but in ‘requesting money from citizens’. They procured their weapons by robbing isolated police stations. The group had a command structure, with ‘lieutenant’ Sahala Siregar as its commander and Mohamad Jasin, Idris, and Mustafa Siregar as his deputies. Nothing is known

96    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid about these men beyond what was reported in newspaper coverage surrounding their arrest and trial, but it seems clear (if only from their names) that all originated from the area. Their age and the reports on their network and associates suggest that they were low-​ranking veterans of the revolution. Soon after the first arrests in the Bulumario affair, newspapers reported that ‘sealed documents’ had been found proving connections with the Darul Islam insurgency in Aceh. The authorities made much of this affiliation in the prosecution of the group members, rebranding the group ‘DI/​TII South Tapanuli’. It is impossible to assess from the available reports how important the Darul Islam connection really was for the members of the Bulumario group. As important seems to have been the group’s roots in local society, with authorities fearing support from other Islamic and veterans’ groups, and from local Masyumi leaders who attended the trial hearings. Apart from a religious motivation, a number of other factors may have contributed to people joining the Bulumario ‘gang’. This group was by no means the only gang active in the South Tapanuli region around this time. In the months before and after their arrest, reports abounded of ‘long-​haired gerombolan’, of shoot-​outs with police, and of unidentified men in uniform. In Sibolga, meanwhile, there were reports in June 1956 of youth gangs fighting one another with bike chains, belts, and spears. Three months later, in October, reportage indicated that a student gang calling itself the Red Cat was extorting local businesses and even the head of police. Many of these events when taken individually seem inconsequential next to the disorders in Central Java. Still, the problems in sparsely populated South Tapanuli were similar to those in the MMC. This was an internal frontier society. South Tapanuli consisted of mountains with plantations on their lower slopes and wild vegetation at higher altitudes. The main roads were poorly maintained, making travellers easy prey for bandits. State authority was tenuous. When gangs were spotted, police had to be driven in from the major population centres to deal with them. One police station in the district of Padang Lawas even reported that its only car had been out of commission for over eight months, forcing officers to hitch lifts from local people to get anywhere. Furthermore, as in other regions in Indonesia, there was widespread discontent with government efforts at development. Indonesian newspapers of the 1950s brim with stories about broken infrastructure, lack of services, and the absence of administration, and calls for more development funding. Complaints were voiced loudest by veterans’ groups. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in the aftermath of the Bulumario arrests, the authorities were particularly worried about the fickle loyalties of veterans’ groups, and specifically those of former fighters in Islamic militias. One of the things that the Bulumario group teaches us is that once the Indonesian state chose to crack down on such groups, it could easily do so—​the problem being that the state could not do so against all groups throughout Indonesia all of the time. The resolution of the Bulumario affair points to one way in which the Indonesian government sought a more durable solution. If we compare it with the cases in Central Java described above, the leniency of the authorities in this case seems remarkable. No one was killed during the crackdown of August and September 1956; nor was anyone executed. Prison sentences were relatively lenient, except for the commander Sahala Siregar who was sentenced to five years in August 1957. Overall, the resolution of this insurgency reads almost like a dry run for the much larger amnesties of DI/​TII in Aceh and of the PRRI in West Sumatra that followed several years later.

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    97 Even more importantly, state authorities actively worked to dissuade potential sympathizers of DI/​TII in South Tapanuli. In early 1957, several hundred million rupiah were allocated for investment in roads, irrigation, and other infrastructure. By October 1957, so-​called OKDs (Organisasi Kesedjahteraan Desa, Village Welfare Organizations) were in place throughout Tapanuli. These were auxiliary forces operating under army supervision and charged with overseeing ‘development’ and ‘security’ in their locality, an arrangement similar to that with the OPR in Central Java. In effect, these policy initiatives responded to veterans’ grievances over limited economic opportunities and administrative positions. State authorities meanwhile retained overall responsibility for local security. Thus, a mutually beneficial system of state subcontracting of the monopoly of violence took shape.

Conclusions Historians have tended to see the major rebellions in 1950s Indonesia through the lens of religious or political ideology, or from the perspective of demands for regional autonomy. One might legitimately question whether it makes sense to conflate the various rebellions described above into a single analytical field. Except for the rebellions in West and Central Java, which showed clear connections and exchange, the contacts between the various rebel movements were tenuous at best, nominal at worst. Conversely, several other insurgencies led by Islamic political figures or Islamic militias, often driven by very similar objectives, might just as easily be subsumed under the same heading. Nomenclature or coincidence has, however, led historians to study them separately. In this chapter, instead of putting ideology or regionalism centre stage, we rank these contributory factors alongside the equally poignant veterans’ issue of the 1950s. The three ‘micro-​insurgencies’ cases described above offer us an alternative perspective on the broader phenomenon of insurgencies in Indonesia. What ties them together is the crucial matter of the state’s claim on a monopoly of violence. It would be naïve to ask whether the Indonesian state failed to implement the monopoly of violence. This would mean projecting an ideal-​type Eurocentric conception of the nature of the state onto a situation far removed from local realities across the non-​western world. Studies on vigilantism and the outsourcing of security in Africa convincingly show that state and non-​state actors negotiate over the monopoly of violence, leading to complex, shifting, and inherently paradoxical, alliances.28 Similar unstable relationships between state and non-​state actors are found in Indonesia in the early 1950s. The Indonesian state might have been pursuing a monopoly of exercising violence, but this was not necessarily along a Weberian model in which the exercise of legitimate force rests upon the state.29 Such a perspective helps us to understand 28 Kirsch

and Grätz, ‘Vigilantism’, 2. See also Timothy Ken Menkhaus Raeymaekers and Koen Vlassenroot, ‘State and Non-​ state Regulation in African Protracted Crises: Governance without Government?’, Afrika Focus, 21/​2 (2008), 7–​21. 29  In discussing the outsourcing of security to non-​state actors, Abrahams and Leander state that ‘the traditional Weberian definition of the state as linked to “the monopoly of the legitimate use of force” is . . . increasingly out of sync with reality’. Abrahams and Leander, Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies, 1.

98    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid why and how the Indonesian state and society dealt with problems of crime and insurgency by ‘subcontracting’ security tasks to non-​state groups. The paradox and grave danger of strategies of delegating security responsibilities to non-​state actors is obvious: erosion of the rule of law and the risk of unchecked violence. This danger is neither confined to the past, nor to Indonesia. Although it is tempting, we should be careful to posit direct genealogies between the allies of the Indonesian state in the 1950s as we find them in the three cases above, and the non-​state actors involved in, for instance, the anti-​Communist purge and mass killings of 1965. As social and political contexts differed widely, even within the 1950s, and as many different kinds of actors were involved, such genealogies are far from self-​ evident. Still, such connections warrant further investigation. For a better understanding of the subcontracting of security tasks, it is wise to examine how various non-​state actors managed the monopoly of violence in different localities in the late 1950s, the 1960s, and the following decades. Further research might focus on the village defence systems, but also on local civic organizations, both rural and urban, which were officially tasked with social affairs and security. This calls to mind the urban neighbourhood associations (Rukun Kampung), and, in rural areas, the Village Welfare Organizations and Civil Defence Organizations (Hansip, Pertahanan Sipil). Such investigations, whether in relation to the Indonesian cases discussed here or to other conflict-​ridden post-​colonial states, will contribute to discussions about violence in ‘frontier zones’ within states where the state is weakly represented, and where non-​state actors assume governmental functions either in alliance with, or as alternatives to, a weak government.

Select Bibliography Abrahams, Rita, and Anne Leander (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Private Security Studies (London: Routledge, 2016). Abrahams, Ray, Vigilant Citizens: Vigilantism and the State (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc. 1998). Anderson, Benedict R. O’G, Java in a Time of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972). Anderson, David, and Daniel Branch (eds.), Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists, and the Cold War, 1945–​76 (London and New York: Routledge, 2017). Biberman, Yelena, ‘Self-​Defense Militias, Death Squads, and State Outsourcing of Violence in India and Turkey’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 41/​5 (2018), 751–​781. Bourchier, David, and John Legge (eds.), Democracy in Indonesia 1950s and 1990s (Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1992). Campbell, Bruce B., and Arthur D. Brenner, Death Squads in Global Perspectives. Murder with Deniability (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). Chauvel, Richard, Nationalists Soldiers and Separatists: The Ambonese Islands from Colonialism to Revolt, 1880–​1950 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1990). Colombijn, Freek, and J. Thomas Lindblad (eds.), Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002). Cribb, Robert, Gangsters and Revolutionaries: The Jakarta People’s Militia and the Indonesian Revolution, 1945–​1949 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991).

Insurgencies in Early Post-Colonial Indonesia    99 van Dijk, Cornelis, Rebellion Under the Banner of Islam: The Darul Islam in Indonesia (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981). Feith, Herbert, The Indonesian Elections of 1955 (Interim report series Modern Indonesia Project. Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program. Department of Far Eastern Studies. Cornell University, 1957). Feith, Herbert, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962). Formichi, Chiara, Islam and the Making of the Nation: Kartosuwiryo and Political Islam in Twentieth-​century Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012). Frakking, Roel, ‘ “Who Wants to Cover Everything, Covers Nothing”: The Organization of Indigenous Security Forces in Indonesia, 1945–​50’, in Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 111–​132. Ibrahim, Julianto, Dinamika Sosial dan Politik Masa Revolusi (Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 2014). Harvey, Barbara, Permesta: Half a Rebellion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). Kahin, Audrey, Rebellion to Integration: West Sumatra and the Indonesian Polity, 1926–​1998 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999). Kahin A.R. and George McTurnan Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy. The secret Eisenhower and Dulles debacle in Indonesia. New York. The New Press. Keppy, Peter, ‘Twisted Roads to Employment: Revolution, Independence and the Fate of Indonesian Freedom Fighters’, in H. de Jonge and T. van Meijl, eds., On the Subject of Labour. Essays in Memory of Frans Hüsken (Nijmegen: In de Walvis, (2010, 17–​21. Keppy, Peter, The Politics of Redress: War Damage Compensation and Restitution in Indonesia and the Philippines, 1940–​1957 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010). Kilcullen, David, ‘Political Effects of Military Operations in Indonesia 1945–​99’, PhD dissertation, University of NSW, 2001. Kirsch, Thomas, and Tilo Grätz, ‘Vigilantism, State Ontologies and Encompassment. An Introductory Essay’, in Thomas Kirsch and Tilo Grätz, eds., Domesticating Vigilantism in Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2010), 1–​25, https://​www.resea​rchg​ate.net/​publ​icat​ion/​ 288607696_​Kirsch_​Thomas_​and_​Gratz_​Tilo_​2010_​Vigilantism_​State_​Ontologies_​and_​ Encompassment_​An_​Introductory_​Essay_​In_​Domesticating_​Vigilantism_​in_​Afri​caOx​ ford​_​Jam​es_​C​urre​y_​1-​25. Leirissa, R.Z., PRRI, Permesta: strategie membangun Indonesia tanpa Komunis (Jakarta: Pustaka Utama Grafiti, 1991). Lev, Daniel S., Transition to Guided Democracy (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2009 [1966]). Lindblad, J. Thomas, Bridges to New Business. The Economic Decolonization of Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008). McVey, Ruth T., ‘The Case of the Disappearing Decade’, in David Bourchier and John Legge, eds. Democracy in Indonesia 1950s and 1990s (Clayton, Victoria: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1992), 1–​15. Poeze, Harry, Verguisd en vergeten: Tan Malaka, de linkse beweging en de Indonesische revolutie, 1945–​1949, Vol. I–​III (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007). Poeze, Harry, ‘Walking the Tightrope: Internal Indonesian Conflict, 1945–​ 49’, in Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 176–​197. Post, Peter et al. (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Indonesia in the Pacific War (Leiden: Brill, 2010).

100    Peter Keppy, Bart Luttikhuis, and Abdul Wahid Pusat Sejarah dan Tradisi TNI, Sejarah pemberontakan DI/​ TII di Jawa Barat dan penumpasannya (Jakarta: Pusat Sejarah TNI, 2012). Raeymaekers, Timothy Ken Menkhaus, and Koen Vlassenroot, ‘State and Non-​ state Regulation in African Protracted Crises: Governance without Government?’, Afrika Focus, 21/​2 (2008), 7–​21. Rifkin, Mark, ‘The Frontier as (Movable) Space of Exception’, Settler Colonial Studies, 4/​2 (2014), 176–​180. Ryter, Loren, Youth, Gangs, and the State in Indonesia, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2002. Sedjarah TNI-​ AD Kodam VII Diponegoro: Sirnaning Jakso katon Gapuraning Ratu (Semarang: Sendam VII/​Diponegoro, 1971). Smail, John R.W., ‘The Military Politics of North Sumatra December 1956–​October 1957’, Indonesia 6 (October 1968), 128–​187. Swift, Ann, The Road to Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of 1948 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Tarling, Nicholas (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia IV: From World War II to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Chapter 5

Hum anitarian I l lu si ons American Counter-​Insurgency—​From the Indian Wars to the Global War on Terror Jeremy Kuzmarov In 1978, three years after American troops and embassy personnel ignominiously fled Vietnam, Major General Edward Lansdale published an essay on the Vietnam War which promoted the stab-​in-​the-​back myth that blamed the anti-​war movement for falling prey to Hanoi’s strategy of ‘exploiting contradictions in the enemy camp’. Much like their French counterparts a generation earlier, American troops, Lansdale lamented, were left ‘feeling alienated from the folks at home, unwanted, even despised’. According to Lansdale, the major flaw of American strategy in Vietnam was the sheer massiveness of the organizations that the United States ‘poured into the small but beleaguered country’, and the fact that American leaders ‘relied so heavily on military solutions in a war that begged for political solutions’. Whereas ‘the enemy waged a political contest backed by armed force, what they termed a “people’s war” ’, and ‘sought to gain control of the people’, we mostly ‘sought to destroy enemy forces. Ironically, the American presidents who stuck with the military method for waging the war, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, were the epitome of the professional American politician, shrewd, tough, realistic, imaginative, and dynamic in their political campaigns in the United States. If they had ever awakened to the political skills in their campaign for Vietnam, the outcome undoubtedly would have been very different’.1 Lansdale’s remarks exemplify an imperative placed on political solutions for effective counter-​insurgency practice, which were not effectively instituted in Vietnam. Known as the ‘maestro’ of counter-​insurgency, Lansdale had gained fame in the early 1950s for engineering an alleged miracle in the Philippines, where he adopted civic action, or economic development projects and other psychological warfare tactics that helped to defeat the left-​ wing Hukbalahap agrarian insurgents. Working undercover as a CIA agent, Lansdale forged a strong rapport with Filipino Defence Minister and President Ramon Magsaysay, whose enlightened character and reform policies had been played up in the media. The author wishes to thank Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless for their help with this piece. 1  Edward G. Lansdale, ‘Thoughts About a Past War’, in Allan R. Millet, ed., A Short History of the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), vi, vii, viii, ix.

102   Jeremy Kuzmarov Lansdale was subsequently sent to apply the same methods in building the client regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, though he failed, owing to the strength of the resistance forces and political weakness of Diem. In 1963, Diem was assassinated in a US-​backed coup, and the US was humiliated in the Vietnam War. Afterwards, Lansdale regained some of his former stature by claiming to have had a formula for winning the war and defeating the communists which was never applied. This formula entailed a reliance on native proxies and Special Forces combined with economic aid projects to win peasant support, along with development of functioning democratic institutions.2 The myth of the Lost Cause would ultimately help to shape not only the conservative backlash against the antiwar movement, whom Lansdale blamed for sapping morale, but also the reinvigoration of counter-​insurgency doctrine during the Global War on Terror. In 2007, General David Petraeus and his deputy John Nagl authored an updated counter-​insurgency manual for use in Afghanistan and Iraq which emphasized the function of soldiers as ‘goodwill ambassadors’. The manual noted that ‘at its core, counterinsurgency is a struggle for the population’s support’. To effectively win ‘hearts and minds’, the host government had to promote democratizing reforms and provide efficient services to the public, with soldiers serving as ‘armed social workers’. A heavy priority was placed also on the cultivation of intelligence networks and calibrated policing techniques designed to undercut the insurgency in a clinical way that would avoid excessive civilian casualties.3 Lansdale’s significance, as one of the inspirations behind this latter volume, is in his creation of a particular language of American counter-​insurgency and promotion of tactics that were designed to defeat nationalistic or terrorist organizations in a manner that gave off the impression of being humane. Lansdale’s background significantly was as an advertising executive.4 He and his successors have understood very well that the key to victory in war is control over information and winning over public opinion through effective public relations and have crafted their strategy accordingly. A main problem was that COIN was a servant of geopolitics and designed to advance American interests and not true democracy, which would have often resulted in policies the Americans were against, like nationalization of industry, expansive land reform, higher taxation rates and wage levels, and laws preventing the stationing of foreign military bases. The influx of foreign capital on a hollow economic base and elevation of leaders with limited popular appeal fuelled corruption furthermore and undermined nation building efforts. COIN was more successful as a marketing tool, nevertheless, and in giving a humanitarian aura to military interventions that were driven largely by classic imperialistic motives.

2 See

Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (New York: Liveright, 2018); Cecil B. Currey, Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). 3 See David H. Petraeus et al., U.S. Army U.S. Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Signalman Publishing, 2009); Fred Kaplan, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and The Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013); and for critical analysis, Hannah Gurman (ed.), Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013). 4 See Currey, The Unquiet American; Jonathan Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

American Counter-Insurgency   103

The Indian Wars and US Army Small Wars Manual Counter-​insurgent warfare differs from conventional war in its emphasis on adopting calibrated violence to defeat guerrilla forces, cooptation of legal and administrative apparatuses in the service of warfare, and deployment of ‘a language of humanitarianism and/​or development as both the justification and impetus for war’, as historian Lelah Khalili put it. The civilian population is considered as ‘the prize to be won’—​as much by persuasion as by force or intimidation—​and insurgent defectors are to be brought over through economic inducements and improvements in government service.5 American counter-​ insurgents, however, have often sought to impose western institutions without respect for local traditions and have adopted what historian Richard Drinnon termed a ‘savage war’ doctrine in which atrocities are justified on the grounds that guerrilla fighters do not respect civilized laws of war.6 The term counter-​insurgency was formally adopted by the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s, though its history goes back to the era of the Indian Wars. Historian John Grenier points out that what is now called ‘special operations’ or ‘low intensity warfare’ was first adopted by colonial militias against indigenous communities in Virginia and Massachusetts. These irregular forces sought to ‘disrupt every aspect of resistance’ and ‘obtain intelligence through scouting and taking prisoners’—​the same formula adopted by Lansdale and Petraeus. The native chiefs were bought off through economic inducements and bribery, and indigenous people were pacified by converting them to Christianity.7 As late as the 1960s, the US Army Command and General Staff College adopted its antiguerrilla doctrine from the experience of military commanders who fought in the nineteenth-​century Indian Wars. A guiding influence, General George Crook, had earned the reputation as ‘the Napoleon of Indian fighters’ for leading the suppression of Arizona’s Apache Indians, considered ‘the most destructive guerrilla force the world has ever known’. Crook’s success resulted from his development of transportation and intelligence networks and use of native scouts, ‘the wilder the better’, who ‘had the necessary endurance and know-​ how to fight the Indians on their own terms’. According to a 1960 article in The Military Review which equated Communist guerrillas with the Apaches, Crook promoted an early form of civic action in which the Apache were promised economic benefits if they moved onto a reservation outside Tucson, and could enter government service. Crook’s deputies oversaw the digging of an irrigation canal and water wheel and helped the Apaches plant fifty-​seven acres with melons, turnips, barley, and corn. If the Apaches did not comply, 5 Leilah

Khalili, ‘Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency in the Neoliberal Age’, in Amal Gazhal and Jens Hanssen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle Eastern and North African History (online publication, September 2015), https://​epri​nts.soas.ac.uk/​20804/​1/​Khal​ili%20-​ %20Counterterrorism_​and_​Counterinsur​genc​y_​in​_​the​_​Neo​libe​ral_​Age%202.pdf. 6 See Richard Drinnon, Facing West: On the Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979). 7 See John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–​ 1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Roxanne Dunbar-​Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 58.

104   Jeremy Kuzmarov however, they would be hunted down and killed, much like with the Vietcong who refused to move to model villages or strategic hamlets.8 A major innovation in COIN strategy in the Cold War was the use of modern media to cultivate a heroic image for US government allies and to push for greater governmental reforms that were designed to undercut the guerrillas’ appeal. New technologies were also used to develop informational databanks on insurgent leaders and to coordinate political policing operations which were designed to clinically eradicate the guerrillas without resorting to the scorched earth tactics that had decimated the Indian tribes.9 The US Marine Corps’ small wars manual, published in 1940 based on the army’s experience fighting in Latin America during the late 1910s and 1920s, emphasized the importance of organizing native military and police forces to combat the insurgents, effective propaganda, the establishment of fair elections, and studying the social, economic, and political factors underlying peasant insurgencies so that they could be remedied.10 ‘Decisive results’ were to be gained with the ‘least application of force and minimum loss of life’. The local population was to be treated with ‘tolerance, sympathy and kindness’, rather than in a manner which would imply their inferiority or status as a conquered people.11 Natives who resisted, paradoxically, were considered to have ‘child-​like characteristics’ and ‘could not be judged by our standards’ because they were illiterate and ‘lived simply and in nature’. Their politicians were ‘scheming men’ like American Indian chiefs, susceptible to bribes, who ‘frequently distort the truth’ and were ‘unable to distinguish between right and wrong’.12 The manual acknowledged that in Latin American countries in which the US was involved, ‘great tracts of the richest land were controlled and owned by foreign interests’ and that the ‘admission of cheap foreign labor with lower standards of living created a social condition among the people which should have been remedied . . . before it reached a crisis’. However, the manual went on to advocate the recruitment of special agents in the rural constabulary ‘from among the owners of the large estates, plantations, mines, ranches, banks and other large commercial and financial houses’ who could act as ‘guards for the protection of life and property’.13 This was somehow synonymous with America’s mission to ‘instill in the inhabitants the leading ideas of civilization’, including ‘security and the sanctity of life 8 Lt. Colonel David V. Rattan, ‘Anti-​ guerilla Operations: A Case Study From History’, Military Review (May 1960), 23–​ 27; Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Counter-​Terrorism, 1940–​1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 33; Charles M. Robinson III, General Crook and the Western Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 132, 137; Paul Magid, The Gray Fox: George Crook and the Indian Wars (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 118. See also Odie B. Faulk, The Geronimo Campaign (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 32; Angie Debo, Geronimo: The Man, His Times, His Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 81. The Owyhee Avalanche, published near the Oregon Trail, referred to Crook in his younger days as a ‘splendid Indian exterminator’. 9 See Jeremy Kuzmarov, ‘Under the Façade of Benevolence: Psywar, Amnesty and Defectors in America’s Asia Wars’, The International History Review (September 2019); Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 10 U.S. Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual, Department of the Navy, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940). 11  U.S. Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual, 30, 32. 12  U.S. Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual, 24. 13 Ibid.

American Counter-Insurgency   105 and property and individual liberty’, and ‘to make self-​sufficient native agencies responsible for these matters’.14 A hint of the underlying brutality of counter-​insurgency was evident in the manual’s sanctioning the use of chemical agents, aerial attacks, and punitive expeditions alongside surprise attacks and deception. American soldiers were advised to ‘strike most vigorously and relentlessly when the going is the easiest. When the opponents are on the run, give them no peace or rest or time to make further plans. Try and avoid leaving a few straggling leaders in the field at the end [who could] . . . revive interest by bold strokes’.15 Fighting and winning small wars was still thus all about finding the best means of killing the enemy off, and making sure that he did not return.

The Quiet American: Edward Lansdale and the Philippines As America evolved as a world power in the mid-​twentieth century, it drew both on its own organic colonial traditions and those of European colonial empires. In the Pacific theater of the Second World War, American commanders borrowed from the tactics of British General Orde Wingate in recruiting Kachin tribesmen in Burma who could move through the jungles like natives and planted punji sticks made of fire-​hardened bamboo in the ground which would impale Japanese soldiers.16 Carl Eiffler, commander of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Detachment 101, boasted to President Franklin Roosevelt about a ‘return to our tradition of the scouts, the raiders and the rangers’.17 In December 1952, Sir Gerald Templer, the British High Commissioner of Malaya, was featured on the cover of Time Magazine and praised for having ‘neutralized the jungle’ by combining military and psychological warfare operations and police training with a ‘hearts and minds approach’ that included an amnesty and village resettlement programme where ex-​insurgents were won over through economic incentives.18 Time attributed to Templer the statement that ‘you can’t deal with a plague of mosquitos by swatting each individual insect’19—​implying the need to implement both the carrot and the stick, which became central to American counter-​insurgency doctrine in the Cold War. Immortalized in two of the most famous Cold War novels, The Quiet American and The Ugly American, Edward Lansdale drew on Templer’s techniques in helping to orchestrate 14 Ibid.

15  U.S. Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual, 28, 29, 58. On the brutality of US military operations in the Banana Wars, see John Kenneth Turner, Shall it Be Again? (New York: B.W. Huebsch Inc., 1922), 360. 16 Bruce Bliven Jr., From Pearl Harbor to Okinawa: The War in the Pacific 1941–​ 1945 (New York: Random House, 1960), 108. 17  Troy J. Sacquety, The OSS in Burma: Jungle War Against the Japanese (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013), 8, 91, 182. 18  Time Magazine, 15 December 1952; W.A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribner, 1972), 319; Richard Clutterbuck, foreword by Harold K. Johnson, The Long, Long War: Counterinsurgency in Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1966); John Cloake, Templer, Tiger of Malaya: The Life of Field Marshall Sir Gerald Templer (London: Harrap, 1985). 19  Time Magazine, 15 December, 1952.

106   Jeremy Kuzmarov the defeat of the leftist Hukbalahap, who threatened American access to air bases and investment opportunity in the Philippines.20 Leading the anti-​Japanese resistance during the Second World War and promoting needed agrarian reform, the Huks were thrust underground after nine of their leaders were barred from taking up their seats following election to public office.21 The key to Lansdale’s success was an effective public relations campaign which cast Filipino Defence Secretary and then President Ramon Magsaysay as a liberal reformer and populist who transformed the army into one with a ‘social conscience’ by partaking in civic action. The Economic Development Corps (EDCOR) offered amnesty to Huk defectors, implying immunity from criminal prosecution and torture, in return for a loan and a fifteen-​ acre plot of land in the province of Mindanao along with tools and seeds to grow crops, free transportation, schools, medical care, and clean water.22 The US at this time was supplying crates of weapons and advisory training through military specialists from Greece and Korea ‘expert in suppressing people’s movements’, as William Pomeroy, an American Second World War veteran and member of the Communist Party USA who defected to the Huks, put it. Magsaysay was known as an ‘outstanding Huk killer’ who had acquired expertise in guerrilla warfare fighting the Japanese in Second World War.23 With Lansdale’s approval, he appointed as a special adviser his former army commander Napoleon Valeriano, whom the Huks considered a ‘blood thirsty triggerman’ who caused the massacre of more than seventy civilians in San Il Defenso, Bulacan.24 Valeriano and Charles T.R. Bohannan in their 1962 book Counter-​Guerilla Operations: The Philippines Experience characterized EDCOR as an ‘advertising stunt’ whose ‘value in selling the good intentions of government to the governed was tremendous’.25 The authors doubted that more than 300 Huk families were resettled, though they could guarantee that at least 3,000 Huks surrendered. Huk defectors played a particularly crucial role as spies and in bounty-​hunter operations, which resulted in wide-​scale killing and the decimation of the Huk.26

20 

See Currey, The Unquiet American; Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War. Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 22  Robert Smith, The Hukbalahap Insurgency: Economic, Political and Military Factors (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1963), 108, 109; Alvin H. Scaff, The Philippine Answer to Communism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1955), 38, 112. 23  William Pomeroy, The Forest: A Personal Record of the Huk Guerrilla Struggle in the Philippines (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 79, 90. 24  Nick Cullather, Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States Philippines Relations, 1942–​1960 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994), 101; ‘Head Off the Fascist Offensive!’; ‘A New Year Message to the Philippines Army from the Hukbalahap’, American embassy, Manila, 9 February 1951, RG 59, Records of the Department of State, Philippines, 796.001, National Archives, College Park Maryland (NA), Box 4319; Sterling Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 147. Seagrave refers to Valeriano as ‘Lansdale’s chief peasant killer’. 25 Napolean D. Valeriano and Charles T.R. Bohannan, foreword by Kalev Sepp, Counter-​ Guerrilla Operations: The Philippines Experience (Westport, CT: Praeger Security, Classics of the Counterinsurgency Era, 2006 [1962]), 180. 26  Valeriano and Bohannan, Counter-​Guerrilla Operations, 140; McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, 114, 115; Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The U.S., the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 378. 21 See

American Counter-Insurgency   107 Historian Vina Lanzona, in an essay in Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency, emphasizes the displacement of communities in Huk-​ dominated Central Luzon Province through EDCOR and other resettlement schemes, which were part of a COIN strategy designed to isolate Huk guerrillas. The net effect, she writes, was that families were torn apart, children were abandoned by their parents, and women, more often than not, were left to sustain their families by themselves.27 An American missionary observer, Samuel Wells Stagg, stated that ‘he would not keep a pig under the conditions in which these people were forced to live. They had no shelter, no sanitary facilities, and the flies swarmed so thick that not a square inch of their food was free of them’.28 These conditions were suppressed as part of the carefully managed psychological warfare campaign, which extended to the American public. The US army has since produced over two dozen studies analysing the winning tactics employed by Magsaysay to help defeat the Huks.29 Colonel Kalev I. Sepp, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Special Operations, wrote in a new foreword to Valeriano and Bohannan’s Counter-​Guerrilla Operations: ‘In a time of global turmoil, in the age of the guerrilla, what could have been more useful than analysis of how a nascent democracy [Philippines under Magsaysay] reformed its army and police, rallied its people, and changed its policies to defeat an insurgency? In the 21st century these lessons remain important. And they will always be’.30 The Huks, however, sustained armed resistance into the late 1960s because the grievances of the peasant population, which sustained their insurgency, were addressed only superficially through EDCOR.31 The Philippines remained an American neo-​colony, hosting US military bases, providing a favourable investment climate for companies like Caltex, which established a refinery with capacity for producing 16,000 barrels of oil daily, and provided troops and training for covert operations across Southeast Asia.32 After Magsaysay died in a plane crash, the Philippines fell into dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos.33 The notion of an army with a social conscience advanced by Lansdale’s PR team and successful

27 Vina Lanzona, ‘The Philippines—​ “Engendering” Counterinsurgency: The Battle to Win the Hearts and Minds of Women During the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines’, in Gurman (ed.), Hearts and Minds, 74. 28  ‘Information to Department of State About the Huks Supplied by Correspondent of the Philippines Free Press’, 13 April 1950, RG 59, Records of the Department of State, 1950–​1954, Philippines, 796.00, National Archives, College Park Maryland (NA), box 4315. 29 Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 91. 30  Kalev I. Sepp, ‘Foreword’, in Valeriano and Bohannan, Counter-​Guerrilla Operations, x. 31 Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, 117. Draconian anti-​subversive laws remained a basis at that time for arresting and killing Huk leaders like Prudencio Opinianzo, who set up a successor organization called the Philippines for Poor Farmers. The demise of the Huk movement largely stemmed from internal weaknesses in the organization and an artificial economic boom bred by the Korean War, which boosted confidence in the government. See Cullather, Illusions of Influence, 91. 32  William Pomeroy, An American Made Tragedy: NeoColonialism and Dictatorship in the Philippines (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 27; Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen R. Shalom (eds.), The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987); David W. Conde, CIA—​Core of the Cancer (New Delhi: Entente Private Limited, 1970), 104; Memo from the Secretary of State to the ambassador in Manila on 22 June 1951, RG 59, Records of the Department of State, 796.001, NA, Box 4318 (on Caltex). 33  See Raymond Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator (New York: Vintage, 1988); Seagrave, The Marcos Dynasty.

108   Jeremy Kuzmarov counter-​insurgency became nothing more than an illusion; which was used to legitimize subsequent counter-​insurgency operations including in Vietnam.

The Kennedy Counter-​Insurgency Era Lansdale’s efforts in the Philippines helped to usher in the ‘counter-​insurgency era’ that reached its apex under the Kennedy administration during the early 1960s. The dashing young liberal leader considered guerrilla fighting a ‘special art’ and helped to inspire a new moral purpose behind US foreign policy, identifying ‘low-​profile, brushfire wars under Soviet sponsorship’ as a major new threat to the world’s balance of power. Kennedy’s advisers—​ the best and the brightest from Harvard and other Ivy League schools—​ encouraged greater funding for Third World militaries which they believed were best equipped to defeat left-​wing guerrillas and then facilitate the transition from traditional to dynamic modern economies integrated into global capitalism.34 According to National Security Council adviser Walt W. Rostow, communism was a disease of the transition to modernization that could be curtailed through the selective application of military force combined with ‘programs of village development, communications and indoctrination’. The latter were especially crucial in ‘preventing the emergence of the famous sea in which Mao tse-​Tung taught his men to swim’.35 (Mao was the famed Chinese revolutionary who had theorized about the importance of winning over peasant support through development programmes and agrarian collectivization.) Holding a ‘romantic fascination with guerrilla warfare’, Kennedy himself is alleged to have read the texts of Mao as well as Che Guevara and made sure that all State Department employees took a special counter-​ insurgency course before going to Third World countries.36 Kennedy also expanded support for the Green Berets (Special Forces) whom Newsweek described as ‘hard muscled wielders of knife and garrote teaching their back alley arts to fighters for freedom in the jungles of Southeast Asia, the savannas of Central Africa, wherever revolt and terror encroach’.37 In October 1961, Kennedy took White House reporters on a trip to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where Green Berets performed ambushes and ate snake meat.38 Subsequently,

34  Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 80; David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, anniversary edition (New York: Ballantine Books, 1993); Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and Nation Building in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 35  Walt W. Rostow, ‘Guerrilla Warfare in Underdeveloped Areas’, in Lt. Col. T.N. Greene (ed.), The Guerilla and How to Fight Him (New York: Praeger, 1962), 54–​61; Rostow also quoted in Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, 59. 36 Drinnon, Facing West, 365; Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, 80. 37  ‘Jungle Faculty’, Newsweek, 6 March 1961, 33; and Michael D. Gambone, Small Wars: Low-​Intensity Threats and the American Response Since Vietnam (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012), 27. 38 Russell Crandall, America’s Dirty Wars: Irregular Warfare From 1776 to the War on Terror (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 154; Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, 56. The high point of the day was an exhibition of a tiny rocket which when strapped to the back of a soldier enabled him to fly over obstacles and across streams in the style of a comic book hero.

American Counter-Insurgency   109 Kennedy established a Special Group on Counter-​Insurgency (CI), headed by his brother Robert, whose aim was to assure the use of American resources with maximum effectiveness in ‘preventing and resisting subversive insurgency’ across the globe.39 This was to be achieved through expanding economic aid programmes while training ‘tribal groups with an exploitable paramilitary capability’, including Montagnards in South Vietnam, the Hmong in Laos, and ethnic clans in Thailand, Colombia, Venezuela, and Iran.40 One of Camelot’s top counter-​insurgency enthusiasts, Roger ‘Tex’ Hilsman, was part of OSS Unit 101 that worked with the Kachin warriors in Burma.41 He said that the ‘best method to fight the guerrilla was to adopt the tactics of the guerrillas’. Hilsman also advocated for ‘political interference’ in countries threatened by communism by encouraging reformers to organize mass parties, by creating citizen militias, and in ‘broadening the will and capacity of friendly governments to augment social and political reform programmes as a basis for modernization’.42 This prescription, however, threatened to undercut the very success of counter-​insurgency operations because it smacked too much of colonialism, and the friendly government could be discredited if it was associated too much with foreign interests. The dark side of counter-​insurgency was evident in Laos, where America’s Hmong warriors issued bounties for enemy ears, and in Colombia, where Plan Lazo combined military civic action programmes (public works, irrigation, health, and literacy projects) with the formation of ‘hunter killer’ death squads under the direction of General William Yarborough.43 The infatuation with knowledge production and total surveillance in COIN was reflected in the creation of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Office of Public Safety (OPS), whose purpose was to upgrade police telecommunications and filing systems and import modern police technologies to regimes that were fighting anticommunist guerrillas.44 Robert Komer, a CI member, said that the police were ‘more valuable than Special Forces in our global counter-​insurgency efforts’ and particularly useful in fighting urban insurrection. ‘We get more from the police in terms of preventive medicine than from any single U.S. program . . . they are cost-​effective while not going for fancy military hardware . . . They provide the first line of defense against demonstrations, riots, and local insurrections. Only when the situation gets out of hand [as in South Vietnam] does the military have to be called in’.45 This analysis assumed that the government supported by the US were viewed legitimately by their people and rioters illegitimately—​which was not always the case. Charles Maechling Jr., staff director for the CI, acknowledged that in ‘failing to insist on even rudimentary standards of criminal justice and civil rights, the United States provided regimes having only a façade of constitutional safeguards with updated law enforcement machinery readily

39 McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft, 161. 40 Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, 132. 41 

See Roger Hilsman, American Guerrilla: My War Behind Japanese Lines (New York: Brassey’s, 1990).

42 Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, 61, 62; Hilsman, American Guerrilla, 264.

43  See Forrest Hylton, ‘Plan Colombia: The Measure of Success’, The Brown Journal of World Affairs, 17/​1 (Fall/​Winter 2010), 104, 105; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drugs Trade, rev. ed. (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003); Roger Warner, Shooting at the Moon: The Story of America’s Clandestine War in Laos (Lebanon New Hampshire: Sterrforth, 1998). 44 Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression. 45  Ibid., 11, 12.

110   Jeremy Kuzmarov adaptable to political intimidation and state terrorism. Record keeping in particular was immediately put to use in tracking down student radicals and union organizers’.46

‘Trying To Be Good Colonialists’: Counter-​ Insurgency and Vietnam Vietnam was the greatest showcase for counter-​ insurgency during the Camelot era. The Kennedy administration increased counter-​insurgency weapons research there by over $100 million and authorized an increase of Special Forces (Green Berets), providing helicopters, light aviation, and transport equipment, and personnel ‘for aerial reconnaissance, instruction in and execution of air-​ground support and special intelligence’.47 These initiatives built off previous efforts by Edward Lansdale and his associates to try and stabilize the regime of Catholic anticommunist Ngo Dinh Diem, who was envisioned as the next Magsaysay.48 American strategic planners wanted a strong anticommunist South Vietnam to provide a strategic counterweight to Chinese power and wanted its economy, like that of Korea, to be connected with Japan, a key junior partner in the Cold War.49 The South Vietnam-​based National Liberation Front (NLF) was formed after the US had failed to allow for elections mandated under the Geneva Accords to unify the country. Dwight Eisenhower had reported in his memoir that he knew North Vietnamese revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, who had led the long liberation war against France, would win these elections by 80% of the vote.50 Compared especially to Ho, Diem lacked much political legitimacy as he favoured Catholics over the dominant Buddhist majority, had sat out the anti-​French war in exile, and adopted an arcane philosophy called personalism that lacked appeal to the masses.51 In a futile attempt to bolster Diem’s rule and undermine Ho Chi Minh and the NLF, Lansdale’s country team spread false rumours of Vietminh atrocities, organized a fake resistance movement in North Vietnam, and devised a public relations campaign in which northern defectors were given ‘forty acres’ of land to settle on in South Vietnam and a mule.52 Lansdale further coordinated a ‘Denunciation of the communist campaign’, which provided cash rewards to residents who turned in their neighbours. Paul Harwood, CIA chief of covert action, lamented that this campaign was infused with a ‘totalitarian spirit’, because of the influence of ex-​Vietminh defectors recruited by the CIA who adopted ‘Vietminh methods’ 46 

Ibid., 12. Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture (Boston: South End Press, 1993). 48 Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War. 49  See Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973). 50  See George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). 51  Numerous books have detailed Diem’s political failings, including recently Phillip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003) and Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 52 Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War. 47 See

American Counter-Insurgency   111 like the establishment of armed propaganda teams and detention and torture of dissidents, which helped turn the population against the government.53 Some scholars of the Vietnam War emphasizing the importance of Vietnamese agency argue that Diem pushed civic action teams under the advice of a former Vietminh agent.54 Whatever the case, the Denounce the Communist Campaign set the groundwork for Chieu Hoi (‘Movement to Regroup Misled Members of the Resistance’ or ‘Open Arms’), a key dimension of counter-​insurgency which was instituted in April 1963 under the guidance of CIA agent Rufus Phillips, a Lansdale protégé. Modelled after the Philippines’ EDCOR, NLF insurgents were given access to jobs, land, or cash rewards under this programme if they defected to the government. Many Hoi Chanh were recruited into the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) to serve as penetration agents and scouts. Tellingly, they were given the nickname ‘Kit Carsons’, after the Navajo agent who fought for white settlers in the era of the California Gold Rush.55 The theme song of Chieu Hoi cleverly centred on the theme of a bird flying home to his family nest. The programme’s seal adopted the symbol of a white peace dove, reinforcing an aura of humanitarianism.56 In his second tour in Vietnam after a period planning clandestine operations targeting Cuba, Lansdale brought some of his former associates in the Philippines to work on Chieu Hoi, including Charles T.R. Bohannan, who drew on his experience with EDCOR. Sir Robert Thompson, who oversaw British counter-​insurgency policies in Malaya and was another key adviser to Diem, considered Chieu Hoi vital in recruiting intelligence assets. Thompson wrote in his 1966 book, Defeating Communist Insurgency, that the ‘natural cupidity of many members of the population soon involves them in the hunt, particularly if they know that their identity will not be revealed and that they will be paid in cash in accordance with the results’.57 These comments epitomize a cynical view of human nature, which underestimated the principled commitment of NLF fighters and Vietnamese who had struggled for decades to achieve national independence.58 In another passage, Thompson claimed that ‘the predeliction of some insurgent leaders for

53 Thomas

L. Ahern Jr., ‘Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954–​1963’, Center for the Study of Intelligence, https://​arch​ive.org/​str​eam/​CIAAndTheHouseOfNgoCov​ertA​ctio​nInS​outh​Viet​nam1​954-​ 1963/​Viet​nam%20Hi​stor​ies%202%20-​%20CIA%20and%20the%20Ho​use%20of%20Ngo%20-​%20Cov​ ert%20Act​ion%20in%20So​uth%20Viet​nam,%201​954-​1963_​d​jvu.txt; Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 27. Other state security agents were sent for training in Philippines. 54  See Geoffrey C. Stewart, ‘Hearts, Minds and Công Dân Vụ: The Special Commissariat for Civic Action and Nation-​Building in Diệm’s Vietnam, 1955–​1957’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 6/​3 (Fall 2011), 44–​100; Miller, Misalliance. 55  On Carson, see Hampton Sides, Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). 56  The theme song can still be viewed on YouTube, though it is banned by the communist government, https://​www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​r8Y2​4LKM​Ro0&feat​ure=​youtu.be. See also SGM Herbert A. Friedman, ret. ‘The Chieu Hoi Program of Vietnam’, http://​www.psy​warr​ior.com/​Chie​uHoi​Prog​ ram.html. 57 Sir Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam (New York: Praeger, 1966), 88; J.A. Koch, ‘The Chieu Hoi Program in South Vietnam 1963–​1971’, Report Prepared for Advanced Research Projects Agency, January 1973, R-​1172-​ARPA. 58  See Truong Nhu Tang, A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (New York: Vintage, 1986).

112   Jeremy Kuzmarov either brandy or girls can provide plenty of scope for psywar experts and artists’.59 This is the same means by which white colonizers bought off native and African chiefs in the classic era of colonialism. The non-​military dimensions of counter-​insurgency were carried out under the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), which at its heyday in 1969 had a staff of 6,500 US military and 1,100 civilian personnel and a budget of over $500 million in US funds, plus matching Vietnamese funds.60 At the heart of its activity was the effort to monitor and control the population through creation of a family census and resource control programme and issuance of identity cards, as in Malaya, which were scrutinized at police checkpoints.61 Secret police would access people’s homes in an attempt to gain information on their political affiliation through participation in public health initiatives, which were part of larger rural development programmes designed to win the people over to the government’s side.62 The USAID was tasked with trying to professionalize the police force and manage the prison system, where rehabilitation programmes were enacted that would encourage defection. However, a surplus of political prisoners combined with corruption in the South Vietnamese army undercut these latter efforts, and prison conditions were nightmarish. One public safety officer lamented that ‘political education cannot occur until you enable a man to sleep away from his own urine and feces, give him wholesome food and the opportunity for rehabilitation’.63 Efforts to promote political reform and clean elections as a crucial dimension of COIN similarly failed and were largely insincere. When future president Richard Nixon visited Saigon in 1966, Lansdale told him they were hoping the forthcoming elections would be ‘the most honest ever held in Vietnam’. Nixon replied, with a wink and laugh: ‘oh sure, honest yes, honest. That’s right, so long as you win!’ America’s favoured candidate Nguyen Van Thieu later ran unopposed after rigging the rules for candidate eligibility. National Security adviser Henry Kissinger stated that ‘while Thieu’s methods were unwise, neither Nixon or I was willing to toss [him] to the wolves’.64 On 10 May 1967, Army Captain Howard Levy was court martialled and sentenced to twenty-​six months in federal prison for refusing to teach medicine to Green Berets whom he identified as ‘killers of peasants and murderers of women and children’. Dr. Levy stated that while they were administering simple vaccines to Vietnamese children, the United States was bombing their villages.65 Levy’s dissent reflected a recognition of the political imperative underlying the army civic actions programmes and their contributions to the destruction of 59 Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency, 94. 60 

Robert Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1972), 123. See Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression; Clutterbuck, The Long, Long War. 62 Testimony, Ngo Vinh Long, MIT Symposium on the 30th Anniversary of the End of the Vietnam War, Boston, Massachusetts, 30 April 2005; Hannah Gurman, ‘Vietnam: Uprooting the Revolution: Counterinsurgency in Vietnam’, in Gurman (ed.), Hearts and Minds, 77–​104. 63 Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, 157. 64 Rufus Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008), 293, 300, 301. 65  Robert N. Strassfield, ‘Vietnam War on Trial: The Court Martial of Dr. Howard Levy’, Wisconsin Law Review, 839 (1994); David Zeiger, Sir No Sir! The Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War (Displaced Films, 2005). 61 

American Counter-Insurgency   113 Vietnam’s peasant society. Daniel Ellsberg, a member of Lansdale’s country team who leaked a secret planning blueprint after turning against the war, stated that ‘good colonialists was what we were all trying to be . . . It was and is, the wrong aspiration to have’.66

The Phoenix Program and End of an Illusion Following the 1968 Tet offensive, Chieu Hoi was integrated into the deadly Phung Hoang, or Phoenix Program, named after a mythical all-​seeing bird which selectively snatches its prey. Financed by USAID and the CIA partially through illicit means, the aim of Phoenix was to better coordinate intelligence and destroy the Vietcong leadership through carefully calibrated policing operations that would avoid extensive collateral damage. A gamut of psychological warfare tactics were employed, including the use of wanted posters, disguises, warning leaflets, and hanging victims on hooks for intimidation.67 Hoi Chanh defectors were crucial to Phoenix as members of the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) which hunted the ‘Vietcong’. They provided intelligence, and served as PRU interrogators and penetration agents in the attempt to counter the Vietcong’s successful infiltration of the Government of Vietnam (GVN) security forces.68 At the top of the Special Branch’s recruitment list were victims of Vietcong atrocities along with ethnic minorities and men with criminal proclivities who could be useful in the dirty work of counter-​insurgency. Some committed atrocities disguised as Vietcong as part of what historian Douglas Valentine terms the ‘ultimate form of psy-​war’, whose goal was to ‘reinforce negative stereotypes of the Vietcong’.69 Political scientists Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew A. Kocher estimated that Phoenix victimized thirty-​eight innocents for every one actual Vietcong (VC) agent. NLF leaders could evade capture by having access to safe houses and the support of a well-​developed political infrastructure.70 Phoenix operatives also used the programme to settle personal scores, fitting a pattern of colonial counter-​insurgency in which local actors ‘bent and twisted imperial military ambition to suit their localized agendas’, as two historians wrote.71 The net effect was to divide Vietnamese society and create a vicious cycle of violence that extended past the war when GVN loyalists were sent to re-​education camps.72

66 

Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, 440.

67 Valentine, The Phoenix Program. 68  Ibid.;

Douglas Valentine, The CIA as Organized Crime (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017), 121; Tang, A Vietcong Memoir. 69 Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 107, 108. See also Anthony Herbert, Soldier (New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1973), 105–​106. 70  Stathis N. Kalyves and Matthew Adam Kocher, ‘How “Free” is Free Riding in Civil Wars? Violence, Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem’, World Politics, 59/​2 (January 2007), 201; Ralph W. McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983), 156. 71  David L. Anderson and Adam Branch (eds.), Allies and the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1946–​1976 (London: Routledge, 2017), 6. 72  See Tiziano Terzani, Gia Phong (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977); Ginetta Sagan and Stephen Denney, ‘Reeducation in Unliberated Vietnam: Loneliness, Suffering and Death’, Indochina Newsletter, October–​November 1982, https://​indom​emoi​res.hyp​othe​ses.org/​2388.

114   Jeremy Kuzmarov During the early 1970s, the American antiwar movement caught wind of Phoenix as journalists published numerous exposés detailing the excesses of the programme, which was characterized by a senior North Vietnamese officer as ‘devious and cruel’.73 The United States by this point had lost the political and information war and was on its way to defeat. According to journalist Michael Herr, COIN specialists like Lansdale, on their second and third tours in Vietnam, ‘seemed like the saddest casualties of the 1960s. All the promise of good service on the frontier either gone or surviving like the vaguest salvages of a dream, still in love with their dead leader [Kennedy], blown away in his prime and theirs’.74 Herr wrote that ‘when he asked a “spook” what all the fashionable jargon meant—​from frontier sealing, census grievance, black operation, revolutionary development, and armed propaganda—​“the spook just smiled” ’.75 He understood that the fancy double-​speak at the heart of counter-​insurgency discourse was hollow and designed to give off a superficial intellectual and humanitarian veneer.

Counter-​Insurgency’s Rebirth Counter-​insurgency experienced a rebirth in the Reagan era where it was rebranded as ‘low intensity warfare’; a new magic formula for victory against communist forces. Many in the political establishment felt that El Salvador, where America supported government forces fighting the leftist Farabundo Marti Liberation Movement (FMLN), offered an opportunity to get COIN right. A heavy priority was placed on the political component of COIN by trying to reform the Salvadoran military, stabilize and legitimize the government, and make the economy work better for everyone. To accomplish these latter ends, Washington groomed a new officer corps that advanced through merit and sponsored elections and adopted a Vietnam style civic action programme in which soldiers helped provide economic aid and medical care in the countryside.76 An expansive psychological warfare programme was also adopted under the recommendation of an elderly Lansdale, who was invited to take part in a Pentagon conference on Central America in May 1984.77 Politically, Washington supported the centrist Christian Democratic Party over the far-​ right National Republican Alliance (ARENA), encouraging its leaders to promote land reform and other liberal policies. However, this latter strategy failed to create a more humane 73 

William Rosenau and Austin Lang, ‘The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency’, (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009), 14. A prominent journalistic exposé was Georgie Ann Geyer, ‘The CIA’s Hired Killers’, True Magazine, February 1970. 74  Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 52. 75  Ibid., 52. 76 Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 101, 102; Brian D’Haeseleer, The Salvadoran Crucible: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency in El Salvador, 1979–​1992 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2017). 77 Currey, Edward Lansdale, 346. Lansdale criticized the sending of heavy weapons, recommended more use of the Salvadoran infantry, and voiced approval at one of his peers who stated that ‘bombers are no damn good in a guerrilla war’.

American Counter-Insurgency   115 environment as the army threatened the Christian Democrats with a coup if they prosecuted members of the military for human rights violations. The land reform further militarized the Salvadoran countryside and subsidized repression by inserting government forces into strategic guerrilla-​held zones and contested areas to supply a ‘security’ shield for the projects, which a classified cable from the US embassy acknowledged proved ‘illusory as a means either of producing greater national wealth or better distributing it’.78 The FMLN had taken to guerilla struggle following the March 1980 murder of the Archbishop Oscar Romero, who had been a voice for El Salvador’s poor.79 In December 1981, the American trained Atlcatl Battalion massacred over 800 people in the village of El Mozote, the largest massacre in Latin American history. An American adviser explained the strategy of drying those areas (‘infected by communism’) up. ‘You know you’re not going to be able to work with the civilian population up there’, he said, ‘you’re never going to get a permanent base there. So you just decide to kill everybody. That’ll scare everyone else out of the zone’.80 These comments show the dark underside of US military policy, which the rhetoric of COIN helped to masquerade.

The Army Counter-​Insurgency Manual and War on Terror With the FMLN ultimately defeated, El Salvador alongside the Philippines and Vietnam came to serve as important models for counter-​insurgency operations in the Global War on Terror, which were led by many of the same people.81 James Steele, for example, who headed a group of Special Forces advisers in El Salvador, served as Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s personal envoy to Iraq’s special police commandos, which came to function as Shia death squads following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Sunni regime. Steele was close with David Petraeus, the head of US forces in Iraq, from the time they had served together in El Salvador.82 78 Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 102; Daniel Siegel and Joy Hackel, ‘El Salvador: Counterinsurgency Revisited’, in Michael T. Klare and Peter Kornbluh (eds.), Low Intensity Warfare: Counterinsurgency, Proinsurgency and Antiterrorism in the Eighties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 127. 79  Elizabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2. American counter-​insurgency policy in El Salvador in the 1980s ran parallel to Guatemala, where the army, with US encouragement, announced a ‘beans and rifles’ programme, which offered food and medical aid to Quiche Indian refugees in the Ixil triangle of Quiche and protection to campesinos who cooperated with the government combined with scorched earth policies against those who resisted. Later, Guatemala’s leader, Efrain Rios Montt, was convicted by a Guatemalan court of crimes against humanity: Kate Doyle (ed.), ‘The Final Battle: Ríos Montt’s Counterinsurgency Campaign: U.S. and Guatemalan Documents Describe the Strategy Behind Scorched Earth’, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 425, 9 May 2013, https://​nsa​rchi​ ve2.gwu.edu/​NSA​EBB/​NSAEBB​425/​. 80  Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 52. 81 Grandin, Empire’s Workshop. For the claim that El Salvador was a success, see Kalev I. Sepp, ‘Best Practices in Counterinsurgency’, Military Review (May–​June 2001), 8–​12. 82 Grandin, Empire’s Workshop; Mona Mahmood et al., ‘From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington’s man behind brutal police squads’, The Guardian, 6 March 2013. Some of the counter-​insurgents’ careers went

116   Jeremy Kuzmarov President George W. Bush had called on Petraeus to bring back counter-​insurgency to salvage the American war effort in Iraq. As head of the army’s Command and Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Petraeus had directed the writing of the US Army/​Marine Counter-​ insurgency [COIN] Field Manual (FM 3–​24), which came to hold a spot in Amazon’s Top 100 list. It announced the arrival of an age of ‘internal’ or ‘irregular wars’ in which success would not be determined by military might alone, but instead by winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people. To achieve this, COIN had to focus on the needs and interests of the civilian population by providing effective security and other services like electricity, irrigation, health care, schooling, and roads. The role of counter-​insurgents was to ‘protect the people’ from terrorists and function as ‘goodwill ambassadors’.83 In an effective stroke of public relations, the foreword to the new manual was written by the Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University, Sarah Sewall, who took the opportunity to take a jab at pacifists, writing that ‘most of us, however, reluctantly, accept war as necessary’. Sewall went on to create a false dichotomy of civility and savagery which harked back to the age of the Indian Wars by contrasting the insurgents’ alleged ‘eagerness to kill civilians’ with Americans’ ‘cognizance of international rights standards’.84 A cornerstone of the COIN programme were the human terrain teams, which embedded anthropologists and social scientists with ground troops in order to better understand Afghanistan’s and Iraq’s tribal cultures. The smart cards they issued, however, were often superficial, and a programme of engaging with tribal chiefs was cut.85 Few of the soldiers served long enough also to learn the local languages. The COIN manual meanwhile rationalized paramilitary police operations, drone strikes, and the assassination of insurgent leaders who did not respond to American goodwill overtures. General Stanley McChrystal, who headed these operations, was chillingly described by a senior Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official as an ‘expert killer’.86 He held much in common with Edward Lansdale, the COIN guru who had been known for macabre tactics in the Philippines and Vietnam back to the 1960s. Don Bordenkircher, for example, had run the Con Son prison in Vietnam and was tasked with reforming the Abu Ghraib prison after the infamous torture scandal in Iraq. Adolph Saenz, who worked with the Border Police in Iraq, had served with USAID’s OPS in Latin America and hunted Che Guevara in Bolivia. 83 

‘Introduction’, in Gurman (ed.), Hearts and Minds, 1. Sewall, ‘Introduction to the University of Chicago Press Edition: A Radical Field Manual’, The U.S. Army Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3–​24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3–​33.5 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), xxxiv. Many would not accept war as necessary when it is not based on tangible national security interests and is sold through misinformation. Sewall fails to acknowledge furthermore that the United States itself was not always acting under ‘proper international rights standards’, including in its wide killing of civilians and promotion of torture. 85  Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–​2014 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2014); Rochelle Davis, ‘Culture as a Weapon System’, Middle East Report, 9/​11 (Summer 2010) ; Mark Price, Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of a Militarized State (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011). On the cutting of the tribal engagement programme and dismissal of a soldier who supported it, see Ann Scott Tyson, American Spartan: The Promise, The Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant (New York: William Morrow, 2014). 86 Gurman (ed.), Hearts and Minds, 5; Phyllis Bennis, ‘Afghanistan’, in Julian Assange (ed.), The Wikileaks Files: The World According to U.S. Empire (London: Verso, 2016), 384. 84  Sarah

American Counter-Insurgency   117 such as the vampire trick, in which his country team would capture a guerrilla commander, drain his body of blood, and then string him up on a hook in the town village as an act of intimidation.87 The contradictions of COIN played out in the much-​publicized counter-​insurgency campaigns in Marjah and Kandahar in southern Afghanistan in 2010, which had been advertised as models of ‘population-​centric’ or people-​centred COIN. These, however, produced only limited security gains, but a wide range of grievances resulting from the razing of villages and displacement of thousands of people, including an estimated 3,461 families around Marjah.88 The United States ultimately failed to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people or build effective democratic institutions in either Afghanistan or Iraq, which devolved into Vietnam-​style quagmires. Yet again, the rhetoric of COIN had helped to sanitize military operations that were driven by the pursuit of classical imperialist aims—​including access to oil and expanding the American network of military bases, which triggered sustained opposition among locals and violent radicalization.

Conclusion In his 1977 book The Counterinsurgency Era, Douglas Blaufarb, the CIA station chief in Laos during the heart of the Indochina wars, sought to repudiate the idea that counter-​insurgency was simply another name for counter-​revolution. Rather, he said, as ‘conceived and carried out by the Kennedy administration’, it was ‘intended as a means of encouraging the inevitable and sometimes violent changes taking place in the underdeveloped world to take a democratic and libertarian direction’.89 Unfortunately, in practice, counter-​ insurgency did not often achieve these latter ends. While the insurgencies the US were combating often adopted brutal methods, many had developed as a result of the failure of democratic structures, vast social inequality, and/​or foreign political manipulation. The goal of COIN was always to isolate the insurgency by winning over mass support through economic aid and nation-​building programmes. Those who did not cooperate were to be eliminated surgically, with an attempt to minimize civilian casualties. At first a major showcase, Vietnam became the lesson of what not to do, because as Lansdale suggested, the US applied too much firepower and failed to effectively market its chosen leaders or enact beneficial economic reforms. Many of the failings of the Vietnam War were repeated, nevertheless, in Central America in the 1980s and then in the War on Terror. In all these cases, the US wound up losing the information war as the gap between the rhetoric and reality was clear for too many people to see. In the future, COIN theory will surely again be dusted off the shelf. The prospect that it will be successful is quite unlikely, unless world political circumstances and the goals of US foreign policy change.

87 

See Nashel, Edward Lansdale’s Cold War. Gurman (ed.), Hearts and Minds, 4. 89 Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, 88. 88 

118   Jeremy Kuzmarov

Select Bibliography Blaufarb, Douglas, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York: The Free Press, 1977). Currey, Cecil B., Edward Lansdale: The Unquiet American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). D’Haeseleer, Brian, The Salvadoran Crucible: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency in El Salvador, 1979–​1992 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2017). Gambone, Michael D., Small Wars: Low-​Intensity Threats and the American Response Since Vietnam (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2012). Gurman, Hannah (ed.), Hearts and Minds: A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013). Kuzmarov, Jeremy, ‘Under the Façade of Benevolence: Psywar, Amnesty and Defectors in America’s Asia Wars’, The International History Review (September 2019). Kuzmarov, Jeremy, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). Magid, Paul, The Gray Fox: George Crook and the Indian Wars (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015). McClintock, Michael, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Counter-​Terrorism, 1940–​1990 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992). McCoy, Alfred W., Policing America’s Empire: The U.S., the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). Petraeus, David H. et al., U.S. Army U.S. Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Signalman Publishing, 2009). U.S. Marine Corps, Small Wars Manual, Department of the Navy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940). Valentine, Douglas, The Phoenix Program (New York: William Morrow, 1990). Valeriano, Napoleon D., and Charles T.R. Bohannan, foreword by Kalev Sepp, Counter-​ Guerrilla Operations: The Philippines Experience (Westport, CT: Praeger Security, Classics of the Counterinsurgency Era, 2006, 1962).

Chapter 6

Sou rces, M et h od s , and the Viol e nc e of In su rgency in Nort h e rn Irel and Rachel Caroline Kowalski What is the Study of Violence? Many prominent philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists have sought to define and redefine the concept of violence in the last half-​century.1 Today, violence is a broadly defined phenomena widely considered to include the actual or threatened use of physical force or power with the intention of inflicting physical harm (injury or death), psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation upon an individual, group, or community.2 Collectively scholars have examined violence in its many manifest forms: from aggravation, to outbreak, to cessation, and the aftermath; at the individual, local, national, and global scale, across different periods of time, in various parts of the globe; via different medium of human record, and through different disciplinary lenses.3 This chapter is primarily focused on violence that takes the form of physical force; though it should be noted that Irish republican insurgents have also manifested intimidation, fear, and coercion in the past century via the threat or example of violence.

1  See

for instance: Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970); Diego Muro-​ Ruiz, ‘State of the Art: The Logic of Violence’, Politics, 22/​2 (2002), 109–​117; Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-​sociological Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Richard Bessel, Violence: A Modern Obsession (London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015), 11–​18; Philip Dwyer, ‘Violence and its Histories: Meanings, Methods, Problems’, History and Theory, Theme Issue 55 (December 2017), 7–​22. 2  E.G. Krug et al. (eds.), World Report on Violence and Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2002), 5. 3 Bessel, Violence: A Modern Obsession, 11–​18.

120   Rachel Caroline Kowalski Studies of violence have involved a variety of methods of collecting, examining, or analysing evidence.4 The basic format of violence research is generalizable: a topic of inquiry, open research question, or falsifiable hypothesis is selected, and a suitable sample of source material is established and examined, before conclusions are drawn by surmising what can reasonably be inferred from the sum of the evidence.5 But the scale, scope, and character of each research project will vary depending on the aims or purpose of the work, the interests or skillset of the researcher(s) involved, and the sources and resources that are available for the project.6 The sample of evidence that is selected and surveyed for each project will differ in volume and detail.7 The number of cases—​bounded entities such as individuals, organizations, or nation-​states, which can be observed spatially and/​or temporally—​that are included in a study can be vast; or research may focus on an in-​depth analysis of a single case study or contained comparison of a small sample of cases. Cases may be observed at regular or sparse intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly, for example) over a relatively short or comparatively long period of time. A single institution, organization, or country may serve as a case study that is observed at the local, regional, or national level, or multiple cases could be compared at the same level of spatial analysis. And any number of internal or external factors or variables may be considered. The sources of information which may be available to research in any given topic can vary in volume and character, but can generally be defined as falling into one of two categories: quantitative or qualitative.8 Quantitative research is the systematic empirical investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical, or computational techniques. Sources may include new or pre-​existing datasets of various sizes and scales. Qualitative research, by contrast, is the observation of various visual, literary, or oral sources to gather non-​numerical data. Sources may be historic records, such as archival material, interview recordings, film, photography, biographical material; or researchers may collect new qualitive evidence by conducting in-​depth interviews, participant observation, or ethnographic field research. Projects can be large, small, mono-​method, or involve a combination of quantitative and qualitative work depending on the relevant abundance or scarcity of research time, funding, or source material that is available.9 All research projects—​large and small, quantitative and qualitative—​can provide valuable insight and enrich the literature of violence and colonial insurgency. To be sure, different types of evidence provide the researcher with different opportunities, and there are distinct benefits to surveying a sample that provides either a depth or breadth of coverage. There can, however, be equal and opposite disadvantages or drawbacks to different ways of working that need to be considered and accounted for. 4  Todd Landman and Edzia Carvalho, Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). 5 John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge University Press, Online publication date: February 2019), 65; G. King, R.O. Keohane, and S. Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 6  David Skarbek, ‘Qualitative Research Methods for Institutional Analysis’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 16/​4 (2020), 5–​6, published online, doi:10.1017/​S174413741900078X. 7  Ibid., 5–​6. 8  Landman and Carvalho, Issues and Methods. 9  Skarbek, ‘Qualitative Research Methods’, 5–​6.

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    121 Primary source material may contain silences, gaps, or biases, or lack the vital detail and context necessary to represent the topic. The sample of evidence that is selected will shape the nature of the outcome of the project. A research project could yield research findings that range anywhere from hypothetical or indicative, to relatively determined or proven, depending on how comprehensively the evidence surveyed can represent the subject. Researchers can improve the representativeness and reliability of the inferences they draw by cross-​referencing multiple sources of evidence, or ‘triangulation’. Or they can turn to the secondary literature to better understand how their research findings might be placed in context: to explore how the research findings of a micro investigation or macro model scale up or down respectively.10 Still, it is unlikely that any sample of evidence will truly epitomize the subject, and research claims may need to be qualified accordingly.11 This chapter argues, therefore, that it is perhaps more useful to consider academic ‘best practice’ as being about rigour and transparency, over a prescribed optimum sample of evidence or research method. For the accuracy of research-​based claims will always be subject to the quality of the sample of the evidence that is selected, and the critical analysis that is employed to interrogate it.12 This chapter will consider the various challenges and opportunities that are presented by different types of evidence—​quantitative or qualitative—​ and various intensity of focus—​at the macro, micro, or meso level. To do so, it will use the case study of the violence that was perpetrated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA).

The case study The PIRA was a paramilitary organization that participated in the conflict commonly known as the Northern Ireland Troubles (c.1969–​1998): three decades of fighting in and over Northern Ireland that began during the late 1960s when divergence over matters of identity, governance, and self-​determination manifested as sustained violent and non-​violent confrontation in the region.13 The conflict formally concluded with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. More than 3,700 individuals lost their lives during the conflict, and at least 47,000 others were injured. Casualties were incurred on all sides—​and among non-​combatants or civilians.14 Most violence occurred within the region, but the conflict did spread further afield to Great Britain, independent Ireland, and elsewhere in Europe, including Gibraltar and west Germany. The conflict has been aptly described by Richard English as resembling a ‘triangular war of attrition’.15 Indeed, the perpetrators can be grouped 10  Lars-​ Erik Cederman and Manuel Vogt, ‘Dynamics and Logics of Civil War’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 61/​9 (2017), 1992–​2016, 1998–​1999, 2007–​2008. 11 Ibid. 12  King et al., Designing Social Inquiry (1994); Skarbek, ‘Qualitative Research Methods’, 4–​5 13  Brendan O’Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume I: Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 92. 14 Ibid. 15 Richard English, ‘Explaining the Northern Ireland Troubles’, in Northern Ireland Community Relations Committee Council, What Made Now: Northern Ireland (Belfast: Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, 2008); Richard English, Armed Struggle (London: Macmillan, 2003).

122   Rachel Caroline Kowalski into approximately three categories: republican paramilitaries, loyalist paramilitaries, and the UK security forces. Each was represented by several and changing organizations that, at least in the case of the paramilitaries, were fissiparous and sometimes plagued by internecine rivalry. On 28 December 1969, a few months after violence first broke out in Northern Ireland, a clandestine paramilitary organization introducing themselves as the Provisional Irish Republican Army formally announced they had emerged as the latest group intent on serving the Irish nationalist cause in the republican tradition of armed struggle.16 The PIRA espoused an unwavering sense of their purpose, objectives, and methods. Their leaflets, posters, publications, and the statements they issued frame the conflict as an anti-​colonial insurgency, the PIRA as freedom fighters, and their armed struggle as necessary and ‘justified’.17 The PIRA attested the right of the Irish people to self-​determination, as well as the right to use force to reverse the partition of Ireland. The PIRA drew upon a long-​standing and evocative tradition when declaring its self-​perceived status as the government of the ‘republic’ and their indefeasible right, therefore, to apply violence.18 Moreover, they believed in the essential sovereignty of Ireland as a whole. They held that no interest group or minority was justified in denying complete unfettered Irish independence. Rather, they demanded the complete loyalty of all Irish citizens and maintained their prerogative to avenge any treachery in this regard.19 The PIRA sustained insurrection against the British state until 1997, interspersed with periods of ceasefire or truce in 1972, 1974–​1975, and between 1994 and 1996 (which were neither total nor complete). The initial focus of their armed struggle centred on serving as the defenders of the Catholic communities (in the north). By October 1970, however, the PIRA were sufficiently reorganized to begin moving onto the offensive. PIRA violence was aimed at different targets and was intended to serve different purposes or fulfil different objectives. Practically speaking, their bombs and bullets were intended to kill or harm targeted peoples, cause material damage to places and spaces, and expend the time and resources of the security services called into action to respond to them. More broadly, the killing or maiming of security force personnel, and the risk—​actual or threatened—​that PIRA violence posed to infrastructure, the economy, and civilian safety was intended to—​directly or indirectly—​ contribute to the realization of their objectives by coercion. The troubles in the north did not galvanize the whole island of Ireland in support of republican goals.20 This reality was gradually reflected in the political strategy of the PIRA and their political arm, Provisional Sinn Féin. For example, their 1971 Eire Nua (New Ireland) policy document proposed a nine-​county Ulster assembly (Dail Uladh) as a constituent of a federal united Ireland.21 The PIRA began engaging in secret talks with representatives

16 

Seán MacStiofáin, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Edinburgh: Gordon Cremonesi, 1975), 142. Ó Néill, Freedom Struggle by the Provisional IRA (Dublin: Irish Republican Publicity Bureau, 1973), 1–​8. 18  Marc Mulholland, Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 75. 19  Ibid., 65. 20  Ibid., 83. 21 Ibid. 17  P.

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    123 of the British government. Abstention was eventually abandoned, and the PIRA gradually redirected a greater proportion of their focus to their political strategy over time.22 In the latter part of their campaign the PIRA employed what they called a ‘tactical use of armed struggle’ (TUAS)—​a limited volume of acutely targeted and applied violence—​in a bid to add pressure to their political campaign; commonly referred to as their combined ‘Armalite and ballot box’ strategy.

Researching PIRA Violence To understand the character of the violence perpetrated by the PIRA is to think critically about how and why the organization decided to apply violence: their policies concerning targets and tactics, the extent to which these principles aligned with their actions, and the various factors which could and did shape or determine this. There is a vast array of primary source material—​both qualitative and quantitative—​available with which to do so. Qualitative source material including memoirs, oral history, newspapers, and state papers is in plentiful supply. Datasets are also comprehensively established and widely available for quantitative research: tables of data which count conflict-​related explosions, shootings, and associated fatalities by status type or religious grouping, for instance, are printed in multiple books, reported in open-​access archival material, and have been made freely available online.23 Each resource provides a different level of detail or coverage and contains insight into different perspectives or agenda, depending on the author and purpose of the record. Tremendous variation existed in the character and tone of the PIRA campaign; it changed over time, was regionally diverse, and contained numerous patterns, cycles, deviations, and aberrations. This is because the way in which PIRA violence was designed, occurred, was understood, and was remembered was determined by the coalescence of multiple and competing factors, exogenous and endogenous to the armed struggle. These include but are not limited to: the quality of PIRA recruitment and training, the degree of internal cohesion that existed within the PIRA including over matters of PIRA policy and practice, the volume and quality of weapons the PIRA had at their disposal, the level of support that was received or felt, the efficacy and resilience of British counter-​insurgency policy or practice, the strength of threat—​real or perceived—​to PIRA goals or authority that was sensed, the distinct characteristics of each PIRA target, or differences in local or regional demographics or topography. This variation can, however, be either absent in or obscured by any single source of evidence. Hence, it is important to think critically about the representativeness of the sample of evidence selected, and it may be necessary to account for any gaps and silences, or limit research claims accordingly.

22 O’Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume I, 65–​67. 23 

See, for instance: https://​cain.uls​ter.ac.uk/​ni/​secur​ity.htm

124   Rachel Caroline Kowalski

Quantitative Evidence, Macro-​L evel Analysis, and PIRA Violence Conflict data and quantitative research are invaluable assets for researching colonial insurgency. Macro models have been used, for instance, to explore the potential existence of a relationship between phenomena across a selection of countries, periods, or both;24 or to provide insight into the long-​term causes, effects, or legacies of historical phenomena, critical junctures, or turning points.25 Datasets come in all shapes and sizes and can bring opportunities or impose limitations correspondingly. When the sources and resources permit, conflict or other data can provide a highly detailed and representative sample of evidence which reflects the complexity of its subject. Conceptual disaggregation and precise measurement underpin the process of collecting this kind of data, which generally involves the researcher(s) spending a great deal of time meticulously combing detailed qualitative archival records. Rich, representative datasets of this nature can allow the researcher(s) to examine their subject at the meso level, which can provide—​among other things—​a greater depth of spatial analysis. It is likely that researchers would need to limit their project to a single or few case studies in order to achieve this depth of focus. For example, Caroline Beer and Neil Mitchell examine democracy and human rights across the states of India,26 and Yuri Zhukov considers the relationship between interdiction and reprisal violence against civilians in German-​occupied Belarus during the Second World War.27 However, by actively sacrificing breadth in favour of depth, a meso-​ level analysis can restore nuance to the subject matter at hand and allow systematic testing of hypotheses; a benefit which is distinct from the opportunities for theory development that are available via large-​N, macro-​level quantitative research projects. Large, multiple case study datasets (new or existing) are often preferred by those seeking to establish the ‘big picture’.28 This is because they allow the researcher(s) to interrogate a vast quantity of evidence or compare numerous cases simultaneously with statistical analyses. Doing so can prove a highly effective mechanism for tapping into a subject at the macro level, or, in other words, exploring how and why large-​scale structural movements generate individual-​level implications. To achieve this macro-​level analysis, however, the data is necessarily aggregate and acontextual.29 This means that our analysis of it can risk producing reductive mono-​causal explanations of complex phenomena, unless the micro foundations of the findings are reflected on and actively researched, or the claimed findings 24 

Landman and Carvalho, Issues and Methods, 318–​319. See, for instance: Stefano Costalli and Andrea Ruggeri, ‘The Long-​Term Electoral Legacies of Civil War in Young Democracies: Italy, 1946–​1968’, Comparative Political Studies, 52/​6 (2018), 927–​961; James Mahoney, ‘Path Dependence in Historical Sociology’, Theory and Society, 29/​4 (2000), 507–​548. 26  Caroline Beer and Neil J Mitchell, ‘Comparing Nations and States: Human Rights and Democracy in India’, Comparative Political Studies, 39/​8 (2006), 996–​1,018. 27 Yuri M. Zhukov, ‘External Resources and Indiscriminate Violence: Evidence from German-​ Occupied Belarus’, World Politics, 69/​1 (2017), 54–​97. 28  Skarbek, ‘Qualitative Research Methods’, 4–​5. 29 Cederman and Vogt, ‘Dynamics and Logics of Civil War’, 1992–​ 2016; Skarbek, ‘Qualitative Research Methods’, 1. 25 

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    125 are moderated, respectively. The applicability of the ‘democratic peace’ hypothesis that emerged from macro-​level studies of the relationship between regime change—​especially a transition to democracy—​and the likelihood of civil war, for example, has been called into question by scholars whose case study work highlights exceptions.30 Conflict data relating to various aspects of the Northern Ireland Troubles has been employed in quantitative analysis of PIRA violence or the wider conflict, or as part of a larger comparative study of political violence. Data which relates to PIRA violence can provide useful insight into the undulation of the conflict or give a sense of the changing intensity of the armed struggle over time. Quantitative evidence can also provide an overview of the extent to which the violence varied by region or placed pressure on different parts of the population. However, the data can also be incomplete or misleading without further information. The datasets commonly quoted or analysed tend to be of the large, aggregated, and acontextual variety and can prove to be a quite unrepresentative sample of evidence. For example, when non-​fatal incidents of PIRA violence are disproportionately or totally unaccounted for. The Global Terrorism Database includes just 4,098 incidents relating to the Northern Ireland Troubles (2,553 of which are attributed to the IRA).31 But the conflict—​ which claimed the lives of more than 3,700 people—​included over 36,000 shooting incidents and 10,000 explosions.32 A notable exception to this is coding of 5,461 incidents that involved a PIRA Improvised Explosive Device (IED), as part of the data-​driven ‘From Bomb to Bomb-​ Maker’ project, by Victor Asal, Paul Gill, R. Karl Rethemeyer, and John Horgan, the analysis of which revealed that only 8.7% of the incidents reviewed by the project team resulted in the death of one or more persons.33 Data which definitively disaggregates responsibility for the total volume of shooting and bombing attacks by perpetrator affiliation does not yet exist.34 But it only takes a simple cross reference of the conflict data that is widely available to gain an indication of the significance of non-​fatal violence to analyses of the organization. If we take the safe (under)estimation that the PIRA were responsible for at least half of the shooting attacks and explosions that occurred throughout the conflict, we discover that the organization perpetrated violence 30 See, for example, Bill Kissane, ‘Democratization, State Formation, and Civil War in Finland and Ireland: A Reflection on the Democratic Peace Hypothesis’, Comparative Political Studies, 37/​ 8 (2004), 969–​985 for Bill Kissane’s criticism of Håvard Hegre et al., ‘Towards a Democratic Civil Peace? Democracy, Political Change, and Civil War, 1816–​1992’, American Political Science Review, 95 (2001), 16–​33. 31 See: ‘Incidents relating to Northern Ireland between 1970 to 1998’, https://​www.start.umd.edu/​ gtd/​ s ea​ rch/​ R esu​ lts.aspx?sta​ r t_​ y​ e aro​ n ly=​ 1970&end_​ y​ e aro​ n ly= ​ 1998&sta​ r t_ ​ y​ e ar= ​ & star ​ t _ ​ mo​ nth=​ &start_ ​ d ay= ​ & end_ ​ y​ e ar= ​ & end_ ​ m o​ nth= ​ & end_ ​ d ay= ​ & asm ​ S ele ​ c t0= ​ & coun​ t ry= ​ 6 03&asm ​ S ele ​ c t1=​ &dtp2=​all&succ​ess=​yes&casu​alti​es_​t​ype=​b&cas​ualt​ies_​max=​; relating to the IRA, https://​www.start. umd.edu/​gtd/​sea​rch/​Resu​lts.aspx?sta​rt_​y​earo​nly=​1970&end_​y​earo​nly=​1998&sta​rt_​y​ear=​&star​t_​mo​ nth=​&start_​day=​&end_​y​ear=​&end_​mo​nth=​&end_​day=​&asm​Sele​ct0=​&coun​try=​603&perp​etra​tor=​ 417&dtp2=​all&succ​ess=​yes&casu​alti​es_​t​ype=​b&cas​ualt​ies_​max=​. 32  More than 15,000 bombs were planted, approximately two-​thirds of which exploded. See: Table NI-​ SEC-​06, ‘Security Related Incidents (Number) in Northern Ireland (Only), Shootings, Bombings, and Incendiaries, 1969 to 2003’ [Online], https://​cain.uls​ter.ac.uk/​ni/​secur​ity.htm , accessed 1 June 2019. 33  Victor Asal et al., ‘Killing Range: Explaining Lethality Variance within a Terrorist Organization’, Conflict Resolution, 59/​3 (2015), 401–​427. 34 R.W. White, Out of the Ashes: An Oral History of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Newbridge: Merrion Press, 2017), 153.

126   Rachel Caroline Kowalski with a low level of lethality. Indeed, based on the number of fatalities they caused we can see that fewer than 5% of bullets fired by PIRA, and fewer than 6% of the bombs they planted, resulted in deaths. The implication of this is that a fatality-​centric analysis of Provisional IRA violence is likely to be misleading without further qualification because fatal violence represents only a fraction of the PIRA’s activities. Datasets relating to the Northern Ireland conflict can also lack key information and detail about the events to which they relate. Data collected about the characteristics of the individuals who lost their lives to acts of PIRA violence, for instance, is insufficient to probe the perpetrators’ intentions, drill down into the detail of what can be quite distinct events, or offer any scope to disaggregate or differentiate between them. All of these are key elements of interpreting the meaning and significance of fatality statistics. For, as Richard Bessel observes, ‘it is worth considering how a corpse becomes a murder case’.35 The PIRA believed themselves to have the right to perpetrate both anti-​ property violence—​ attacks against economic targets and infrastructure—​ and anti-​ personnel violence—​attacks which target people.36 They were clear about who and what this violence could and would be directed towards. The organization made clear in their 1973 publication Freedom Struggle, for instance, that legitimate targets of assassination included ‘Crown Forces’—​members of British state security forces including various wings of the military and police forces, and seemingly extending at times to include prison officers and reserve, part-​ time, junior, or cadet military forces—​and ‘Collaborators’—​that is, individuals who were perceived to play an active role in furthering ‘the stranglehold of the enemy’. The booklet further explains that legitimate targets of anti-​property violence included the spaces in which the individuals on their list of so-​called legitimate targets dwelt, in addition to various elements of infrastructure.37 PIRA violence actually claimed the lives of 1,768 individuals, including 639 civilians, 454 members of the British Military Services, 181 members of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), 273 members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), 151 of the PIRA’s own members or other republican paramilitaries, thirty loyalist paramilitaries, and twenty prison officers.38 This widely available data immediately reveals that those who died as a result of PIRA violence exceeds the categories the organization defined as legitimate targets of assassination. To be sure, the majority of the 639 non-​combatants killed by PIRA bombs and bullets are not well described by the organization’s definition of a collaborator. But tables of aggregate data that chart who killed whom, and how many of which religion, do not give us a clear picture of the nature of the events in which individuals lost their lives or the character of the actions taken by the organizations who were responsible. Victim status—​combatant or non-​combatant, Protestant or Catholic—​is not a definitive indication of perpetrator motive. 35 Richard Bessel, ‘Assessing Violence in the Modern World’, Historical Reflections/​Réflexions Historiques, 44/​1 (2018), 68. 36  Provisional IRA, Freedom Struggle (London: Red Books, 1973), 1–​8. 37  In addition, the PIRA also employed their self-​ perceived status as the government of the ‘republic’ to justify their enforcement of martial law, for instance by punishing petty thieves, drug-​dealers, paedophiles, or those who were perceived to have ‘fraternized’ with the security forces, with beatings, kneecapping, tarring and feathering, or the shorning of hair. 38  See: Table 20, ‘Deaths for Which the IRA were Responsible’, in (David McKittrick et al., Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, revised and updated ed., (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Company, 2007), 1,562.

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    127 Hence, the aggregate statistic of civilian or other casualties can obscure the complexity of the subject. There is a myriad of reasons why civilians—​within and without the PIRA definition of a legitimate target—​fell victim to PIRA violence. Some were intentionally assassinated; most were not the target of the assault which killed them. In addition to targeting non-​combatants for their alleged ‘collaboration’, to a limited extent, the PIRA can be seen to have carried out sectarian assassinations: the killing of individuals targeted on the basis of their known or presumed ethno-​nationalist identity.39 These fatalities are among the most contentious events of the conflict, and sources relating to the incidents can be particularly scarce or opaque.40 Still, the sectarian assassinations attributed to the PIRA involved the intentional taking of life and can, therefore, be differentiated from other civilian fatalities that resulted from PIRA violence. Seeking to understand how and why the organization attempted and succeeded to kill those they targeted is an important element of researching PIRA violence. But it is also distinguishable from researching the ways in which non-​combatant fatalities resulted from PIRA inefficiency, negligence, or indifference towards civilian safety. And failure to disaggregate and differentiate the targeted assassination of civilians from collateral damage in our analysis of PIRA violence could be a reductive—​if not problematic—​way of assessing its impact on non-​combatants.41 Qualitative evidence can provide insight into the context and meaning behind the numbers and can open further avenues of inquiry into the subject. For, as David Skarbek attests, if we exclude qualitative evidence, we limit the scope of the questions we can ask of our subject because not everything is, of course, quantifiable.42

Qualitative Evidence, Micro-​L evel Analysis, and PIRA Violence Detailed qualitative evidence can allow researchers to uncover the inherent traits, characteristics, and qualities of the subject and can achieve a more a holistic interpretation. For instance, by seeking to establish all the factors which worked together to bring about a perceived change or turning point in history,43 or disaggregating different phases of 39  Henry

Patterson, ‘Sectarianism Revisited: The Provisional IRA Campaign in a Border Region of Northern Ireland’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 22/​3 (2010): 337–​356; Matthew Lewis and Shaun McDaid, ‘Bosnia on the Border? Republican Violence in Northern Ireland During the 1920s and 1970s’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 29/​4 (2017), 635–​655; Rachel Caroline Kowalski, ‘The Role of Sectarianism in the Provisional IRA Campaign, 1969–​1997’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 30/​4 (2018), 658–​683. 40  See, for instance, McKittrick et al., Lost Lives (2007), references 1,709–​7 10, 1,268, 1,743. 41  Victims of conflict that are killed despite not having been the primary target of the military operation or violent assault which killed them are commonly referred to in the literature as collateral damage. See, for instance: Adil Ahmad Haque, ‘Killing with Discrimination’, in Saba Bazagan-​Forward and Samuel C. Reckless (eds.), The Ethics of War: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 164–​181; Jack Macdonald, Enemies Known and Unknown (London: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2017), 202–​203. 42  Skarbek, ‘Qualitative Research Methods’, 1. 43  See, for instance, Laia Balcells, ‘Rivalry and Revenge: Violence against Civilians in Conventional Civil Wars’, International Studies Quarterly, 54 (2010), 291–​313, who considers the Spanish civil war—​the

128   Rachel Caroline Kowalski conflict—​pre-​war, origins, dynamics, end, and aftermath—​to expose temporal continuities or change which might otherwise have been obscured.44 Jelke Boesten weaves together and interacts with various theoretical debates on power, domination, sex, sexuality, and sexual identity by drawing upon extensive ethnographic work and oral testimony in her analysis of gender-​based and sexual violence and intersecting inequalities in Peru.45 Qualitative research projects can be relatively broad or confined in scale or scope. Some analyses are based on detailed and extensive comparison and are able, therefore, to achieve a meso-​level analysis of their subject. In other words, these rich and detailed works shed light on the complex relationship between militarized insurgency and the communities in which they are fought. Stathis Kalyvas’s work on the Greek Civil War demonstrates how fluid and changing local allegiances may be by deconstructing the conflict in granular detail.46 Others focus on a single case study or limited comparative study and may refer to the secondary literature for further context regarding, for example, how their findings may correlate with or stand against those of other scholars working in other fields. For instance, while the primary focus of Gemma Clark’s Everyday Violence in the Irish Civil War is a detailed study of events in three counties (Limerick, Tipperary, and Waterford), the author has established further context for the research findings by drawing comparison with contemporary violent practices—​especially arson—​in other counties in Ireland, as well as with those occurring in other times and places. When time, money, or qualitative evidence is scarce it may not be possible for the researcher to draw the aggregate implications of their micro findings. In such cases, it can become necessary to limit research claims to avoid conceptual stretching. Detailed qualitative sources of evidence can bring insight into the various ways PIRA violence was designed and occurred, and the various factors which played a role in shaping both. Rich material can provide key insights into the character of a single event: whether a PIRA attack was spontaneous or planned, precise or clumsy, accurate or bungled; whether those who died had been the intended target of an attack and if not, why it was that they fell victim to violence which had not been intended to kill them.47 By doing so, fine-​grained resources can even betray a sense of the extent to which the organization operated with an accurate or overinflated perception of their capacity for precision, or reveal what they were willing to risk or compromise in the pursuit of their goals. In other words, in-​depth case study research can illuminate the meaning behind the data, flesh-​out statistical analyses, and is a vital element of the process of establishing a picture of PIRA violence which represents the breadth of variety that characterized it. Rich primary sources tell us, for example, that attacks against military and police personnel—​on and off duty, on and off target—​required extensive forward planning, and inexhaustible reserves of patience. Sometimes the PIRA would have to wait for days, weeks, piece demonstrates that local political allegiances prior to the war affected the dynamics of violence in the conflict and explores the emotional mechanisms that triggered desire for revenge. 44 

Cederman et al., ‘Dynamics and Logics of Civil War’, 2006–​2007. Boesten, Sexual Violence During War and Peace: Gender, Power, and Post-​Conflict Justice in Peru (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Jelke Boesten, Intersecting Inequalities: Women and Social Policy in Peru, 1990–​2000 (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). 46  Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘“New” and “Old” Civil Wars: A Valid Distinction?’, World Politics, 54 (2001), 109–​110. 47  A.R. Oppenheimer, IRA: The Bombs and the Bullets: A History of Deadly Ingenuity (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009). 45  Jelke

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    129 or months at a time, before their intended target would unwittingly manoeuvre themselves within fatal proximity of the trap laid for them. It would have taken the PIRA a number of hours and several trips even to bury and conceal the 500lb explosive device that killed multiple members of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders on 10 September 1972 as it exploded beneath their Saracen armoured truck, as well as the 500 metres of command wire which trailed from the bomb across fields to the PIRA member who clicked the button that detonated it remotely.48 Far less force was required to kill those who were targeted when they were unarmed or unprotected by the shell of a militarized vehicle or fortified base. As equally ‘soft targets’, therefore, the PIRA could attack and kill both collaborators and off-​duty security force personnel using less powerful guns and bombs by comparison.49 Still, the operations could involve just as much forward preparation, and patience to execute, nevertheless. It is believed that the PIRA member or members responsible for shooting UDR Private Sydney Watts as he arrived home from visiting a friend had been hiding in position for the best part of an hour before they killed him, and that they must have been monitoring his habits and routines for some time, in order to know that he did so around the same time every week.50 What fatality statistics fail to convey is that the volume of attacks which were intended to maim or kill PIRA targets—​especially security force personnel—​far exceeds that which succeeded, nor do they help to explain this disparity. Politically violent groups take to arms in a manner that is both clandestine and amateur. Playing the role of the disadvantaged party in an asymmetric conflict can shape the design of their strategies and have a detrimental impact on their actual precision and operational lethality. Their weapons can be improvised or rudimentary, their members relatively untrained, and their often illegal status means that politically violent organizations are reliant on social devices rather than law to ensure conformity and adherence to policy within their own ranks.51 As such, insurgent groups like the PIRA are prone to tactical errors in the execution of their attacks, experience dissention, and can fall prey to deviations from organizational policy or goals as individual agenda creeps into their activities. The disparity between what the PIRA intended to achieve with their campaign of violence, and the actual outcome of their attacks can be vast.52 The likelihood that any given PIRA operation would go to plan depended on the scope the scheme contained for deviation. The PIRA was willing to accept different intensities of risk in different scenarios to preserve their own interests, for example, depending on the value the organization placed on the target in question, or the difficulty that was associated with overcoming practical obstacles in certain environments. Essentially, any given act of PIRA violence had one of only a few different outcomes. PIRA operations could either be stillborn, abandoned, or thwarted by others; or the bombs and bullets they fired hit or missed their targets, with or without further non-​combatant casualties.

48 

David Barzilay, The British Army in Ulster: Vol.1 (Belfast: Century Printing Services, 1973), 54–​55. for instance, McKittrick et al., Lost Lives. References 1,185 and 1,186 are examples of court magistrates shot in their homes; 1,864 is an example of a part-​time reserve police constable killed off-​ duty by an under-​vehicle bomb. 50  McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, reference 901. 51  Jacob N. Shapiro, The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). 52  Krug et al. (eds.), World Report on Violence and Health (2002), 5. 49  See,

130   Rachel Caroline Kowalski Many of the PIRA’s attempted strikes upon police and military personnel failed to kill them. This could be due to PIRA inefficiency—​bombing or shooting attacks that were stillborn or off-​target—​or because the PIRA’s efforts had been successfully thwarted by the security services.53 Accounts of these non-​fatal attacks can give a similarly chilling account of the dogged perseverance with which the PIRA pursued their targets, nevertheless. Lieutenant Colonel Derrick Patrick OBE records an incident from December 1976 in his memoir, Fetch Felix, which displays the tenacity of the PIRA.54 A weapons intelligence officer from 3 Brigade headquarters was initially tasked to investigate the suspicious scene with which Patrick would later become involved: a badly damaged vehicle that appeared to have been the subject of a large explosion and was abandoned on a quiet road, approximately 150 yards away from a border crossing between Country Armagh and the Republic of Ireland. The weapons intelligence officer inspected the site and, upon finding no evidence that indicated that anyone had been killed or injured in the blast, or that the wrecked vehicle posed any further security risk, determined that it was safe for the car to remain in situ while other priority jobs were attended to. Unbeknownst to the 3 Brigade officer, however, one of the two milk churns that were lying close to the vehicle had been fitted with a live explosive device. The PIRA bomb planters, clearly disappointed with a lack of results for their efforts, went on to stage the scene more provocatively. By the time Patrick was called to attend the site, the PIRA had hijacked a petrol tanker from a nearby garage and used it to completely block the road where the wrecked car was standing. The addition of this enormous vehicle and its highly flammable contents to the scene made it abundantly clear that the site required security force attention. The tanker also added another complex element to what Lieutenant Colonel Patrick makes clear was an already risk-​and work-​intense bomb disposal task: The problems raised by the vehicles were complex and varied. The Provisionals had deliberately fixed things to attract us into the area so we could take it as read that they had prepared something unpleasant for us. The question was where they had hidden their surprise package—​the churns, the side of the road, the drive leading to the house or the petrol tanker. Was it radio-​controlled, remote-​controlled, a pressure plate mine or what? We did not know even how many there might be. In the circumstances, there could easily be more than one.55

In other words, the PIRA had put together a serious challenge for the bomb-​disposal expert (ATO), and one which we can presume was intentionally designed to test their mental endurance to the limits in a bid to lure them into making a fatal mistake as they moved from checking each element of the scene and, if necessary, diffusing any devices that were discovered. The vehicles eventually proved to pose no security risk, but the two milk churns had been fitted with dummy and live devices, respectively. This, Patrick notes, could potentially have caused an ‘unsuspecting, or overconfident operator . . . [to be] duped into thinking that having cleared the one churn without trouble, the other would be the same’.56

53  See, for instance, Lieutenant Colonel George Styles G.C., Bombs Have No Pity: My War Against Terrorism (London: William Luscombe Publisher Limited, 1975), 114–​115, 136–​139. 54  Lieutenant Colonel Derrick Patrick, Fetch Felix: The Fight Against the Ulster Bombers 1976–​ 77 (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1981), 72–​76. 55  Ibid., 73. 56  Ibid., 75–​76.

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    131 On this occasion, however, the ATO was able to safely clear the site without coming to any harm themselves. A fine-​grained analysis of detailed qualitative evidence can reveal the diversity that is absent or obscured by fatality statistics. Incidents of non-​fatal violence make up a significant proportion of total PIRA activity. Hence, if we restrict our analysis to fatality-​centric evidence, our analysis will underplay the sum of harm that the PIRA intended to inflict against security force personnel. Failure to account for non-​fatal operations can also skew our understanding of the volume of PIRA activity that was directed towards the organization’s so-​ called ‘legitimate targets’ in different scenarios. Specifically, the proportion of PIRA violence which was directed towards soft targets—​security force personnel in an off-​duty capacity, and non-​combatants killed for alleged collaboration or in sectarian assassinations—​will be over-​represented. This is quite simply because PIRA violence proved significantly more lethal when the target was without or outside of the kind of protective barriers that are normally imposed to shield on-​duty soldiers and policemen from, at least, some degree of harm. The picture of the PIRA’s activities can, however, be obfuscated to the greatest degree by the aggregate statistic of the civilian casualties they are attributed responsibility for. Collateral damage is an ill-​defined category which causes unease—​or offence—​among both scholars of violence and those bereaved by it because it is often perceived to be a casual or dismissive term, or to imply some level of erosion of culpability on behalf of the perpetrator(s). It is the contention of this chapter that the term is unsatisfactory principally because it fails to encompass the diverse ways in which collateral damage can and does occur or provide scope to differentiate between them. Rich qualitative material can yield a more complex or ‘thick’ interpretation of the subject by providing insight into the various reasons how and why non-​combatants were killed by PIRA violence. At the extreme, the PIRA were willing to take actions they knew were more than likely to result in civilian casualties to pursue a high-​profile and, therefore, well-​guarded target.57 The most infamous example of this would be the attempted assassination of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984. But wholly indiscriminate attacks of this nature were the exception and not the rule. More generally, the PIRA posed danger to non-​combatants because they allowed, to varying degrees, the accuracy of their operations to rely upon a range of forces that were beyond their control. Sometimes civilians and PIRA members themselves were killed because their weapons malfunctioned or were poorly operated: twenty-​ six civilians and sixteen members of the PIRA were killed when their devices exploded prematurely as they were assembling, transporting, priming, or planting them.58 On other occasions, it was the PIRA’s planning that was lacking. It only took the introduction of a new one-​way traffic system in Coleraine to render the bomb warnings delivered in advance of a car bomb attack in June 1973 fatally inaccurate.59 Often PIRA operations deviated from what

57 

See, for instance, McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, references 2,653–​2,654, 2,661. Ibid., references (civilians) 24, 25, 376, 377, 381, 383, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 559, 983, 1,580, 1,581, 2,208, 2,209, 3,418, 3,419, 3,420, 3,421, 3,422, 3,423, 3,424, 3,425, 3,427; (PIRA) 23, 31, 37, 378, 379, 380, 382, 556, 557, 558, 981, 982, 1,582, 1,583, 2,210, 3,426. 59  Ibid., reference 870; BBC News [Online], 30 October 2011, https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​north​ ern-​irel​and-​15158​068; https://​bel​fast​chil​dis.com/​2016/​06/​12/​colera​ine-​bomb​ing-​12th-​june-​1973-​the-​ forgot​ten-​massa​cre-​of-​the-​troub​les/​. 58 

132   Rachel Caroline Kowalski had been originally planned because their success depended on the actions of civilians being predictable, when they invariably proved to be otherwise. Qualitative evidence also allows us to see that the extent to which PIRA violence risked civilian safety exceeds the number of incidents when non-​combatants lost their lives. Some reports of PIRA violence indicate that civilian casualties had only been narrowly avoided. In November 1977, part-​time UDR lieutenant Walter Kerr was sat warming the engine of his car with barely a minute to spare before he was due to drive his children and neighbour’s child to school, when a PIRA bomb that had been concealed beneath it exploded.60 On other occasions, however, there is evidence to indicate there are times when the PIRA had preference for civilian safety over military success. The inquest recorded that the 15lb device which killed private Geoffrey Mark Curtis in West Belfast in 1983 was originally intended to target a regular police patrol, but that the PIRA delayed using the remote control activated device against the RUC officers because a schoolgirl had been walking close by.61 And, though it has been beyond the scope of this chapter, it should be noted that it is only through the study of non-​fatal violence that we are able to see the extent of the suffering that PIRA violence imposed without physically scarring the flesh. The psychological harm caused to those who experienced hijackings, were forced to flee the scene of an imminent explosion, or lived in the fear that they one day might have to, is one example. Rich qualitative sources of evidence can, of course, only expose the minute details about the characteristics of the incidents of PIRA activity that are included in the case study. The secondary literature may provide further context which can be drawn upon to provide an indication as to how the findings of a limited case-​study project scales up. But research claims may need to be limited to the boundaries of the temporal or spatial remit of the study. For only a representative sample of evidence will provide a clear sense of the extent to which PIRA violence can be said to have been, for example, perpetrated with either a consciously discriminate or recklessly negligent regard for civilian safety.

PIRA Violence at the Meso Level Researchers can find themselves better placed to test hypotheses, develop a nuanced interpretation of complex subject matter, or place their findings in context by tapping into a meso level of analysis.62 Often a combined methodological approach has been taken to do so: rich data is collected by combing detailed sources of qualitative evidence before quantitative research methods are employed to analyse it statistically. This can enable the researcher to gauge the typicality and prevalence of certain outcomes, behaviours, characteristics, or phenomena: such as the volume of PIRA violence that was perpetrated in a manner that could be considered proportionate, discriminate, and effective, compared to that which could be described as having been inaccurate, inefficient, or indiscriminate. It can also allow the researcher to uncover patterns or trends: such as how, when, where, and why PIRA violence 60 

McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, reference 1,975. Ibid., reference 2,541. 62  Sidney Tarrow, ‘Inside Insurgencies: Politics and Violence in an Age of Civil War’, Perspectives on Politics, 5/​3 (2007), 587–​600. 61 

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    133 was more or less likely to occur in different ways, and the various internal or external factors which were influential in this regard. Hence, a meso level of analysis of PIRA violence can help to illuminate how and why the design and outcome of their operations varied by region or changed over time. If we survey, cross reference, and corroborate various detailed sources of evidence, we can establish key information about the PIRA’s operations that can reveal insight into the nature of the relationship between exogenous factors and the way in which the PIRA violence was designed and occurred consequently. For example, if we consider what weapons and tactics are used against different targets and in different scenarios we can gain insight into how the PIRA capitalized on the advantages provided by, or worked to overcome any challenges posed by, the different spaces in which they operated. PIRA tactics were designed to protect their own interests: they endeavoured to put a safe distance between themselves and the force of their own weapons, and generally sought to minimize the likelihood that they would face return fire. The PIRA were better placed to do so when operating in the countryside because trees, bushes, and fields of crops provided natural cover to conceal PIRA weapons and operatives, whilst open spaces and rolling hills provided clear or elevated vantage points from which to keep look out. As such the PIRA were able to make use of powerful weapons that could be fired manually, but remotely. Command Wire or Radio Controlled Improvised Explosive Devices (CWIED and RCIED)—​bombs that are fired by the pressing of a switch or plunger that was either physically attached to the device via a length of (command) wire or communicated with it wirelessly by utilizing the electromagnet spectrum (e.g., via radio waves)—​were regularly fired from distances ranging from 100 to 300 metres away from the site of impact, but could be and at times were detonated from significantly further away. Built-​up and densely populated urban spaces, by contrast, provided far less scope to conceal either weapons and people or maintain good visibility from long distances. Hence there were a greater number of obstacles standing between the PIRA and their objectives when operating in larger towns or cities. To circumvent these challenges, the PIRA tended to resort to ‘hit and run’ style tactics or utilized weapons that allowed them to be totally absent from the scene at the moment of impact when perpetrating urban guerrilla warfare. These included bombs that were time-​operated (TOIED)—​explosive devices which function after a pre-​set delay that is often determined by a mechanical or electric timer but could also be chemical or igniferous—​or victim-​operated (VOIED)—​explosives which incorporate a firing mechanism that is sensitive to and triggered by the expected actions of the intended targeted actions. But TOIEDs or VOIEDs rely to varying degrees on forces outside the bomb-​planter’s control: the accurate functioning of the weapon, the predictability of the security force response, and an assumption that no one will be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The challenges of the urban sphere deterred the PIRA from using the weapons over which they had most control and saw them gravitating towards tactics which actively compromised the precision of their operations instead. The consequences can be sensed by considering the variation between how lives were lost to PIRA violence in difference spaces. PIRA bombing attacks proved fatal for security force personnel most often when CWIEDs and RCIEDs were used, during attacks launched in rural spaces. By contrast, it was the PIRA’s TOIEDs and VOIEDs that killed their own members and non-​combatants most often, during attacks which occurred in an urban setting. It is also apparent that civilians were harmed in far greater numbers per violent episode. Often they were not the intended

134   Rachel Caroline Kowalski target of the attack which killed them: PIRA bombs designed to tear down commercial buildings, or rip armoured vehicles apart, had a violent capacity which far exceeds what would be necessary to inflict harm upon a non-​militarized building or unarmoured body, and when civilians fell victim to devices intended for such purposes instead, the impact was devastating. A meso-​level analysis of PIRA violence can also reveal insights which challenge or undermine the oversimplification of patterns of temporal change that can emerge from the study of less complex data. For example, if we considered the volume of casualties that resulted from PIRA violence in different groups over time, we might gain a sense that the PIRA campaign ‘matured’ over time. To be sure, the volume of ‘own-​goals’ (PIRA members that died as a result of the organization’s own bombs and bullets) and civilian casualties decreases dramatically over time. And it is no coincidence that this pattern is commensurate with the organization’s increasing capacity for precision: PIRA operations were perpetrated with increasing accuracy over time because the organization could, and to some extent did, learn from their errors or moderate their behaviour in line with how it was being portrayed in the media and interpreted by others. When we examine PIRA violence in more detail, however, we notice sequences of concurrent events when the PIRA continues to use high-​risk weapons and strategies, despite the fact they were proving to be dangerously imprecise, or detect occasions when the PIRA reintroduced them later in their campaign, at a point when their arsenal had evolved to include more accurate alternatives.63 The PIRA bombers that attempted to strike at the headquarters of a loyalist Paramilitary organization on the Shankill Road in Belfast in 1993 via Frizzell’s fish shop that was located beneath it, for example, must have been wise to the fact that the igniferously-​initiated TOIED (or ‘short fuse’ device—​a bomb which will explode after the expiration of a short length of burning safety fuse that is manually lit) they were about to use had proven dangerously unstable on other occasions.64 The scene of devastation that was created by the blast of the weapon as it exploded, prematurely killing nine Protestant civilians and one of the two PIRA bomb-​planters, was certainly reminiscent of earlier scenes, including that of the wrecked Red Lion pub on the Ormeau Road in South Belfast, which was targeted by the PIRA on 2 November 1971 in a recklessly negligent bid to inflict damage on the adjacent Ballynafeigh RUC Station, and resulted in the killing of three civilians.65 These tragedies testify to the fact that the outcome of PIRA operations was, crucially, subject to both the organization’s capacity and willingness to operate with precision. The full range of characteristics apparent in the PIRA campaign may never be exposed, examined, or measured. But the rich sources of evidence that exist and are increasingly becoming available to research certainly provide the opportunity to explore the subject matter in greater depth. Sampling a large and varied body of evidence can provide scope for conceptual disaggregating and a greater degree of precision in measuring. But meso-​level analysis is not a prerequisite to meaningful research. To suggest so would, at the very least, 63  Patrick Finnegan, ‘Professionalization of a Nonstate Actor: A Case Study of the Provisional IRA’, Armed Forces & Society, 45/​2 (2019), 353–​356. 64 McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, references 3,418–​ 3,427; Ardoyne Commemoration Project, Ardoyne: The Untold Truth (Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications Ltd, 2002), 400–​401. 65  The Daily Mirror, 3 November 1971, 1; Fortnight, 28, 12 November 1971, 15; McKittrick et al., Lost Lives, references 170–​172.

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    135 be unnecessarily exclusive of work that is conducted in fields where evidence is scarce, or by students and scholars with limited time or other resources. It would also be both arbitrary and false, for academia is a collaborative enterprise. The micro foundations established in one study can give context to the macro findings of another, or vice versa. And useful comparisons can be—​and are—​drawn by scholars working on independent projects across a broad spectrum of topics.

Conclusion Academic research involves making inferences about the things that have been observed in the knowledge that, in doing so, we are making inferences about things that have not. For it is highly unlikely that any researcher or research project team can or will ever successfully cover—​or uncover—​all that their subject embodies. Rather, each research project will have its limitations. Seeking to ascertain the limits and boundaries of our sources and methods, and demonstrating transparency in this regard, is, therefore, of paramount importance.66 This may, of course, be easier said than done, for the literature on cognitive bias suggests that we are more likely to jump to conclusions and base our reasoning on little evidence that we might have realized. Daniel Kahneman, cognitive psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, explains that operative features including intensity matching and associative coherence make us prone to cognitive illusions such as anchoring, nonprogressive predictions, and overconfidence.67 Kahneman attests that the quality of the evidence may not actually count for much because ‘poor evidence can make a very good story’.68 Causal explanations prove so effective at inspiring confidence that they can be accepted though they defy statistical reason.69 In fact, it is suggested that even those with statistical training do not necessarily prove to be good intuitive statisticians.70 Lieve Van Woensel suggests this can have serious implications for the academic researcher: ‘confirmation bias may cause researchers to seek out or favour information that supports their argument, or prematurely stop gathering information once sufficient evidence is found to support their view’.71 And it is attested that the ‘availability’ heuristic can cause issues or events to become highly salient to certain topics, or basic assumptions to be shared by scholars working in the same field of research.72 Cognitive psychologists suggest that bias in the selection and interpretation of evidence is to some extent unavoidable, but that a heightened awareness of the range of ways it can impact our work can help minimize its implications.73 And though it is an important 66 

Lieve Van Woensel, A Bias Radar for Responsible Policy-​Making: Foresight-​Based Scientific Advice (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Fig. 2.1, 33, 1–​15. 67  Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, Kindle ed. (2011), 417. 68  Ibid., 208–​220. 69  Ibid., 198–​207. 70  Ibid., 4–​5. 71  Van Woensel, A Bias Radar, 19. 72  Ibid., 7. 73  Ibid., Fig. 2.1, 33, 1–​15.

136   Rachel Caroline Kowalski consideration for all academic researchers, it might be argued that it is most pertinent to those who have research subjects that are exposed to wide coverage in the media or concern emotive topics. For if the relative importance of an issue is assessed by the ease with which it is retrieved from memory, those issues which have already flooded our consciousness could become disproportionately favoured (availability bias).74 And, it might not be unreasonable to suggest, therefore, that the changing tone of the literature on violence bears some relation to the sensitive nature of the topic; or, more specifically, to the challenge of maintaining objectivity in the face of material which might offend our sensitivities. Kalyvas attests that ‘cheap’ violence—​that which is perpetrated with free or inexpensive weapons such as fists, knives, machetes, or homemade explosives—​tends to horrify us more than ‘expensive’ forms of violence—​including targeted strikes conducted from unmanned drones—​despite the fact they can be just as indiscriminate.75 We might imagine, therefore, that researchers’ fast, intuitive responses to the forms of violence which appeared most alien to them—​disgust or repulsion, for example—​contributed to the presumption that the violence of insurgency was irrational or lacked strategic motivation and logic, which it is common to find expressed in historic accounts of insurgency and civil wars.76 In the past few decades, the nature and meaning of insurgent violence has been portrayed and evaluated in the literature in a myriad of ways—​from barbaric, to rational.77 The sentiments of what is now unfavourably referred to as ‘new-​barbarism’ bled into the literature—​and reached audiences—​outside of the academic sphere.78 Robert Kaplan’s 1994 article in The Atlantic, ‘The Coming of Anarchy’, concluded that African civil war violence stemmed from a breakdown of social order and consequent unleash of anarchy: ‘Physical aggression is a part of being human. Only when people attain a certain economic, educational, and cultural standard is this trait tranquilized’.79 The article, which initially received widespread acclaim, echoed attitudes towards civil and anti-​colonial violence recorded decades earlier.80 L.S.B. Leaky reported in 1954 that the civil and anti-​colonial violence exhibited by the Mau Mau movement in Kenya equated to ‘acts of incredible beastliness and depravity’,81 but that with educational and economic reforms, ‘Personally, [he had] faith, complete faith, that wisdom and common sense will prevail and that the peoples of Kenya, black, white and brown, will jointly show that it is possible to work together in harmony for the common good and progress of all’.82 More recently, the explainable functions and strategic logic behind various acts of internecine, guerrilla, or terrorist violence have become

74 Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, 7–​8. 75 

Kalyvas, ‘ “New” and “Old” Civil Wars’, 115–​116. Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone (Oxford: James Currey, 1996). 77  Kieran Mitton, Rebels in a Rotten State: Understanding Atrocity in Sierra Leone (London: C. Hurst & Co (Publishers) Ltd., 2015), 6–​10. 78  Kalyvas, ‘ “New” and “Old” Civil Wars’, 113–​114; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence. 79  Robert D. Kaplan, ‘The Coming of Anarchy’, The Atlantic, February 1994 [Online], http://​www.thea​ tlan​tic.com/​magaz​ine/​arch​ive/​1994/​02/​the-​com​ing-​anar​chy/​304​670/​, accessed 4 June 2020. 80 Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest, xv; Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 37–​48. 81  Louis S.B. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau (London: Routledge, 1954), 77. 82  Ibid., 152. 76 Ibid.;

Violence of Insurgency in Northern Ireland    137 recognized.83 Paul Richards’ revisionist theory, retrospectively referred to as the ‘rational-​ actor’ thesis, for instance, made a dramatic departure from the racist undertones of new-​ barbarism when attesting purpose, logic, and reason behind what had previously been dismissed as mere barbarity.84 Richards’ assertion that the tactics of the rebels employed in the Sierra Leonean conflict were ‘fully effective in disorientating, traumatizing, demoralizing’ and ‘devilishly well-​ calculated’ resonates with more recent works which seek to explain the logic in the strategy of civilian centric international terrorism.85 Neumann, for example, breaks down the process employed by Islamist groups such as Al Qaeda into three phases: disorientation, target response, and gaining legitimacy.86 And, most recently, there has been a turn towards interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the role of emotions in the perpetration of violence. David Keen, for instance, applies lessons from the work of psychoanalyst James Gilligan—​ whose work has concerned high-​security prisoners in the American prison system—​to the Sierra Leone civil war (1991–​2002) to assert the importance of understanding the role of shame in the perpetration of civil war violence.87 And Kieran Mitton has advanced a thesis that asserts the role of multiple ‘emotions’; the emotion of disgust, for example, is closely associated with the notion of shame and has played a role in acclimatizing RUF combatants to violence by giving them a narrative of justification.88 Precisely what role, if any, cognitive biases can be said to have played in the changing tone of the historiography of insurgent violence is perhaps unquantifiable. Still, criticism of publications that take a detached or clinical tone to discuss insurgent violence demonstrate that the process of writing about—​if not researching—​the violence of insurgency is challenging in and of itself. Thomas Nagel’s review of Richard English’s Does Terrorism Work, for example, concludes that ‘the main thing missing from English’s response is any sense that there might be something intrinsically wrong in deliberately killing and maiming innocent civilians as a means to bring about even a desirable outcome’.89 A sentiment which serves a stark reminder that the subject of violence is highly potent to the senses of our readers and suggests that the absence of the sort of condemnatory tone we might expect in works of moral philosophy can, for some, make for a jarring read.

83 Michael

L. Gross, The Ethics of Insurgency: A Critical Guide to Just Guerrilla Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 84 Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest, xx. 85  Ibid., xvi. 86  Peter Neumann and M.L.R. Smith, The Strategy of Terrorism: How it Works and Why it Fails (London: Routledge, 2008), 31–​55. 87  David Keen, Conflict & Collusion in Sierra Leone (Oxford: James Curry Ltd, 2005), 56–​83; David Keen, ‘Since I Am a Dog, Beware My Fangs’: Beyond a ‘Rational Violence’ Framework in the Sierra Leonean War (London: Crisis States Programme, 2002); James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, (New York: Putnam Pub Group, 1996), 103–​136. 88  For instance, the RUF conceptualized the conflict as a war of liberation against a ‘rotten state’; a powerful means to encourage the prioritization of ‘disgust’ regarding state corruption over any previously held notions that killing or maiming others was shameful or wrong. Mitton, Rebels (2015), 177–​179, 181–​225. 89  Thomas Nagel, ‘By Any Means or None’, London Review of Books, 38/​17 (8 September 2016).

138   Rachel Caroline Kowalski

Select Bibliography Bessel, Richard, Violence: A Modern Obsession (London: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015). English, Richard, Armed Struggle (London: Macmillan, 2003). Gerring, John, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge University Press: Online publication date: February 2019). Gross, Michael L., The Ethics of Insurgency: A Critical Guide to Just Guerrilla Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Kahneman, Daniel, Thinking Fast and Slow (Kindle Edition, 2011). Kalyvas, Stathis N., The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). King, G., Keohane, R.O., and Verba, S., Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Landman, Todd, and Carvalho, Edzia, Issues and Methods in Comparative Politics: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). Neumann, Peter, and Smith, M.L.R., The Strategy of Terrorism: How it Works and Why it Fails (London: Routledge, 2008). O’Leary, Brendan, A Treatise on Northern Ireland, Volume I: Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Skarbek, David, ‘Qualitative Research Methods for Institutional Analysis’, Journal of Institutional Economics, 16/​4 (2020), published online, doi:10.1017/​S174413741900078X. Van Woensel, Lieve, A Bias Radar for Responsible Policymaking; Foresight-​Based Scientific Advice (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

‘RU L E S OF T H E G A M E’ Law, Doctrine, and Propaganda

Chapter 7

De c ol oniz ati on’ s Wa rs and the Civilia ni z at i on of Viole nc e Martin Thomas Few would disagree that ‘everyday violence’ was intrinsic to colonialism. That violence may be central to the pasts—​and often the memories—​of colonial populations; it is less so to the lives of metropolitan Europeans. Some of the violence involved, as well as its escalation, and its targets, was sadly predictable. Collective punishment, an instrument both of colonial coercion and the ‘compliance terror’ of some insurgent movements, was pervasive.1 But much of decolonization’s violence, in form and outcome, seemed unpredictable to the imperial governments struggling to contain it.2 Recognizing the purposes of deliberate colonial harm, whether physical or psychological, as well as its repetitious banality, is critical to understanding why certain groups among colonial subject populations—​women, workers, and the young—​were particularly exposed to it. As this chapter will argue, we need to look for other causal connections as well. One is the linkage between levels of insecurity and the intensity of violence. Another is the tendency for violence actors (those with executive powers) and violence workers (those inflicting the pain) to operate with less restraint over time. Late colonial violence repeatedly crossed the line between authorized repression and unauthorized, but tacitly sanctioned, killing.3 1  Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–​1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order; Martha Crenshaw Hutchinson, Revolutionary Terrorism. The FLN in Algeria, 154–​1962 (Stanford, CA.: Hoover Institution Press, 1978). 2  Catherine Coombs, ‘Partition Narratives: Displaced Trauma and Culpability among British Civil Servants in 1940s Punjab’, Modern Asian Studies, 45/​1 (2011), 201–​224. 3 As examples: Matthew Hughes, ‘The Practice and Theory of British Counterinsurgency: The Histories of the Atrocities at the Palestinian Villages of al-​Bassa and Halhul, 1938–​1939’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 20/​3–​4 (2009), 528–​550; Bart Luttikhuis and A. Dirk Moses, ‘Mass Violence and the End of the Dutch Colonial Empire in Indonesia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14/​3–​4 (2012), 257–​276; Mustafah Dhada, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964–​2013 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). And for earlier colonial practice: Mark Condos, ‘License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–​1925’, Modern Asian Studies, 50/​2 (2016), 479–​517; Kim Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare, Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British

142   Martin Thomas Locally, environments of violence differed.4 A broad generalization may be ventured even so. Although systematized and rendered possible by colonial authority, violent acts were increasingly enacted without precise instruction or concomitant constraint, producing performative cycles of retribution that only embedded colonial violence more deeply still. Contributors to this volume have discussed numerous acts of violence. The structural violence intrinsic to colonialism has also figured large—​as a social condition, as institutionalized discrimination, as a system of exploitation and rights denial. We’ve yet to consider something else. Must we identify late colonial violence as something distinct in order to understand decolonization? Pushing further still, was decolonization brought about by organized violence, whether through acts of rebellion or in reaction to security force repression?5 To tackle such a big question we need to address others. Most fundamentally, how might we understand colonial violence? Discussions among just war theorists, political scientists, and scholars of international law about the ethics of inflicting harm to advance political objectives dwell on questions of intentionality, proportionality, and the status of human targets, whether as combatants or civilians.6 Comparable discussions about intra-​state conflicts and ‘irregular wars’, in which the legal status of guerrillas and paramilitaries is blurry, often touch on colonial experiences, but rarely engage the most basic question of all.7 What happens when victims of violence are classified, not just along axes of combatant and non-​combatant, but along those of racial difference as well? The question is troubling, but it must be central to any analysis of colonial violence in general and of civilian vulnerability within decolonization conflicts in particular. Did imperial authorities guided by their own hierarchies of difference in the treatment of dependent populations replicate those differences in their approach to repression? More bluntly, did colonial security forces coerce and kill in distinctive, even unique ways? What, if anything, distinguished the violence actors who opposed them as ‘colonial’ insurgents? After considering these epistemological questions, another task is to disaggregate the most politically decisive aspects of violent decolonization; namely, those elements of contestation that accelerated the end of foreign colonial rule. Politically decisive maybe, but I suggest that this issue is as much social as it is political because its key component relates not to fighters, but to the much larger numbers of unarmed local inhabitants caught up in decolonization’s Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal, 85 (Spring 2018), 217–​237. See also the chapters by Brian Drohan, Roel Frakking, and Matthew Hughes in this volume. 4 

Luise White, Fighting and Writing: The Rhodesian Army at War and Postwar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 24–​27. White’s thoughtful analysis of white Rhodesian soldiers fighting the Bush War of the 1960s and 1970s stresses the centrality of the local environment, its dangers, and its mastery through ‘bushcraft’ as contributors to the ideas and forms of violence enacted against Africans. 5  The most recent major contribution in this field, Dierck Walter’s 2017 book Colonial Violence, did not tackle the issue systematically. 6 Maja Zehfuss, ‘Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 14/​3 (2012), 423–​440; Helen M. Kinsella, ‘Superfluous Injury and Unnecessary Suffering: National Liberation and the Laws of War’, Political Power and Social Theory, 32 (2017), 205–​ 231; Alexander B. Downes, ‘Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves: Investigating the Effectiveness of Indiscriminate Violence as a Counterinsurgency Strategy’, Civil Wars, 9/​4 (2007), 420–​444; Alex J. Bellamy, ‘Supreme Emergencies and the Protection of Non-​Combatants in War’, International Affairs, 80/​5 (2004), 829–​850. 7  Benjamin Valentino, Paul Huth, and Dylan Balch-​Lindsay, ‘“Draining the Sea”: Mass Killing and Guerrilla Warfare’, International Organisation, 58/​2 (2004), 375–​407.

The Civilianization of Violence    143 violence.8 Focusing on this civilianization of war, this chapter considers four of its aspects. These are the vulnerability of particular individuals and groups; the relationship between colonial civilian targeting, forms of insurgent practice, and counter-​insurgent restriction; experiences of civilians, detainees, and refugees; and, finally, their changing status as colonial empire receded. The central figure throughout is the unarmed colonial subject or, in simpler parlance: the civilian as victim and agent of violent decolonization.9

Civilians in Late-​C olonial Conflicts Let’s first of all reflect on how ‘civilians’ in decolonization might be categorized—​along axes of gender, age, and activity. A word of caution here: the tendency to feminize civilian populations can be as limiting as its corollary in the presumption that participation in insurgent groups and acts of political violence was a male activity. This is not to deny that colonial violence against civilian populations was highly gendered; far from it. It is simply to recall that young men and adolescent boys were peculiarly endangered as civilians, albeit for different reasons than women and girls of a similar age. For the elderly, too, experiences of deprivation and threat were equally inflected by gender difference, but old people of both sexes, as well as the sick and the disabled, suffered from repressive policies of population removal, internment, food denial, and other forms of collective punishment.10 Beyond civilian communities, the tendency remains to typologize insurgencies as male, the involvement of women requiring particular explanation whereas men’s resort to political violence is often considered a matter of course.11 This is odd. Women figured in all insurgencies. Their participation was more diverse and more integral than commonly acknowledged.12 In some 8 

For a grassroots perspective on what this meant, see Christian Lentz’s study of the Black River region in Northern Vietnam during the Indochina War: Contested Territory: Ðien Biên Phu and the Making of Northwest Vietnam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 9  I use the terms ‘civilian’, ‘unarmed colonial subject’, and ‘non-​combatant’ interchangeably, following social scientific writing on just war theory and military violence against non-​combatants. Good introductions are: Alexander B. Downes, ‘Desperate Times, Desperate Measures: The Causes of Civilian Victimisation in War’, International Security, 30/​4 (2006), 152–​195; Seth Lazar, ‘Necessity and Non-​ Combatant Immunity’, Review of International Studies, 40/​1 (2014), 53–​76. 10  Moritz Feichtinger, ‘“A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72, and see Moritz’s chapter in this volume. 11  Miranda Alison, ‘Women as Agents of Political Violence: Gendering Security’, Security Dialogue 35/​4 (2004), 447–​448, and, more generally, Alexis Leanna Henshaw, ‘Where Women Rebel: Patterns of Women’s Participation in Armed Rebel Groups, 1990–​2008’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 18/​1 (2016), 39–​60. The tendency to analyse war and collective violence as male activities is evident in political sociology as well. For a critique, see Siniša Malešević, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 288–​306. 12  Powerful case studies are: Harry G. West, ‘Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of Frelimo’s “Female Detachment” ’, Anthropological Quarterly, 73/​4 (2000), 180–​194; Raphaëlle Branche, ‘Fighters for Independence and Rural Society in Colonial Algeria’, in Nuno Domingos, Miguel Jerónimo, and Ricardo Roque (eds.) Resistance and Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2019), 68–​72; Miranda Alison, ‘Cogs in the Wheel? Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’, Civil Wars, 6/​4 (2003), 37–​54.

144   Martin Thomas insurgent movements, such as the Viet Minh, the FLN in Algeria, Frelimo in Mozambique, and the PAIGC in Portuguese Guinea, women’s participation in Party militias, medical teams, and social welfare programmes was strongly encouraged in defiance of cultural mores.13 To be sure, women and girls, whether unarmed or armed, faced gendered patterns of coercion and forms of retribution but they were not without agency, whether as victims of that violence or as individuals resolved to fight back.14 Equally, insurgent groups in their formative stages relied on their surrounding population, not just for resources and other material aid, but, as crucially, for communication and concealment.15 On the active side, couriers were often female. On the passive side, withholding information from government representatives about who the rebels were and what they were doing was vital to their survival. And these early-​stage responsibilities fell disproportionately on female householders who were tied to their location by family and work responsibilities. Ties of ethnicity or kinship tended to thicken such veils of secrecy, making it easier for rebels to develop into larger insurgent groups.16 Whether focused on questions of gender or not, it is a tautology to assert that high levels of empire violence and their replication between territories confirm the proposition that ‘colonial violence’ is somehow distinctive. What singles out late colonial societies are elements of political economy: high levels of male labour migration, widespread gendered agricultural labour in which women fieldworkers played a central role, and the numerical predominance of women within family groups living in settlements beyond the gaze of international scrutiny. From these socio-​economic conditions certain patterns of colonial violence followed. As described elsewhere in this volume, women faced discrimination and abuse from male paramilitaries and guards recruited to police either rural communities or resettlement camps as established moral economies of kin networks and gendered living spaces broke down.17 Patterns of decolonization violence were also woven into the fabric of local colonial authority structures. Low-​level intermediaries, mandarins, caïds, and mayors, tribal chiefs, and village headmen provided the foundations of local government, tax collection, and workaday legal punishments on which colonial authority was constructed. Take taxes. Colonial subjects encountered taxation as levies on their persons (‘head taxes’), property (‘hut taxes’), and livestock (numerous colonial variants), as well as on goods purchased. It was not so much that imperial governments were ruthlessly extractive; rather, in delegating tax collection duties to chiefly authorities, village leaders, and other local authority structures, colonial administrations left these indigenous auxiliaries with unchecked powers of revenue

13 ‘Guerre de libération nationale. Un témoignage d’Anissa Barkat, née Derrar’ Centre national d’études historiques, 1977, Centre El Biar, Algiers; Galvão and Laranjeiro, ‘Gender Struggle in Guinea-​ Bissau’, 103–​106. Although PAIGC leader Amilcar Cabral condemned it, some women fighters in the PAIGC faced abuse by male commanders and risked alienation from their extended kin networks. 14  Emily Bridger, Young Women Against Apartheid—​ Gender, Youth and South Africa`s Liberation Struggle (Oxford: James Currey, 2021), and see Emily’s chapter in this volume. 15 Janet I. Lewis, How Insurgency Begins: Rebel Group Formation in Uganda and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 7–​10, 38–​45. 16  Ibid., 14–​15, 46–​54, 126–​128. 17  See the chapters by Emily Bridger, Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz, Roel Frakking, and Moritz Feichtinger.

The Civilianization of Violence    145 collection.18 These auxiliaries personified the ‘decentralized despotism’ that Mahmood Mamdani considers characteristic of late colonialism.—​. As Neil MacMaster describes in his chapter in this volume, unless these low-​level officials agreed to work covertly against their nominal colonial masters, they faced targeted retribution from insurgent groups.19 It was in small towns and villages that violence against civilian officials was harshest. In part, this was a matter of geography, of remoteness from police stations or army garrisons. More significant though was the poverty pervasive in the rural interior of numerous colonies. Here the disparities in wealth and social status between those working with the colonial system and those who defied it might be objectively narrow, but they are subjectively significant. Most local authority figures, whether or not they behaved corruptly, remained relatively poor by European standards. Even so, from Central America to Southeast Asia these community leaders seemed privileged next to the poorest farmers, sharecroppers, and labourers who provided the rank and file of so many rural insurgent groups. A little more wealth, a whiff of corrupt practice, and accusations of collaboration were enough to condemn countless village officials in the eyes of their neighbours.20 Discerning a clear line demarcating acts of anti-​colonial resistance from score-​settling between insiders and outsiders to the colonial system is difficult and analytically misleading, the point being that no such line existed. Post-​holders were targeted because their accommodation with colonial authority—​and the fruits it bore—​caused violent resentment in others.21 Resistance to foreign rule meshed with the rivalries intrinsic to the politics of everyday life in settlements, villages, and towns throughout the colonial world because competing local claims to power and resources overlapped with the divisions between colonial haves and have-​nots.22

18 Sceptical

treatments of the extractive nature of colonial governance include Ewout Frankema, ‘Raising Revenue in the British Empire, 1870–​1940: How “Extractive” Were Colonial Taxes?’ Journal of Global History, 5/​3 (2010), 447–​477; Ewout Frankema and Frans Buelens (eds.), Colonial Exploitation and Economic Development: The Belgian Congo and the Netherlands Indies Compared (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); and for interactions between local and imperial officials: Benjamin N. Lawrence, Emily Lynn Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts (eds.), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Christopher Prior, Exporting Empire: Africa, Colonial Officials and the Construction of the Imperial State, c.1900–​1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 19 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 48; also cited in Anne Phillips, ‘Global Justice: Just another Modernisation Theory?’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Empire, Race, and Global Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 148, 155. 20 Alan McPherson, The Invaded: How Latin Americans and Their Allies Fought and Ended US Occupations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 140–​141; Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Pierre Asselin and Martin Thomas, ‘French Decolonisation and Civil War: The Dynamics of Violence in the Early Phases of Anti-​Colonial War in Vietnam and Algeria, 1940–​56’, Journal of Modern European History, 20:4 (2022), 513–​35. 21  Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 58–​61, 141–​144; Neil MacMaster, War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–​1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 164–​172; Roel Frakking, ‘Beyond Sticks and Carrots: Local Agency in Counterinsurgency’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 5/​3 (2014), 391–​415. 22 McPherson, The Invaded, 142–​148, 264.

146   Martin Thomas Insurgent groups could achieve multiple objectives by targeting wealthier landowners, local officials, and their protectors. Individuals most likely to feed information to colonial authorities were silenced. Opportunities for more socially conservative community members to organize against insurgency were diminished. Redistribution of land and other resources was made easier, thereby serving a radical ideological agenda. Perhaps most important, such targeting helped insurgents to build new local coalitions of community self-​interest that identified with the rebel movement rather than the incumbent colonial regime.23 Another factor connected acts of micro-​violence at village level to the macro-​politics of national struggle. Insurgents, for the most part unable to strike at central authority in faraway colonial capitals, made local agents of government their primary targets. Community leaders often hedged their bets in response, either working covertly with rebel groups or cleaving to paramilitary loyalist organizations that might offer better protection. The more that rebels could lay down administrative structures, levy taxes, impose laws, and provide public goods, the greater the likelihood that local officials and the affected population would make a political choice between embracing or opposing what political scientist Ana Arjona describes as ‘rebelocracy’.24 Those choices were rarely definitive even so. Anti-​colonial movements could exploit the illegitimacy of colonial institutions to entrench alternative guerrilla states, but life in rebel-​held areas was rarely secure. Resources might be scarce and economic activity disrupted. The possibility of military intervention or community rejection meanwhile pushed insurgent movements towards harsh punishment of dissent.25 Such punishments were typically dispensed by paramilitaries. So it is no surprise that the phenomenon of paramilitarism was fundamental to the civilianization of decolonization’s wars.26 Paramilitary organizations typically derived from community self-​defence groups seeking to retain their agency as autonomous actors rather than being assimilated to the ‘violence work’ of the conflict’s principal combatants. As a result, the micro-​foundations of local violence rarely mapped neatly onto the larger dyadic narrative of a single insurgent movement fighting counter-​insurgent colonial security forces. A more critical determinant of violence levels and types were the choices made by local militia forces about community protection, strategies of survival, and score-​settling.27 Whether working alongside larger organized military formations or parleying their own interests between them, paramilitary groups could be decisive. In certain cases, including Indonesia, Kenya, and Bangladesh, 23  These strategies are explored in the cases of the Chinese and Malayan Communist Parties and the Vietnamese National Liberation Front in Marc Opper, The People’s Wars in China, Malaya, and Vietnam (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2020), especially 235–​246. 24 Ana Arjona, ‘Civilian Resistance to Rebel Governance’, in Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mampilly (eds.), Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 180–​184. 25  Arjona, ‘Civilian Resistance to Rebel Governance’, 185–​187. 26 Uğur Ümit Üngör, Paramilitarism: Mass Violence in the Shadow of the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 43–​47. A thoughtful survey of the phenomenon, this study says little about paramilitaries in decolonization conflicts. 27 Roel Frakking and Martin Thomas, ‘Windows onto the Microdynamics of Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence: Evidence from Late Colonial Southeast Asia and Africa Compared’, in Thijs Brocades Zaalberg and Bard Luttikhuis (eds.), Empire’s Violent End: Comparing Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization, 1945–​1962 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022), 78–​126; Roel Frakking, ‘ “Gathered on the Point of a Bayonet”: The Negara Pasundan and the Colonial Defence of Indonesia, 1946–​50’, International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 30–​47.

The Civilianization of Violence    147 paramilitary groups of this type shaped the outcome of a decolonization conflict and the subsequent distribution of power and rewards.28 Ironically, those responsible for the substance and direction of punitive policing within colonies often transgressed the hierarchy between civilized colonizers and less civilized subjects, what Partha Chatterjee characterized as the fundamental ‘rule of colonial difference’.29 All too frequently, colonized people faced coercive violence enacted by other colonized people, by individuals who served as members of—​or adjuncts to—​colonial security forces.30 Those rules of colonial difference remained intact because those responsible for policing’s direction upheld them. To answer one of the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter, imperial governments and their security force officers developed violence practices based on their cultural construction of subject communities as somehow less than ‘civilized’, emotionally immature, and conspiratorial.31 Kim Wagner, for instance, points to a late nineteenth-​century convergence between racist discourse, the new ballistic technology of the ‘Dum Dum’ bullet, and medical knowledge of conflict injuries.32 One might point to a comparable triangulation in late twentieth-​century decolonization conflicts, this one between new technologies of mass violence, notably those delivered by aircraft: high-​explosive bombs, chemical defoliants, napalm petroleum jelly, and machine-​gun strafing; the greater prominence of social psychology and consequent efforts to manipulate people’s behaviour through coercion; and, finally, the continued relevance of racialized constructions of difference between rulers and subjects.33 Often, the actions of insurgents and counter-​ insurgents are better understood as a bargaining process in which violence actors sought to maximize their influence in negotiating local distributions of power as well as the future complexion of colonial or national government.34 Temporary alliances and deal-​making often cut across supposedly binary divides between imperial security forces and paramilitary insurgents. From Malaya 28 

For Indonesia: Frakking, ‘ “Gathered on the Point of a Bayonet” ’, 30–​44; for Kenya: Daniel Branch, ‘Loyalists, Mau Mau and Elections in Kenya: the First Triumph of the System, 1957–​58’, Africa Today 53 (2006), 27–​50; for Bangladesh: Sarmila Bose, ‘Anatomy of Violence: Analysis of Civil War in East Pakistan in 1971’, Economic and Political Weekly, 40/​41 (2005), 464–​469. 29  Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 14–​34. 30  Huw Bennett and Andrew Mumford, ‘Policing in Kenya during the Mau Mau Emergency, 1952–​ 60’, in C. Christine Fair and Sumit Ganguly (eds.), Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counter-​Insurgents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 86–​92. 31  Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare’, 221; see also Christiaan Harinck’s chapter in this volume. 32  Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare’, 223. 33  Algeria’s provisional FLN government made these connections repeatedly. As an example, see International Institute of Social History archive, Amsterdam (IISH), COLL00201, Algeria, social & political developments collection, folder 4, GPRA pamphlet, ‘Le napalme en Algérie’, published in August 1960. 34  David M. Anderson and Daniel Branch, ‘Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–​1976’, International History Review, 39/​1 (2016), 3, 6–​8. For contemporary comparisons, see: Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), especially chap. 8; Alex Marshall, ‘Imperial Nostalgia, the Liberal Lie, and the Perils of Postmodern Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 21/​2 (2010), 233–​258; Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M.L.R. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in David Martin Jones, Celeste Ward Gventer, and M.L.R. Smith (eds.), The New Counter-​Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave-​Macmillan, 2014), 1–​5.

148   Martin Thomas to Algeria, local rebels’ defiance of an insurgent leadership ‘line’, offers of money to fighters willing to surrender, and even changing sides were sufficiently commonplace to be integrated into security force strategy.35 Something else bears emphasis here. One implication of the viewpoint that violence was somehow omnipresent in colonialism, albeit in myriad forms ranging from warfare and punitive bodily harm to intimidation and perceived threats, is that imperial rule required violence management.36 In many cases, the job of colonial security forces was not so much to ‘defeat’ anti-​colonial opposition outright as to restrict violent dissent to levels that enabled administration and economic activity to continue. Colonial security forces coerced far more people than they killed. Here, again, there are analytical problems. If the point of colonial repression was not so much ‘to win’ as to allow imperial economies to function, then one might assume that metropolitan governments rejected economic warfare—​the disruption of opponents’ economic production and supply chains—​because it would be self-​defeating, undermining the very colonial economies they wished to protect.37 Yet such ‘wars of resources’ were commonplace.38 From forced population removal, crop burning, and livestock killing to collapsing agricultural production and ecological devastation in conflict zones, various indices confirm that economic violence was fundamental to colonial counter-​insurgency.39 Indeed, some suggest that removing peoples, restricting their freedom of movement, despoiling peasant agriculture, and systematic food denial was what made such colonized spaces ‘extremely violent societies’.40

Restriction, Governance, and Civilian Targets It is no surprise that colonizers as state-​makers were quick to claim a monopoly on organized violence. Often overwhelming and highly asymmetric, such violence rarely distinguished between armed opponents and unarmed colonial subjects. This pattern endured. Only in 35  Kumar Ramakhrishna, ‘Content, Credibility and Context: Propaganda, Government Surrender Policy and the Malayan Communist Mass Surrender of 1958’, Intelligence & National Security, 14/​4 (1999), 242–​266, Ramakhrishna, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds, 1948–​1958 (Richmond: Curzon, 2002); Charles-​Robert Ageron, ‘Une troisième force combattante pendant la guerre d’Algérie. L’armée nationale du peuple algérien en son chef le “général” Bellounis. Mai 1957–​juillet 1958’, Outre-​Mers, 321 (1998), 65–​76; Milos Popovic, ‘Fragile Proxies: Explaining Rebel Defection Against their State Sponsors’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 29/​6 (2017), 922–​930. 36  Paul Staniland, ‘Counter-​ Insurgency and Violence Management’, in Jones, Gventer, and Smith (eds.), The New Counter-​Insurgency Era, 144–​52. 37 Mark Harrison (ed.), The Economics of Coercion and Conflict (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2015), 1–​6; Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison (eds.), The Economics of World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1–​27. 38 Harrison, The Economics of Coercion and Conflict, 1–​6. 39  As was the case in South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta after 1945: see Shawn F. McHale, The First Indochina War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945–​1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 180–​194. 40 Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177–​234 passim.

The Civilianization of Violence    149 October 1957 did Britain’s Colonial Office persuade the psychological warfare specialists of the Ministry of Defence to stop referring to dependent territory populations as ‘the enemy’.41 More generally, colonial governments used emergency powers to collapse the presumptive distinction between violent oppositionists and non-​violent civilians.42 Always an instrument of colonial power, the legislation invoked in decolonization conflicts altered fundamental precepts of human interaction. Communities whose spatial relations had been reordered by imperial borders, the seizure or reallocation of land, and juridical restrictions on freedom of movement were locked down further in times of ‘emergency rule’ or other variants of martial law.43 Colonial authorities, on apprehending imminent threats of disorder, tightened their control over physical space and colonial people’s movement within it. What Annie Pfingst describes as ‘distinct architectures of concentration’ and accompanying ‘spatial technologies of closure’ were the result; in blunt terms, districts under curfew, resettlement camps, ‘new villages’, and detention centres, plus barbed wire, minefields, and checkpoints to corral entry and exit.44 Colonial authorities defended such massive upheaval not just as security measures, but as consistent with development and improved public health, a coercive modernization that was both racially configured and highly gendered. Women, children, and the elderly predominated among permanent residents.45 Their homes were subject to invasion and search. Consider Algeria. There, contrary to customary practice and cultural sensibilities, resettlement camp housing was designed to facilitate surveillance by officials and guards. Within the largest resettlement camps, symmetrically arranged single-​storey houses of cement block, their interiors easily visible, could be fiercely hot by day, freezing cold at night. The lack of concession to the privacy of Islamic domestic space was hardly accidental, instead fitting the strategies of constant surveillance and acculturation to the demands of the colonial state.46 Among forcibly removed colonial populations in general, sexual violence and punishment beatings were an ever-​present threat, especially in camps and village settlements overseen by loyalist militias. Access to primary healthcare, maternity services, food supplies, and vocational training was made conditional on the performance of loyalty to the colonial regime and, sometimes, of compliance with militia demands.47

41  Huw

Bennett, ‘ “Words are Cheaper than Bullets”: Britain’s Psychological Warfare in the Middle East, 1945–​60’, Intelligence and National Security, 34/​7 (2019), 931–​932. 42  The laws involved were not predicated on the proposition that purported that ‘civilians’ by day might also be guerrillas by night. Rather, they were designed to limit civilian freedom of movement as a strategic objective. For wider discussion of the precepts, see: Lazar, ‘Necessity and Non-​Combatant Immunity’, 53–​57. 43  David French, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 1945–​1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 74–​82; Karl Hack, ‘Everyone Lived in Fear: Malaya and the British Way of Counter-​Insurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012), 671–​699. 44  Annie Pfingst, ‘Militarised Violence in the Service of State-​imposed Emergencies over Palestine and Kenya’, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, 6/​3 (2014), 6–​37, quotes at 21. 45  IISH, COLL00201, Algeria, social & political developments collection, folder 1, GPRA pamphlet, ‘Génocide en Algérie: Les Camps de regroupement’, October 1960. 46  Amelia H. Lyons, The Civilizing Mission in the Metropole: Algerian Families and the French Welfare State during Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 159–​160. 47  See the chapters by Katherine Bruce-​ Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz, Moritz Feichtinger, Miguel Bandeira, and José Pedro Monteiro in this volume.

150   Martin Thomas New forms of what could be characterized as defensive sociability emerged in response. Women kept their interactions with male guards to a minimum. Extended families and neighbour networks protected adolescent girls where possible. The forcible removal of people to these spaces of confinement marked the imposition of a colonial carceral regime upon a significant proportion, sometimes even the majority, of a local population whose misfortune was to inhabit areas that imperial security agencies designated politically troublesome and thus requiring ‘emergency’ restriction. Actions of this type derived first from colonial authorities’ information networks, and second from the ways in which such material was interpreted. Imperial states constructed elaborate intelligence systems based on extensive surveillance and informant networks to gather information about dissidents and potential sources of disorder and revolutionary overthrow. Accomplished collectors of intelligence, colonial governments were less adept at analysing it.48 Abiding cultural biases, racial prejudice, and inflated anxieties about communist or religious extremism meant that colonial intelligence operatives often misrepresented and even imagined threats to white rule.49 Colonial security forces took disproportionate action as a result: particular ethnic and confessional groups were criminalized and harassed; repressive measures such as mass arrests or forced removals sometimes triggered the very disorders they were supposed to prevent. Compelled to organize in secret or, more often, inside colonial prisons, revolutionary insurgent movements from India and Vietnam to Algeria and even Northern Ireland took shape, where once only sporadic and more localized forms of protest had existed.50 Emergency legislation made it possible to wage war inside empires without prior need to declare it. Colonial Algeria, for example, was thus rendered legally schizoid. After French parliamentarians approved the first of numerous state of emergency provisions in April 1955, Algeria was simultaneously governed as a hostile territory and an integrated colony whose population was there to be won over.51 At the same time, Algeria’s civilian majority was no longer presumed innocent until evidence suggested otherwise.52 Quite the reverse: imperial security forces coerced entire communities, killed countless civilians, and ultimately interned more than two million others in punitive actions that supposedly restored order. A contradiction in terms, this justificatory logic followed a different strategic rationale.

48 

Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). 49  There is a long history to what historian Christopher Bayly termed imperial ‘information panics’, a tendency among anxious administrators and settlers to view local rumour through a prism of Orientalism, conflating supposed threats in the process. See Bayly, Empire and Information, Alexander Morrison, ‘Sufism, Pan-​Islamism and Information Panic: Nil Sergeevich Lykoshin and the Aftermath of the Andijan Uprising’, Past and Present, 214 (February 2012), 255–​304; Kim A. Wagner, ‘ “Treading Upon Fires”: The “Mutiny”-​Motif and Colonial Anxieties in British India’, Past & Present, 218/​1 (2013), 159–​197. 50  As examples: Durba Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–​1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–​1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Jocelyn Alexander, ‘The Productivity of Political Imprisonment: Stories from Rhodesia’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47/​2 (2019), 300–​324. 51  Sylvie Thénault, ‘L’état d’urgence (1955–​ 2005). De l’Algérie coloniale à la France contemporaine: destin d’une loi’, Le Mouvement Social, 218/​1 (2007), 63–​78. 52 Sylvie Thénault, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale: camps, internements, assignations à résidence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012), chap. 12.

The Civilianization of Violence    151 Emergency legislation gave legal sanction to increasingly permissive violence whose cardinal objective was to isolate insurgents from the surrounding colonial population.53 In this topsy-​turvy world in which law enabled colonial security forces to wage peacetime war against the civilians they claimed to be saving, the most ardent protagonists of repression acknowledged an intellectual debt to their insurgent enemies. Civilians were squeezed between anti-​colonial insurgents and imperial counter-​insurgents equally prepared to use violence to compel compliance. The result? An escalatory dynamic in which the competing sides outdid the other in exemplary acts of violence designed to determine people’s choices once and for all.54 The violence of decolonization, whether conducted in secret or under a public gaze, was performative, as much about instructing those who feared or witnessed it as about silencing, stopping, or otherwise nullifying those who suffered it. Modes of colonial governance also conditioned the way that decolonization’s violence unfolded. In asserting imperial sovereignty, empires made claims to govern their colonial subjects even though, in practice, their administrative presence might have been minimal and remote for most of the time.55 Conversely, whether operating inside disputed colonial territory or from ‘sanctuary bases’ and through ‘governments in exile’ located within other friendly states, insurgent movements used transnational connections to embed alternate governance structures.56 They often did so in conditions of chronic shortage. Some, like the North Vietnamese, introduced new currencies and other units of exchange, including salt and essential foodstuffs, changing ideas of monetary value and collective obligation as part of a wider social revolution.57 Even where no such economic innovations were introduced, demands for labour, resources, and money could be extreme.58 Sustaining supply and distribution networks became tests of political credibility for insurgent groups and matters of personal survival for communities under insurgent control.59 In all cases, the unarmed civilian was chronically exposed to the demands of those with guns.60

53  Benjamin Claude Brower, ‘Partisans and Populations: The Place of Civilians in War, Algeria (1954–​ 62)’, History & Theory 56/​3 (2017), 391–​397. 54  Valentino, Huth, and Balch-​ Lindsay, ‘ “Draining the Sea” ’, 375–​407; Downes, ‘Draining the Sea by Filling the Graves’, 420–​444. An insightful regional case study of these pressures in South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta is Shawn F. McHale, The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945–​1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 55  Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 154–​157. 56 Idean Salehyan, Rebels Without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 40–​46; Jeffrey T. Checkel (ed.), Transnational Dynamics of Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3–​20. See also Mathilde von Bülow’s chapter in this volume. 57 Lentz, Contesting Territory, 41–​46, 96–​102; Christopher Goscha, Vietnam: un État né de la guerre, 1946–​1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), 423–​433. 58 Lentz, Contesting Territory, 115–​127; Christopher Goscha, ‘A “Total War” of Decolonization? Social Mobilization and State-​Building in Communist Vietnam (1949–​54)’, War and Society, 31/​2 (2012), 140–​ 148, 152–​155. 59  The fullest discussion of this rebel governance phenomenon is within the comparative politics literature on civil wars, the exemplary work being Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly (eds.), Rebel Governance in Civil War. 60  Those living in frontier districts and other remote areas often fared worse: see Heike I. Schmidt, Colonialism and Violence in Zimbabwe: A History of Suffering (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013),

152   Martin Thomas Following Heonik Kwon’s insights into the Korean War, a conflict with staggeringly high levels of civilian killings on all sides, my suggestion is not that colonial violence was somehow unique. As with Korea, so in later decolonization wars, understanding their nature and impact is better achieved by considering the high levels of violence against civilian subjects. Their relational ties of kinship and ethnicity, as much as their physical location within areas identified as hostile to the incumbent regime, made them acutely vulnerable to punitive or retributive violence.61 Some of this was indiscriminate, but much of it was targeted. All of it was ‘social’ in the sense that acts of violence affected not just individuals but those with whom they interacted, whether family and kinship groups or neighbours, coworkers, and fellow community members.62 The Korean experience portended what was to come in the decolonizing world. In the five years from the end of Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea in 1945 to the formal outbreak of the country’s civil war in June 1950, at least 100,000 civilians died in acts of political violence in South Korea alone.63 Such was the determination of the rival Korean regimes to be rid of their internal opponents that these killings have been characterized as ‘policide’: a form of state terror based on elimination of any perceived popular threat to regime survival.64 More unusual, although, again, far from unique, colonial regimes and some of their post-​colonial successors exacted collective punishments to enforce social control, applying strategies of associative guilt that fell heaviest on the families and kinship groups of individuals accused of anti-​regime activity. ‘Loyal’ civilian subjects in this context were of multiple types. These may be conceptualized in terms of concentric circles. Those employed by, or otherwise conspicuously supportive of the governing apparatus occupied the inner circle, while those in the more distant circles might be differentiated according to the regime’s judgement, not just of the individual subject’s behaviour but of that of their family, their kin relations, or their local community as well. So pervasive were these attributions of collective political responsibility for alleged misdeeds that it is nonsensical to talk about distinct ‘wartimes’ and ‘peacetimes’ within late colonial empires, a point amplified by the persistence of ideas of associative guilt—​and consequent collective punishments—​within the civil wars that occurred in numerous decolonizing societies.65 Here we come closer to establishing something intrinsic to empires: a colonial liminal condition that was never peaceable, or what some scholars term, adapting the ideas of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, ‘a state of exception’.66

134–​146, 157–​163; Luise White, ‘“Heading for the Gun”: Skills and Sophistication in an African Guerrilla War’, Comparative Studies in Society & History, 51/​2 (2009), 236–​259. 61  Heonik Kwon, After the Korean War: An Intimate History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 5–​6, citing Steven Hugh Lee, The Korean War (New York: Longman, 2001). 62 Kwon, After the Korean War, 3–​4. 63  Dong Choon Kim, ‘Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacres—​the Korean War (1950–​1953) as Licensed Mass Killings’, Journal of Genocide Research, 6/​4 (2004), 526–​569. 64  Kim, ‘Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacres’, 537–​539. 65 Kwon, After the Korean War, 90–​98. 66  Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15/​1 (2003), 11–​40; Elizabeth Kolsky, ‘The Colonial Rule of Law and the Legal Regime of Exception: Frontier “Fanaticism” and State Violence in British India’, American Historical Review, 120/​4 (2015), 1218–​246.

The Civilianization of Violence    153

Experiences of Civilians, Detainees, and Refugees In decolonization conflicts spanning thirty years from the Vietnamese Revolution of August 1945 to Portugal’s African withdrawal after the 1974 Carnation Revolution in Lisbon, aerial bombing and napalm jelly incinerated people, reprisals and degrading treatment were widespread, and at counter-​insurgencies’ kinetic edges rural ‘sweep’ operations and free-​fire zones put local residents literally in the firing line.67 Collective punishments saw villages destroyed (generic), farmland, work routes, and tracks to water sources mined (prevalent in Southern African and Southeast Asian conflicts), ecosystems degraded (generic), and millions incarcerated in resettlement camps and ‘new villages’ (prevalent in Vietnam, Madagascar, Malaya, Kenya, Algeria, Mozambique, and Angola).68 Those who refused faced other vulnerabilities, their reluctance to move constructed as defiance. The consequences could be lethal. Acting at the behest of Portuguese secret police informants, on 15 December 1972 an army company decimated the Wiriyamu Triangle, a cluster of over forty villages in northern Mozambique’s Tete province, killing at least 385 unarmed inhabitants. Villagers became more exposed, having failed to relocate to an aldeamento (resettlement village) as previously instructed.69 The persistence of such violence against civilian populations in colonial spaces after 1949 suggests that, whatever their stipulations, the new Geneva Conventions were substantially ignored. In purely juridical terms, late colonial conflicts were, for the most part, conducted beyond the remit of the laws of war. To be sure, over the course of the 1950s especially the weight of evidence about human rights violations against insurgents, detainees, and non-​combatants mounted. So much so that it drained the credibility from the legal and moral arguments put by colonial powers to treat decolonization conflicts as internal disorders—​something less than ‘armed conflicts not of an international character’—​and thus outside the scope of the Geneva Convention.70 Increasing global attention to civilian maltreatment fostered public awareness that such claims were self-​serving, inhumane, and bogus. For all that, the sorry fact is that rights abuses remained endemic to imperial counter-​insurgencies. 67 ‘Guerre de libération nationale. Un témoignage d’Anissa Barkat, née Derrar’ Centre national d’études historiques, 1977, Centre El Biar, Algiers, 1, 12. A member of an ALN nursing team in Algeria’s wilaya V, Anissa Barkat, was wounded by rocket fire from two French attack helicopters on 3 May 1959. (My thanks to Natalya Benkhaled-​Vince for this reference.) 68  MAE, série Afrique-​ Levant, sous-​ série Mozambique, vol. 59QO29, no. 56/​ AL, ‘A.S. de la situation d’ensemble’, 1 May 1968; no. 10450, Centre d’exploitation du renseignement, Note d’information: ‘Evolution de la situation au Mozambique’, 2 May 1969; vol. 59QO30: Action rebelle et défense portugais, no. 47, ‘A/​S: Evolution de la lutte contre la subversion’, 8 March 1972; 37Q026, sous-​ série: Angola, vol. 26 no. 4/​AL, ‘A.S. Action psychologique et promotion sociale’, 24 March 1972; Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 9–​15, 130–​135, 363–​368; David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 96–​98. 69 Mustafah Dhada, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964–​ 2013 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 159–​169. Village chiefs did not defy the relocation order, but were seeking assurances about the fate of their land and livestock. 70  Marshall, ‘Imperial Nostalgia’, 233–​258, at 241.

154   Martin Thomas This situation was different to that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which the proliferation of international laws that attempted to regulate the conduct of war excluded campaigns of colonial conquest and repression.71 By the end of the Second World War, as Amanda Alexander notes, international law had not somehow forgotten colonial wars. Quite the reverse: it was devised to criminalize guerrilla fighters, thereby denying them the protections (particularly as prisoners of war) conferred by belligerent status.72 In a sequence familiar to scholars of modern counter-​insurgency, to the end of the Algerian conflict, FLN detainees were refused ‘political prisoner’ status, instead facing prosecution for acts defined as criminal. Again, in what was a familiar pattern from French Vietnam at the start of the twentieth century to British-​ruled Northern Ireland three generations later, civil rights demonstrations, media campaigns, and a large-​scale prisoner hunger strike by Algerian detainees in the fall of 1961 failed to sway metropolitan government.73 Neither the abuse of colonial detainees nor governmental toleration of it was anything new. Feminist writer and investigative journalist Andrée Viollis denounced systematic maltreatment of political prisoners in French Vietnam, which spiked after suppression of the Nghệ Tĩnh soviet movement in 1930–​1931.74 The crackdown decimated Vietnam’s leading nationalist force, the VNQDD, outlawed the newly formed Indochinese Communist Party, and locked up thousands of its supporters. Each had devastating long-​term consequences, registered in the radicalization of Vietnamese politics.75 Viollis’s resulting book, Indochine SOS, first published in 1935, has been held up as the first in a series of landmark French literary protests against the habitual use of torture in the French Empire. The book’s high-​ profile reception, including serialization in the French national press, also makes plain that 71  Frédéric Mégret, ‘From “Savages” to “Unlawful Combatants”: A Postcolonial Look at International Law’s “Other”’, in Anne Orford (ed.), International Law and its ‘Others’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–​17, also cited in Anna Chotzen, ‘Beyond Bounds: Morocco’s Rif War and the Limits of International Law’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 5/​1 (2014), 33–​34. 72 Amanda Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law: Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I’, Melbourne Journal of International Law, 17/​1 (2016), 19–​22; also cited in Jessica Whyte, ‘The “Dangerous Concept of the Just War”: Decolonization, Wars of National Liberation, and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 9/​3 (2018), 335 n. 45. 73 For Vietnam, see: Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, chaps. 5–​ 7; for Northern Ireland, see Tony Craig’s chapter in this volume. For the hunger strike by members of the FLN’s French Federation imprisoned in France, see: IISH, COLL00201, Algeria, social & political developments collection, folder 4, ‘Background document on the situation of the thousands of Algerian political prisoners in France and Algeria, text of communiqué issued by FLN French Federation on 5 November 1961, circulated by GPRA, New York. The hunger strike began on 2 November 1961. At its height, and after refusing food for between two and three weeks, 420 prisoners in the Baumettes prison at Marseilles and 100 imprisoned in the eastern city of Metz were dispersed into groups of twenty to other prisons in France. For contemporary pressure on the British government to allow prosecutions of military personnel in Northern Ireland, see: Huw Bennett, ‘ “Smoke without Fire”? Allegations against the British Army in Northern Ireland, 1972–​5’, Twentieth Century British History, 24/​2 (2013), 285–​298. 74  Anne Renoult, ‘Indochine SOS: Andrée Viollis et la Question coloniale (1931–​ 1950)’, in Amaury Lorin and Christelle Taraud (eds.), Nouvelle histoire des colonisations européennes (XIXe—​ XXe siècles): Sociétés, Cultures, Politiques (Paris: Presses Universaitaires de France, 2013), 144–​146. 75  Martin Thomas, ‘Fighting “Communist Banditry” in French Vietnam: The Rhetoric of Repression after the Yen Bay Uprising, 1930–​1932’, French Historical Studies, 34/​4 (2011), 611–​648.

The Civilianization of Violence    155 there was abundant evidence of police and army torture decades before the Algerian conflict brought the issue to public attention in France and globally.76 What Viollis could not foresee was that refugee populations would become totemic civilian victims of late colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies. To give only a few examples, Palestinians forced from their homeland following the 1948 war, Vietnamese moving from North to South after the 1954 ceasefire, and Algerians fleeing their decolonization conflict in increasing numbers from 1956 onwards might get safely across a war frontier, but they could not escape the war’s politics. Each was remobilized by, respectively, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the South Vietnamese regime and its American sponsors, or the Algerian FLN, whether as supporters and fighters in situ or as instruments of propaganda about systemic rights abuses. Thus did displaced people become the embodiment of their conflict’s internationalization.77 Differently put, refugees from decolonization’s wars faced manipulation, whether by their alleged oppressors or their supposed protectors.78 Rarely acknowledged primarily as displaced civilians, they were several other things at once: the object of competing transnational relief efforts, pawns in diplomatic bargaining over humanitarian access to rebel-​controlled ‘free zones’, and powerful symbols in the global war of words about violent struggles for self-​determination. Attempts to shelter and feed them brought together unusual bedfellows whose humanitarian impulse superseded the ideological animosity between them. These working coalitions would traverse several invisible divides: between opposing Cold War blocs, between differing ethno-​religious groups, and across national airspaces, territorial waters, and closed colonial frontiers. At the same time, insurgent movements that instrumentalized the refugee as the personification of colonial victimhood could be ruthless in extracting money, manpower, food, and even medical supplies from their kindred refugee communities.79 The fate of the decolonization refugee was to be objectified. Significantly, while the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had spent three years devising its 1956 ‘Draft Rules for the Limitation of the Dangers Incurred by the Civilian Population in Time of War’, its prohibitions on particular methods and weapons of war were generally ignored.80 This, in combination with the silences and ambiguities of the four 1949 Geneva Conventions regarding civilian protections and recognition of insurgents’ rights to be treated as combatants (and, therefore, with defined protections during surrender or as

76 

Renoult, ‘Indochine SOS: Andrée Viollis et la Question coloniale’, 147–​152. Efrat Ben-​Ze’ev, Remembering Palestine in 1948: Beyond National Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 87–​ 95, 132–​ 134; Laura Robson, ‘Refugees and the Case for International Authority in the Middle East: the League of Nations and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East Compared’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 49 (2017), 625–​644; Jessica Elkind, ‘“The Virgin Mary is Going South”: Refugee Resettlement in South Vietnam, 1954–​1956’, Diplomatic History, 38/​5 (2014), 987–​1,016; MAE, série Afrique-​Levant, sous-​ série MAROC, 1956–​1968, vol. 87, no. 5139/​EMGDN/​REN, Division renseignement, ‘Fiche au sujet des réfugiés algériens au Maroc’, 1 June 1959. 78  See Phi-​Vân Nguyen’s chapter in this volume. 79  MAE, série Afrique-​Levant, sous-​série MAROC, 1956–​1968, vol. 87, PD/​EA, Note sur les réfugiés algériens au Maroc, 14 May 1958. 80  Kinsella, ‘Superfluous Injury and Unnecessary Suffering’, 214; Whyte, ‘The “Dangerous Concept of the Just War”’, 316. 77 

156   Martin Thomas prisoners) within colonial wars, left ample scope to conduct decolonization conflicts, not so much outside the rules, as substantially without them.81 Admittedly, the USSR and ICRC briefly aligned during negotiation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, first in pressing for the extension of protections to insurgents fighting ‘unjust’ occupation and, second, in according belligerent status to those fighting civil and decolonization wars. In the event, though, both the willingness of the ICRC and the Soviets to work together, and the putative recognition that anti-​colonial insurgents be recognized as combatants entitled to the Conventions’ protections, proved short-​lived.82 Not until the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions included insurgencies within the sphere of conflicts to which basic protections for combatants and civilian populations should apply did the human rights of colonized peoples figure centrally in international law.83 National liberation movements seemed to confirm this conclusion by justifying their recourse to violence on the grounds that legitimate claims to self-​determination were not only denied by their colonial rulers, but had been repeatedly overlooked by the international community. There is an alternative perspective, however: one in which transnational activism spearheaded a gradual yet inexorable shift in popular attitudes locally, nationally, and globally. In this sense, the gathering certainty that colonialism was indefensible rested heavily on the chronic abuses of human rights that, by the early 1960s, had come to exemplify it.84 Whereas throughout the global South popular anti-​colonialism was a sentiment bound up with claims to nationhood, domestic rights struggles, and universal claims to equality by non-​white peoples, among domestic publics in Europe and the United States anti-​ colonialism assumed a more humanitarian form, making the alleviation of human suffering a core justification for opposing empire. Why it took so long for publics in the rich world to recognize the sources of suffering in the global South, particularly after the explosions in humanitarian relief efforts during and after the two World Wars, is, of course, a bigger story.85

Moving Beyond Empire European counter-​insurgency campaigns in Asia and Africa exemplified decolonization’s asymmetric ‘dirty wars’ between 1945 and 1965. Attention quickly shifted thereafter to America’s expanding ground war in Vietnam and Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip following its lightning victory in the Six Day War of June 1967.86 Within months of Israel’s pyrrhic victory, the political stakes, geographic 81  Fabian

Klose, ‘“Source of Embarrassment”: Human Rights, State of Emergency, and the Wars of Decolonization’, in Stefan-​Ludwig Hoffman (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 253–​256. 82  Boyd Van Dijk, ‘“The Great Humanitarian”: The Soviet Union, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949’, Law and History Review, 37/​1 (2019), 225–​234. 83  Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (New York: Cornell University Press, 2018), 9–​11, 99–​101, 191. 84  Ibid., 11–​12; Todd Shepard, ‘“History is Past Politics”? Archives, “Tainted Evidence”, and the Return of the State’, American Historical Review, 115/​2 (2010), 474–​483. 85  Julia F. Irwin, ‘Taming Total War: Great War-​Era American Humanitarianism and its Legacies’, Diplomatic History, 38/​4 (2014), 774–​775. 86 Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, 5–​7.

The Civilianization of Violence    157 locales, and ideological contexts of violent decolonization all changed. The audacious Vietnamese Tet assault on American-​held Saigon in February 1968 confirmed that the Hanoi regime and its Viet Cong ally represented one regional wing of a global guerrilla offensive. The fierce resistance offered by fighters of Palestine’s Fatah movement to the Israeli Defense Force raid on Jordan’s al-​Karama refugee camp in March 1968 underlined that thousands of stateless Palestinians represented the other.87 These changes signified several important shifts in the nature of contested decolonization: at once, generational, ideological, and geopolitical. For one thing, to the colonial subjects faced with imperial repression as Europe’s empires withered away were added the millions faced with foreign occupation, imperialist intervention, and the settler colonialism of an expanding Israeli state in the 1960s and 1970s. For another, what had been clearly distinguishable wars of decolonization were increasingly conceptualized by those who lived through them and others still having to fight them as part of something even larger: the assertion among peoples of the global South of their claims to sovereignty, nationhood, and basic rights too long denied.88 Third World and Communist bloc delegates to the 1968 UN Human Rights Conference in Tehran took aim at imperialist violence and international law’s apparent blindness to it, redoubling ICRC concentration on the matter but, otherwise, without immediate result.89 Stung by the criticisms voiced at Tehran and painfully aware of its limited impact on contemporary conflicts in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Nigeria-​Biafra, the ICRC set in train a series of meetings on revisions to international humanitarian law in armed conflicts.90 Turning recommendations into policy outcomes took time. It was not until the early 1970s Diplomatic Conferences preparatory to signature of the 1977 Protocols Additional to the earlier Geneva Conventions that the suffering of civilians and the combatant rights of insurgents were firmly embedded within the scope of international laws on the conduct of war.91 International and transnational pressures from the global South converged to do so. Delegates from countries recently decolonized, as well as anti-​colonialists fighting for national liberation in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa, were pivotal to this reconceptualization of international law. These actors mapped the language of anti-​ imperialism and collective rights to self-​determination onto the arguments of just war theory to highlight the limitations of existing humanitarian laws regulating the conduct of war, the protection of its victims, and the recognition of belligerent status. ‘Just’ war in this 87 

Heather Marie Stur, Saigon at War: South Vietnam and the Global Sixties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 174–​180; Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, 43–​49. The Israeli government’s justification of the al-​Karama raid as a retaliatory police action only added to the impression that it signified colonial-​style warfare and colonialist behaviour. 88 Chamberlin, The Global Offensive, 19–​22, 52–​61. 89 Whyte, ‘ “The Dangerous Concept of the Just War” ’, 316–​ 317; Roland Burke, ‘From Individual Rights to National Development: The First UN International Conference on Human Rights, Tehran, 1968’, Journal of World History, 19/​3 (2008), 275–​296. 90  Eleanor Davey, ‘Decolonizing the Geneva Conventions: National Liberation and the Development of Humanitarian Law’, in A. Dirk Moses, Marco Duranti, and Roland Burke (eds.), Decolonization, Self Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 375–​396. ICRC experiences in the Biafra conflict were especially influential, see: Marie-​Luce Desgrandchamps, ‘ “Organising the Unpredictable”: The Nigeria-​Biafra War and its Impact on the ICRC’, International Review of the Red Cross, 94/​888 (2012), 413–​432. 91  Kinsella, ‘Superfluous Injury’, 218–​224.

158   Martin Thomas context was less an invocation of medieval thinking about the legitimate conduct of military violence than an adaptation to wars of national liberation of earlier Leninist and Maoist support for partisan resistance to oppressive occupation.92 The ideological objective was clearly anti-​colonial, in Jessica Whyte’s telling phrase, to pit ‘the realities of a decolonizing present against the legal norms of a colonial past’.93 The ICRC, reluctant to identify with this radical political agenda, could still endorse it insofar as the practical outcomes sought were to extend the scope of humanitarian oversight and minimize suffering.94 This congruence assured, the core success of the 1977 Additional Protocols was the sentences written into Article 1, paragraph 4 of Additional Protocol I, which extended legal protections to cover ‘armed conflicts in which people are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right to self-​determination’.95 To American consternation, wars of decolonization were at last placed within the juridical scope of international laws regulating war between states. Anti-​colonial insurgents had argued for decades that international humanitarian law served imperial interests by denying both those fighting for national liberation and the surrounding civilian population the same protections as their armed occupiers.96 By extending the purview of belligerent rights and civilian protections, the Additional Protocols at last acknowledged this to have been the case.

Conclusion Amid the epistemological and terminological debates over ‘counter-​insurgency’ and ‘irregular warfare’, one point bears prior emphasis: because conflicts of this type sought to control populations, they were fought among, and often against, civilian communities whose status as such was unrecognized in theory and rarely respected in practice.97 Scholarly work on insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies often distinguishes between so-​called population-​centric and enemy-​centric conflicts, the former predicated on social action, welfare provision, and infrastructure-​building, the latter focused more squarely on military violence. Such distinctions meant little or nothing in conflicts at the end of empire in which the unarmed could be as exposed to punishment as those with weapons.98

92 

Whyte, ‘ “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War” ’, 323–​328. Ibid., 315. 94  Davey, ‘Decolonizing the Geneva Conventions’, 381–​384, 388. Davey stressed the pivotal roles, first of Mouloud Belaoune, former FLN doctor and president of the Algerian Red Crescent between 1967 and 1994, then of the OAU’s Coordinating Committee for the Liberation of Africa as liaisons between anti-​ colonial insurgents and the ICRC. 95  Cited in Whyte, ‘ “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War” ’, 329. 96  Davey, ‘Decolonizing the Geneva Conventions’, 390–​391, 394–​396. 97  Beatrice Heuser, ‘Exploring the Jungle of Terminology’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 25/​4 (2014), 741–​742; Sibylle Scheipers, ‘Counterinsurgency or Irregular Warfare? Historiography and the Study of “Small Wars” ’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 25/​5–​6 (2014), 879–​899. 98  David M. Anderson, ‘British Abuse and Torture in Kenya’s Counter-​insurgency, 1952–​1960’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012), 700–​7 19; and, in the same journal issue, David French, ‘Nasty not Nice: British Counter-​insurgency Doctrine and Practice’, 744–​761. 93 

The Civilianization of Violence    159 Focusing on the experiences of colonial civilian lives makes one thing clear above all. Imperial authorities claiming the right to administer dependent populations did not protect them. Military and police preoccupation with securitization, martial law, punitive restrictions, and other facets of so-​called lawfare deepened civilian insecurity as decolonization proceeded. So much so that, by 1957, in French Algeria, in British Cyprus, and elsewhere, the Geneva-​based ICRC was pressing the French and British governments to permit wider access and extended ICRC inspection powers to cover those subjected to the collective punishments enacted under emergency powers.99 Community members faced the threat or actuality of violence, whether for defying restrictions or, alternatively, for obeying them. Many adapted as best they could, performing multiple identities in an effort to achieve greater security. Public behaviour and even intimate private lives mirrored these shifts. At some times that required outward compliance with authority; at others a readiness to support anti-​colonial movements, or, varying with circumstance and encounter, both. Conversation became more guarded. Trust became more tenuous as suspicion intensified. Late-​colonial insurgencies and counter-​insurgencies, as a consequence, were experienced as something closer to civil war for many of the rural and urban communities among which they were fought.100

Select Bibliography Anderson, David M., and Daniel Branch, ‘Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–​1976’, International History Review, 39/​1 (2016), 1–​13. Arjona, Ana, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mampilly (eds.), Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Barros, Andrew, and Martin Thomas (eds.), The Civilianization of War: The Changing Civil-​ Military Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Branch, Daniel, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya. Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Dhada, Mustafah, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964–​2013 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Moses, A. Dirk, Marco Duranti, and Roland Burke (eds.), Decolonization, Self Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Drohan, Brian, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (New York: Cornell University Press, 2018). Feichtinger, Moritz, ‘“A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72. Hughes, Matthew, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936–​1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Jones, David Martin, Celeste Ward Gventer, and M.L.R. Smith (eds.), The New Counter-​ Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave-​Macmillan, 2014) 99 TNA, CO 936/​ 391, Colonial Office minutes on ICRC conventions for the protection of war victims: applicability in colonial disturbances, various dates, January 1957. 100  The fullest exploration of this argument remains Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya. Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

160   Martin Thomas Kalyvas, Stathis N., The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Kinsella, Helen M., ‘Superfluous Injury and Unnecessary Suffering: National Liberation and the Laws of War’, Political Power and Social Theory, 32 (2017), 205–​231. Luttikhuis, Bart, and A. Dirk Moses, ‘Mass Violence and the End of the Dutch Colonial Empire in Indonesia’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14/​3–​4 (2012), 257–​276. MacMaster, Neil, War in the Mountains: Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–​1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). McHale, Shawn F., The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945–​1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Staniland, Paul, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014). Thénault, Sylvie, Violence ordinaire dans l’Algérie coloniale: camps, internements, assignations à résidence (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012).

Chapter 8

T he Archite c t u re of C ol onial C ont rol Britain’s Pacification of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–​1939 Matthew Hughes Britain’s Way in Counter-​Insurgency Repressive colonial civil legislation underpinned Britain’s suppression of the Arab revolt in Palestine, 1936–​1939. The laws of the Mandate Government guided and made possible successful military operations; soldiers were in Palestine to enforce these laws. Political mobilization of, say, Maoist revolutionary war—​with secure base areas and alternative insurgent government with its own taxes and laws—​for rural-​based Palestinian peasant insurgents was the counterpart to Britain’s administrative war, but one ignored by rebels in favour of banditry and in-​fighting. There is not the space here to examine the political part to the insurgents’ war, except to say that it was mismanaged, and without unified rebel political command to counter the power of the colonial State—​for ‘divided commands have plagued guerrilla leaders through the centuries and are probably more responsible for failed insurgencies than any other factor’—​the British atomized the population and inexorably destroyed armed rebel bands that relied on the people.1 As the political part to Britain’s pacification was the key driver, so it was with the rebels, but the need for concise focus in this short chapter pulls the examination to the victors rather than the vanquished. Readers are directed elsewhere for the rebels’ part in their own downfall, and for a summary of military operations.2 1 Robert

Asprey, ‘ “Guerrilla Warfare” in “The Theory and Conduct of War” ’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica: Macropaedia, 15th ed. (1997), xxix, 689–​693. 2  Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–​39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Steven Wagner, Statecraft by Stealth: Secret Intelligence and British Rule in Palestine (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press 2019); M.K. Kelly, The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine and Nation-​Building on the Fringe of Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017); Charles Anderson, ‘When Palestinians Become Human

162   Matthew Hughes This chapter reorientates us from the military violence of field operations during counter-​insurgency to the colonial state’s emergency powers that lay dormant until great disturbances like the Arab revolt in 1936 demanded their enforcement by the army. Soldiers made real the state’s latent ability to control the people. Palestine is a model of Britain’s ‘way’ in counter-​insurgency in the twentieth century: the calibrated, measured, civil-​led, less than maximal violence of permanent emergency rule. Palestine would otherwise have spiralled into a Vietnam-​style disaster where soldiers and weapons led the counter-​insurgency, political control following rather than commanding the fighting. The army’s mission in Palestine was less to hunt down rebels than to be the Government’s ‘bailiff ’s men’ and administer the colonial state’s emergency laws in lieu of a functioning police force that had collapsed under the weight of insurgency.3 It did this very successfully. Swingeing, non-​lethal, legal collective punishments such as finings, curfews, detention, and forced labour replaced mass shootings and so reduced the numbers of killed, at least in relative terms to other colonial and neo-​ imperial powers. Senior military commanders never wanted untrammelled repressive powers and so acquiesced in this. The war and colonial ministries in London sparred with one another over which would direct counter-​insurgency, but neither sought full martial law, and soldiers worked with civil officials through the revolt to enforce ‘lawfare’: the all-​ encompassing legal system that legally restrained, detained, and impoverished Palestinians; lawfully hanged and killed them; and demolished their homes. It banned newspapers, interned people, fined and exiled them, censored their mail and telephone calls, took away livestock and crops, whipped them, imposed curfews and police posts, exacted corvée, and restricted travel. It made singing, shouting, and waving flags illegal, alongside processing the wrong way down a street, buying a child’s toy gun, or meeting in a cafe. People paid financial bonds to ensure their good behaviour. If they had a nice house, the authorities marked it for destruction if a stranger in the neighbourhood broke the law. Whole village populations walked miles and back every day to report their presence at a police station. Security forces had no need to use masses of unsightly, lethal force, and when such things happened, as they did, they were the work of murky auxiliary-​loyalist or police-​led security forces at the margins of the military machine (as happened in Kenya in the 1950s), or instinctive reactions by soldiers angry at the deaths of comrades. Gross human rights abuse signified the failure of colonial rule.4 Counter-​insurgency was changing after the Great War. The British army had never doctrinally articulated a minimum-​force doctrine for colonial pacification—​coercion was always the basis of operations—​but German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, the formation of the League of Nations, and anger at the 1919 Amritsar massacre by British-​led soldiers of demonstrators in India (not only there but also in the UK) dulled the violent edge of British colonial repression, and by 1936 the racist, eliminationist imperial ‘small wars’ of the Victorian era were unacceptable, replaced by the managed brutality of sub-​war imperial Shields: Counterinsurgency, Racialization and the Great Revolt (1936–​1939)’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 63/​3 (2021), 625–​654; Ted Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–​1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Ghassan Kanafani and Yuval Arnon-​Ohanna in notes 9 and 12 herein. 3 

Roger Courtney, Palestine Policeman (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1939), 83. See Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2017). 4 

The Architecture of Colonial Control    163 policing operations in ‘aid to the civil power’.5 Soldiers used necessary force, there to have moral effect, to strike (or threaten) terror to sustain imperial control, but this was not necessarily acceptable force. Hinge events such as Amritsar had proved the dangers of deploying extreme force.6 Here was the friction that retarded the maximal tendency of the violence inherent in colonial repression. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff even warned the Palestine army commander against using the word ‘punitive’.7 This was not minimum force as less than maximal force. The army in Palestine worked with colonial civil servants, ‘screwing down the people’ rather than killing them.8 The Arab revolt’s fury is testament to Palestinians’ profound anger at British rule and Jewish immigration, but without effective organization their passion stood no chance against Britain’s eight powerful, overlapping coercive-​violence spheres, the first of which is the subject matter for this chapter and informed (more or less) all the other drivers, including point six that was a mark of the failure of legal repression: 1. The colonial legal-​ administrative machinery of the Emergency State that underpinned military operations. 2. The military power of the security forces against rebel bands. 3. Population-​centric pacification driven by the Emergency State, built on the Ordinances and laws as discussed here and enforced by the army. 4. The information-​intelligence gathering systems of the British colonial state and military forces, supported by Jewish and Palestinian agents. 5. The collaboration and cooperation of local Palestinians and Jews, and the creation of pro-​government anti-​rebel auxiliary forces to fight and confuse insurgents. 6. The terror of dirty wars of torture and assassination. 7. The prison system and the use of indefinite detention. 8. Britain’s political-​diplomatic war against the rebels and its cooption of other Arab leaders to collaborate and help to suppress the revolt. Rebels in Palestine had no counter to this. They neither evolved militarily nor pulled off spectacular propaganda-​terror strikes like the IRA’s assassination of the British ‘Cairo Gang’ intelligence unit in Dublin in 1920, the Irgun’s destruction of the King David Hotel in 1946, the Vietcong’s 1968 Tet Offensive, or the 9/​11 airplane terrorist attacks. Palestinian insurgent forces regressed into bandit gangs that robbed villagers. Instead of guerrilla concentration to a culminating battle as happened at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, with Fidel Castro’s triumphal march down from the Sierra Maestra to Havana in 1959, or with the North Vietnamese 5  C.E. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practices (London: HMSO, 1906 [1896]); Callwell, War Office, By Command of the Army Council, 5 August 1937, Duties in the Aid of the Civil Power (London: War Office, 1937). For a recent examination of Callwell, see Daniel Whittingham, Charles E. Callwell and the British Way in Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 6  For the latest study of Amritsar, see Kim Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019). 7  Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (LHCMA), Deverell (CIGS, London) to Dill, 22 April 1937, Dill Papers, 2/​9. 8  Karl Hack, ‘Screwing Down the People: The Malayan Emergency, Decolonisation and Ethnicity’, in Hans Antlöv and Stein Tønnesson (eds.), Imperial Policy and Southeast Asian Nationalism (Richmond: Curzon, 1995).

164   Matthew Hughes capture of Saigon in 1975, British counter-​insurgency diluted the violence of the peasant ‘poor farmers’, the ‘urban and rural poor and not the rich’ who spearheaded the Arab revolt.9 When rebels abducted a teenage boy, he was initially terrified but ‘soon saw they were only a group of peasants, like our own peasants in Tulkarm, and I didn’t feel afraid anymore’.10 Rebel labelling of units as fasa’il (Arabic for bands or platoons) speaks to a rebellion that never stretched beyond small-​scale action. A platoon is the smallest military unit commanded by a commissioned officer, but in the Arab revolt this was the largest rebel unit. Even when guerrilla leader Fawzi al-​Qawuqji in September 1936 organized his force into four companies of Iraqis, Syrians, Druze, and Palestinians, totalling 200 men, each nominal company was a reinforced platoon of around fifty men. British counter-​insurgency was so effective that the army quickly spotted, attacked, and smashed larger formations such as Fakhri ‘Abd al-​Hadi’s 200-​strong one in 1936 and ‘the ease with which its movements could be detected soon persuaded him to adopt the fasa’il system’.11 Good leadership and command for rural-​based bands could have broken the military stasis and grown rebel base areas and forces—​platoons into companies into battalions and so on in a Maoist ascension to full-​scale rural war and victory in conventional battle—​but local fasa’il commanders instead bickered among themselves. Rebels generated a multiplicity of contending, separate commands without hierarchy and with dramatic names like ‘the destruction,’ ‘the attack’, ‘the struggle’, the ‘black’ and ‘red’ hand, but which crumbled when the British killed or captured (and often then hanged) their local leaders.12 To reiterate: this chapter takes the reader away from military counter-​rebel operations—​ for which the army had RAF close air support, tanks, intelligence networks, collaborators, and mobile columns—​ and away from rebel forces—​ that as discussed above were disorganized politically and militarily, so prompting their own defeat—​to test the thesis that the bedrock for the defeat of the Arab revolt was the imperial Emergency State’s powerful legal-​administrative systems. Only powerful ‘networks of rebellion’ could overcome this architecture of colonial control, and the rebels fought with fervour and little else, and so they lost.13

The Colonial Executive Palestine’s colonial executive made the laws that enabled pacification, and it did so without the usual checks and balances of democratic government. In Palestine there was no legislature (parliament) and little separation of the branches of government. Two attempts 9  Ghassan Kanafani, ‘Thawrat 1936–​1939 fi Filastin: Khalfiyyat, tafasil wa tahlil’ [‘The 1936–​39 Revolt in Palestine: Background, Details and Analysis’], Shu’un Filastinyya [Palestinian Matters], 6 (January 1972), 69; see also Swedenburg, Memories of Revolt, 24-​29. 10  Ghada Karmi, In Search of Fatima (London: Verso, 2009), 9–​10. 11  Martin Thomas, Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorders after 1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 247. 12  Yuval Arnon-​Ohanna, Falahim ba-​ Mered ha-​‘Aravi be-​eretz Yisrael, 1936–​39 [Felahin during the Arab Revolt in the Land of Israel] (Tel Aviv: Shiloh Institute, Tel Aviv University, 1978), 90–​91, 109. 13  Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2014).

The Architecture of Colonial Control    165 in 1922–​1923 and in 1935–​1936 to set up a local legislature failed, and the mooted schemes were phoney anyway, as they left the British-​run executive with the real power. The only counter to executive power came from the Palestine judiciary, from informal pressure on the executive, or from the Colonial Office and Parliament in London. Formal legislative scrutiny came indirectly, from the High Commissioner to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, who was responsible as a Minister to Parliament in London. This depended on there being MPs in Westminster interested in arguing the case for either community in Palestine, which happened for Palestine’s Jews at times, less so for the Arab side, although Palestinians opened media offices in London after 1936. There was an advisory council to the executive, but this was also all-​British and headed by the High Commissioner, so he was advising himself. There was a separate judiciary, but an unfavourable ruling in 1936 by Palestine’s British Chief Justice on the army’s destruction of Jaffa’s old city led to his dismissal and showed the limits to its power, on top of which the army interned Palestinians without trial and tried others in military courts under Emergency Regulations. There was only one prosecution of British security personnel during the revolt for abuse: of four British policemen in a ‘special squad’ who, in October 1938, assassinated in broad daylight in Jaffa an arrested suspect whom police had previously tortured, for which the men involved got risibly light sentences, reduced on appeal, or were bound over to keep the peace.14 When civil criminal courts were too slow or lenient in processing rebel suspects, the army admonished them and moved to replace them with military courts. Government in Palestine was by fiat, by proclamation through the High Commissioner by way of Orders in Council, as discussed below. If politics is the formal execution of power, and law is the formal restraint of power, law in Palestine was synonymous with executive power, and infused with colonial ideas of the subject population’s collective lives and shared guilt that demanded group punishments.

Collective Lives The British framed Palestinian village life as a collective ‘social system based on mutual protection rather than justice’, a view in some measure endorsed by local arrangements such as the collective rural faz‘a (alarm) security system whereby certain villages would help one another in times of crisis.15 Groups of villages on the West Bank also had traditions of uniting together, at the head of which stood a family recognized as regional leader. Seeing Palestinians collectively and punishing them accordingly facilitated imperial rule in Palestine on a limited budget without a permanent military garrison before riots in 1929, after which the army stationed two battalions there. Colonial officials agreed a perverse form of ‘joint venture’ (or ‘joint enterprise’) for Palestine’s population, the idea (in UK law) that if someone is part of a group committing a crime then that person is equally guilty, even 14  Matthew Hughes, ‘A British “Foreign Legion”? The British Police in Mandate Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies 49/​5 (2013), 696–​7 11. 15 Ylana Miller, ‘Administrative Policy in Rural Palestine: The Impact of British Norms on Arab Community Life, 1920–​1948’, in Joel Migdal (ed.), Palestinian Society and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 132; Sonia Fathi el-​Nimri, ‘The Arab Revolt in Palestine: A Study Based on Oral Sources’, PhD Dissertation, University of Exeter, 1990, 128–​130.

166   Matthew Hughes if someone else in the group pulled the trigger or threw the punch. This was common colonial practice; indeed, the Bolsheviks adopted the same ‘collective responsibility’ strategy in their suppression campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by mass deportation.16 The British in Palestine chose the village, tribe (if nomadic), or urban quarter as a collective entity to which they would apply joint venture punishment, through mukhtars (headmen), sheikhs, or mayors, assuming without proof that such bodies had collective knowledge of crimes committed by other parts of themselves. This assumed that everyone in a quarter was the same. Colonial ideas on subalterns’ collective lives deepened after 1936 when the British saw any rebel attack as a joint undertaking by all Palestinians and discriminated only in that those punished needed to be reasonably close to the crime, or just the nearest. Effective collective local resistance by the Jewish community blunted British collective punishment, with Jewish areas and rabbis coordinating to protest to local officials their innocence and to ensure that Jews avoided the ‘blacklist’ schedules of places due collective punishment. The British also summarily pre-​assigned group guilt by triaging rural Palestine into good, moderate, and bad villages, or labelling someone as a bad character, and delivering matching punishment after any outrage. The occasional use of tracker dogs imported from South Africa could prove the link between crime and punishment—​the rebels, say, passing through a local village after an attack—​and connect deed and guilt. A priori guilt, tracking, and hunting replaced judicial process to secure those to punish. Policeman Douglas Duff, who was ‘hounding’ rebel forces with dogs, spotted that ‘the foxes had gone to ground just ahead’ near ‘bad’ Ijzim village that security forces then ‘put to the question’ and wrecked.17 ‘I had read of a Roman Peace—​of making a desolation and calling it peace; I now saw what it meant’, wrote Duff, who then had a discerning exchange with a senior police officer on the burden of proof: ‘But there’s no proof that these people had anything to do with that ambush of yesterday’, I persisted. He looked amazed. ‘Good Lord, man’ he objected, ‘didn’t the dogs lead us here?’ ‘But, hang it, that’s not evidence’, I objected. ‘At best it is only proof that the murderers passed this way. It doesn’t prove that they came from this place. Your people and the soldiers have turned the village upside down, but you haven’t found anything to connect Ijzim with the murder’. ‘Of course we have’, he said, stubbornness in his voice; ‘didn’t the trail lead here?’ ‘Then if it had led to your own front door because the criminals may have come to your house, you would have been guilty of the murder of the British officer, I suppose?’ I asked sarcastically. He was looking at me with narrowed eyes. ‘Looks to me as though you were on the side of these wogs’, he said, suspiciously.18

The issue was not burden of proof or guilt, but group punishment. Proof was unnecessary or impossible to determine in fast-​moving military operations, or a dog would supply it. Everyone was guilty. Shared pre-​assigned mass criminality marked a fundamental difference between metropolitan and colonial legal systems.

16  Simon Innes-​Robbins, Dirty Wars: A Century of Counterinsurgency (Stroud: History Press, 2016), 92–​99. 17 Douglas Duff, Palestine Unveiled (London: Blackie, 1938), 58–​ 59; W. V. Palmer, ‘The Second Battalion in Palestine’, in H.D. Chaplin (ed.), The Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment (London: Michael Joseph, 1954), 85. 18 Duff, Palestine Unveiled, 59–​61.

The Architecture of Colonial Control    167

Orders in Council Britain established the administrative and legal superstructure for Mandate Palestine and for the emergency legislation used during the Arab revolt through Orders in Council, issued by the King, to whom Parliament had delegated law-​making powers. Following the substitution of military with civil rule in 1920, Palestine’s 1922 Order in Council created the country’s constitution. Orders in Council were historically the exercise of Royal Prerogative in consultation with the monarch’s closest advisers of the Privy Council (or Ministers nowadays) and were a means through which government could introduce legislation without the need to go through the full parliamentary process. They reflected the fact that before the establishment of the modern state, the monarch in council was the authority to make rules and regulations. Orders in Council saved time but lacked accountability and were an unusual tool for modern metropolitan democracies where parliaments and judiciaries scrutinized and agreed new laws. They could not alter an established rule of English law, but there was no well-​established English law in Palestine to challenge Orders in Council, nor any tradition of such things. Parliament in London gave the Crown through statute the power to make laws through Orders in Council, but unilateral Orders without any legislative scrutiny were and are an uncommon form of enacting major legislation in Britain, if not unknown in times of emergency or more recently in relation to the European Union. Thus, in 1914, Orders in Council rushed through Parliament made into law the Defence of the Realm Act that altered the state of the British constitution, ‘the executive became the legislature, and parliament declined into a relatively unimportant sounding board for public opinion’, as one lawyer curtly put it.19 Despite this, in the culturally ‘white’ metropolis the judiciary, legislature, and the people mitigated emergency regulations and Orders existed only at Parliament’s will. In Palestine, by contrast, Orders in Council were the primary form of law-​making and the unaccountable cornerstone of colonial rule, untampered by legislative or judicial scrutiny. Orders in Council restricted courts from challenging regulations made by military commanders. Common law, individual rights, and habeas corpus applied at home, in the white dominions, and to British subjects abroad, but not ‘in the empire of dark-​skinned peoples’ where threats to the state led easily to the suspension of the ‘normative universe of a rule of law’.20 British (and local Arab and Jewish) judges in Palestine rarely used English case law in Palestine to challenge official rulings, while pre-​Mandate Ottoman laws did little to resist the new body of British colonial law except to preserve local religious and communal customs that the British had little interest in changing as they ensured social stability. Illiteracy and poverty compounded poor access to and limited comprehension of the law, especially amongst rural Palestinian Muslim peasants who felt the rasp of pacification. There were sixty-​three Orders in Council for Palestine to 1944, and twenty amendments thereof, some repealed while others such as the 1925 citizenship Order shaped Palestine’s

19 A.W.B. Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 6–​7. 20  R.W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 481–​482; Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 16–​17.

168   Matthew Hughes history—​but only six of these Orders (and Acts) concern us here, alongside two associated Emergency Regulations: • • • • • • • •

1922 Order in Council 1931 Palestine (Defence) Order in Council 1936 Emergency Regulations derived from the 1931 Order in Council 1936 Palestine Martial Law (Defence) Order in Council dated 26 September 1936 but not published in the Palestine Gazette 1937 Palestine (Defence) Order in Council 1939 Emergency Powers (Colonial Defence) Order in Council 1939 Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1945 Emergency Regulations derived from the 1937 Order in Council

The 1922, 1931, and 1937 Orders in Council were pivotal to repression of the Arab revolt as they enabled a raft of subsidiary enforcement legislation—​notably Ordinances but also Emergency Regulations—​that underpinned pacification. The 1922 Order set the paramount rule that the High Commissioner could make any law that he thought necessary for public order: ‘The High Commissioner shall have full power and authority . . . to promulgate such Ordinances as may be necessary for the peace, order, and good government of Palestine’.21 After the 1929 Jewish–​ Palestinian disturbances, London issued the 1931 Palestine (Defence) Order in Council that gave the High Commissioner even greater powers, and its Article IV made possible the Emergency Regulations issued on 19 April 1936 at the start of the Arab revolt. The threat of disorder meant that in 1937 Britain issued a further Order in Council that referred back to the Palestine (Defence) Order in Council of 1931 and to the Palestine Martial Law (Defence) Order in Council of 26 September 1936. The 1937 Order came into effect from ‘time to time on being proclaimed by the High Commissioner’. It empowered him to make ‘Defence Regulations’ ‘as appear to him in his unfettered discretion to be necessary or expedient for securing the public safety, the defence of Palestine, the maintenance of public order and the suppression of mutiny, rebellion and riot, and for securing the essentials of life to the community’. Defence Regulations allowed for the detention and deportation of anyone if it ‘appears to the High Commissioner to be expedient in the interests of the public safety of the defence of Palestine’. They authorized the taking of any property or undertaking, the search and entering of any premises, and for the High Commissioner to amend ‘any law, suspend the operation of any law, and apply any law with or without modification’.22 Orders in Council triggered a tsunami of subsidiary legislation in the form of principal Ordinances and Emergency Regulations, to which the British added amendments, the key ones being the 1926 Collective Punishments Ordinance, the 1926 Police Ordinance, the 1926 Prisons Ordinance, the 1933 Press Ordinance, the 1936 Criminal Code Ordinance, and the 1936 Emergency Regulations. The myriad amendments to these Ordinances and to the 21  Legislation of Palestine, 1918–​ 25, Including the Orders-​ in-​ Council etc. (compiled by Norman Bentwich) (Alexandria: Whitehead Morris, 1926), i, 6–​7. 22 The Palestine (Defence) Order in Council 1937 in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices. Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1937, Vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Press, 1938), 260–​264.

The Architecture of Colonial Control    169 Emergency Regulations of April 1936 were immensely versatile, allowing the security forces to reassess Ordinances and Emergency Regulations and close loopholes considering rebel actions with suitable amendments. Tracking the multiple amendments to the regulations is not straightforward, one succeeding the next, referring to earlier principal (or main) Ordinances and Emergency Regulations that are not always the first chronologically. Alongside the Ordinances, Emergency Regulations, and their amendments there were Public Notices, Rules, Proclamations, Orders, Bylaws, Rules of Court, Curfew Notices, Notices of Fines, and Ottoman legislation superseded in 1936 by a new Criminal Code. The weak spot in this system for soldiers and police was the civil criminal court system that, first, acted too slowly and, second, with judges sitting without a jury, as was the case in Palestine, acquitted too many suspects, sometimes on what security forces saw as technicalities such as whether a weapon or ammunition was useable. Findings of innocence help explain the large numbers of suspects shot out-​of-​hand when captured, circumventing for security forces any legal due process, or ‘ “bumpings-​off ”—​nothing more or less’, recalled one British civil official.23 Soldiers wanted speedy justice. ‘One must arrest a man in the morning, try him in the afternoon, and shoot him at dawn the next day, if one has to go to drastic measures’, in the words of an RAF officer.24 The slow-​turning wheels of justice prompted the army to demand the right to use military courts to try suspects, a request met with the Defence (Military Courts) Regulations of 1937, enabled by the principal legislation of the 1936 Emergency Regulations, itself enabled by the 1931 Order in Council, the 1937 Regulations then becoming the principal legislation for amendments. Repressive legislation snowballed one to the next.

The Legislative Timeline, 1917–​1935 The British embodied group punishment in the 1921 Collective Responsibility for Crime Ordinance, repealed and updated in 1926. This established that if anyone caused damage or destruction in a village, then the owner of the damaged property could petition the whole village to pay, or if it were common land then the nearest village was the target. This meant that the Palestine Government did not have to pay compensation but targeted instead the ‘assessable inhabitants’ for any damages to pay.25 The High Commissioner issued a Prisons Ordinance in 1921, amended and updated with a principal Ordinance in 1926 and another in 1936, with Acre and Jerusalem gaols as execution sites. The Firearms Ordinance of 1922 became the principal ordinance for limiting small arms, with amendments in 1926, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, and 1938. There was a Police Ordinance in 1921, updated with a principal Ordinance in 1926, that still guides serving Israeli police officers. The emergency laws of the security state were taking root. Between 1924 and 1928, the Palestine Government secured itself and solidified the collective punishment laws first codified in 1921 by marrying ideas of ‘prevention’ to that of 23 

LHCMA, Note, Jerusalem, 25 June 1939, Lees Papers, 5/​9. LHCMA, Letter, Brooke-​Popham (HQ, RAF, Cairo) to Air Chief Marshal Ellington (London), 29 August 1936, Brooke-​Popham Papers, 4/​3/​48. 25  Collective Punishments Ordinance 1926 in Moses Doukhan (ed.), Laws of Palestine, 1926–​1931 Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Rotenberg, 1932), 286–​292. 24 

170   Matthew Hughes collective, joint endeavour in the 1924 Prevention of Crime (Tribal and Village Areas) Ordinance. This allowed the (British) District Commissioner to ‘sanction’ under the power of the High Commissioner ‘that a fine be levied collectively’ from tribal groups.26 The British issued the Prevention of Crime (Continuance) Ordinance in 1925 and the principal Collective Punishments Ordinance (No. 22) in 1926 that partially repealed the 1924 Prevention Ordinance and repealed the 1921 Collective Ordinance. The Collective Punishments Ordinance of 1926 was the legal foundation for much of the pacification during the Arab revolt, and it established a group penalty norm embodied in later Ordinances such as the Collective Fines one of August 1936. Police posts could be quartered in any town or quarter, and failing to render assistance was a crime. The 1926 Ordinance had established schedules of targeted areas and villages, ones made public in the English-​language Palestine Gazette. If a place on the schedule was in a ‘dangerous and disturbed condition’, the High Commissioner could increase the force of police and make the assessable inhabitants pay for a punitive police post, so keeping down government costs.27 The government also expected villagers to feed the police stationed in their village. Point 5 of the 1926 Ordinance made scheduled areas collectively complicit in any crime and introduced the nebulous notion of conniving in a crime. If an offence or damage had been committed and the District Commissioner had ‘reason to believe’ that inhabitants committed it or ‘connived’ or ‘failed to render all their assistance in their power’, or they ‘connived at the escape of, or harboured, any offender’, or they ‘combined to suppress material evidence’, he could fine them.28 The average villager was poor, with peasant families subsisting on £P.25–​30 per annum and government fines were substantial, running to hundreds and for larger towns thousands of pounds. The Collective Punishments (Amendment) Ordinance (No. 35) of 1929 allowed for the punishment of villages and areas even if they were not on existing schedules of such places. The legal materials of this period have long appended lists (or ‘schedules’) of villages with amendments of more villages; this amendment made all of Palestine eligible for collective punishment as it added villages to existing schedules post facto. The principal Police Ordinance in 1926 dissolved the British Gendarmerie force in Palestine and established a new police force, so reducing the need to deploy soldiers. The Police Ordinance allowed the police to enlist ‘suitable persons’ as supernumerary constables on ‘special service’.29 The police could close liquor stores and, referencing Ottoman law on assemblies, arrest people singing songs or using words or gestures likely to breach the peace. Police could outlaw processions, ban flags, emblems, and music, and change the route of any march. Jews complained about the blanket music ban for cafes in Tel Aviv, the city’s Mayor insisting that playing classical music was acceptable.30 Such restrictions were common across the British Empire, but the option to raise supernumerary police is significant as it allowed in times of emergency for the employment of masses of Jewish auxiliary police, especially as the 26 

Legislation of Palestine, 1918–​25, i, 386–​387. Collective Punishments Ordinance 1926 in Doukhan, Laws of Palestine, 1926–​1931, Vol 1, 286–​92; Robert Drayton, The Laws of Palestine in Force on 31 December 1933 Vol 1 (London: Waterlow, 1934), 147–​156. 28 Ibid. 29 Doukhan, Laws of Palestine, 1926–​1931, Vol 3, 1171. 30  Tel Aviv Municipal Archive, Letter, Dr Shalom Hildeshemier to Mayor’s Office, 25 June 1936, and reply from the Mayor’s Office in the next file dated 2 July 1936, File 04-​161-​B/​621: Riots, May–​July 1936 [one bundle of papers]. 27 

The Architecture of Colonial Control    171 British civilian population of Palestine was tiny. The Government made amendments to the Police Ordinance, notably in 1929, 1934, and 1936. The 1934 Police (Amendment) Ordinance 1934, for instance, amended sections of the 1926 Ordinance, tightened up rules on meeting and processions and licences thereof, and penalized further people for unlawful assemblies and refusals to obey police orders. In 1931, London issued the second of the Orders in Council that directly affected pacification: the Palestine (Defence) Order in Council, whose Article IV made possible the tranche of emergency legislation in 1936. The Order was an enabling one. It allowed the High Commissioner to take prompt action in the future and it followed on from the bloody riots of 1929 that left hundreds dead and necessitated for the first time the imposition of an effective police force of a permanent military garrison. The 1931 Order recognized the right to demolish houses, a central plank to pacification after 1936. It gave the High Commissioner swingeing powers to ‘take and retain’ any ‘land or building’, and he ‘may, if he thinks necessary for the purpose of the defence of Palestine, cause any buildings to be pulled down and removed, and any property to be removed from one place to another to be destroyed’.31 This was a significant addition to emergency powers, widely and indiscriminately used during the Arab revolt, targeting impressive village houses or whole neighbourhoods. A Press Ordinance of 1933 gave the High Commissioner extensive powers to control domestic newspapers, censor reporting, and ban foreign newspapers. The Press (Amendment) Ordinance of March 1936 gave the High Commissioner rights to warn newspaper owners and ‘by Orders in Council suspend the publication of the newspaper for such period as he may think fit’, and the Government closed newspapers for months on end during the revolt.32

Emergency Regulations, 1936–​1939 When mass disturbances erupted on 15 April 1936, the Emergency State was primed for action. The High Commissioner proclaimed the 1931 Order in Council and declared Emergency Regulations at 9 pm on 19 April 1936 as a precautionary measure, with a simultaneous night-​time curfew for Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the first of many such town curfews, alongside others attached to the wayside of railways and roads (and daytime curfews). The Emergency Regulations appeared the same day in a supplement to the Palestine Gazette. From 19 May to 14 September 1936, the Government made eleven Emergency Regulations amendments. The principal regulations on 19 April gave security forces the following key powers: • The Government would determine all offences in accordance with the established court system and associated Ordinances. • It will be lawful to seize any buildings needed for the life of the community, such as gas works or electricity stations. • It will be lawful to seize food, fuel, material, or stores needed for public life. 31 Drayton, Laws of Palestine, Vol 3, 2619-​2624.

32  Press (Amendment) Ordinance No. 14 of 1936 (18 March 1936) in Supplement No. 1 to the Palestine Gazette No. 577, 19 March 1936, in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices, Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1936, Vol. 1, 128.

172   Matthew Hughes • The Government can regulate trade and fix prices. • The Inspector General Police, a District Commissioner or Assistant District Commissioner, or superior police officer may: regulate road transport, use of traffic, fares; take possession of cars and vehicles for Government use; prescribe and restrict routes. • The High Commissioner may prohibit and regulate the sale, supply, and delivery of motor fuels and oils. • The High Commissioner can prohibit arms sales. • Anyone who injures or who prevents the proper working of the country’s infrastructure is committing an offence. • A District Commissioner ‘or some person duly authorised by him’ may by order impose a curfew. • The censor shall have the authority ‘to detain, open and examine’ all mail and he can withhold from delivery anything that ‘he shall consider . . . to contain anything the publication of which is in his opinion prejudicial . . . to the public safety or to the defence of Palestine’. • The censor by written authority can prohibit the publication or printing of newspapers. • The censor can demand that newspaper proprietors send to the censor any material prior to publication. • The censor can ban import of newspapers and he can ban publication inside Palestine of newspapers either with a notice in the Gazette or via an order to any person concerned. • Anyone who has a banned newspaper, posts one, or carries one is committing an offence. • Premises can be searched for banned publications or printing presses. • The High Commissioner can restrict the use of telephone services ‘to such persons as he may think fit’. • No ship shall leave a port without official permission. • ‘No person shall, without lawful excuse, loiter in any public place, and every person shall, when so ordered by a Police Officer in uniform, move on’. • The High Commissioner can deport anyone from Palestine with a Deportation Order. • Anyone obstructing, misleading or interfering with, or withholding information from an officer acting under these regulations will be committing an offence. • Any police office or mukhtar can arrest anyone without warrant ‘who so acts as to endanger the public safety’. • Police officers can enter, by force if necessary, premises ‘suspected of being used for purposes endangering the public safety’. • Police officers can search vehicles and anyone they suspect of carrying an illegal article.33

33  Emergency Regulations 1936 in Supplement No. 2 to the Palestine Gazette Extraordinary No. 584, 19 April 1936, in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices, Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1936, Vol. 2, 259ff.

The Architecture of Colonial Control    173 Three amendments affecting travel (22 May), detention (22 May and 1 June), the death penalty (12 June), and house demolition (12 June) merit further scrutiny. Amendment 2 to the Emergency Regulations on 22 May instituted permits for travel and empowered District Commissioners to place people under police supervision, make them live in a designated place, notify police of their whereabouts, and/​or keep a curfew. As these amendments were to Section 15 of the principal Emergency Regulations, they became Regulation 15A. Amendment 3 on 1 June amended detention Regulation 15A to become 15B and said that a District Commissioner had imprisonment powers of one year and he could detain ‘in such place of detention as may be specified by the District Commissioner in the order’.34 This was detention without trial, or internment in ‘concentration’ camps. This solved for the army the issue of detaining suspects who had not committed any chargeable offence, but it did not provide the desired exemplary deterrence or punishment, as soldiers had to hand those found with a weapon to the police, and the arrested person then passed through the criminal courts. Some rebel suspects never got to the courts as security forces shot them in situ, executed them, or beat them to death at army camps or in police cells. ‘Take him for a ride’, a police CID sergeant euphemistically put it when he instructed his men to assassinate a suspect.35 Amendment 4 on 12 June referred back to the 1931 Order and instituted a new sub-​section to Regulation 8 of the Emergency Regulations (so Regulation 8A) confirming the death penalty for any person firing a weapon, throwing a bomb, or interfering with Palestine’s infrastructure. Anyone found ‘guilty of an offence against this regulation’ would ‘upon conviction by a Court of Criminal Assize be punished with death or with imprisonment for life’.36 These three offences became the ones processed by military courts in 1937, but without any right of appeal to a higher court. In 1936, those charged with capital offences still passed slowly through the court system to the Assize Court, after which the High Commissioner (subsequently the army commander) considered the political value of commuting or executing the death sentence. The British caveated this regulation in 1936 by saying that if an attack on infrastructure such as railways or roads did not endanger people, then life imprisonment was the maximum sentence, to be decided by a District Court. The amended regulations were political, a way to ratchet up harsh legislation to intimidate rebels and convince their leadership to accept a ceasefire. The 12 June amendment with Regulation 19B confirmed the demolition powers embodied in the 1931 Order in Council. District Commissioners could mark houses seen as rebel firing points and any building ‘situated in any town, quarter, village or other area the inhabitants of which he is satisfied have committed, aided or abetted any offence involving violence or intimidation, the actual offenders being unknown to him; and where any house, building or construction is appropriated as aforesaid it shall be forfeited to the High Commissioner without compensation and may be demolished’.37 This power to demolish devolved over the course of the revolt to Assistant District Commissioners, the army, and the police.

34 

Emergency (Amendment) Regulations 1936 in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices, Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1936, Vols. 2 and 3, 578. 35  LHCMA, Memoir, Unbeaten Track: Some Vicissitudes in Two Years of a Public Servant’s Life by el-​ Asi, Lees Papers, 5/​13, 6–​7. 36  Emergency (Amendment) Regulations 1936, in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices, Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1936, Vols. 2 and 3, 610. 37  Ibid., 612–​613.

174   Matthew Hughes An amended and suitably updated legal system considering events on the ground was in place by June 1936, the month in which reinforcing infantry battalions arrived in Palestine. A battery of parallel subsidiary Ordinances and Notices further screwed down the country, tackling movement, weaponry, assembly, and explosives. Various parts of the security apparatus issued new instructions. The Police (Amendment) Ordinance on 18 May 1936 targeted persons carrying ‘any knife, stick, bludgeon, iron bar, stone, or weapon of any sort’ and those ‘inciting others to assemble by either by word or writing, or by any other means, and any person singing a song or making use of words or gestures’, who police could now arrest without warrant.38 Security forces spun a bewildering web of overlapping and intertwining laws, with different pedigrees, as when the District Commissioner Order on 8 August 1936 replicated the text of the Police Amendment Ordinance from 18 May 1936 but referred back to the Police Ordinance of 1926. The Knives and Daggers Ordinance 1936 on 18 May 1936 applied ‘anywhere’ that the High Commissioner saw ‘fit’ and prescribed a £P.300 fine and/​or three years in jail for anyone making or selling daggers. Those carrying a knife were liable to the suitably ‘severe’ penalty of a year in jail.39 The Inspector General of Police, Roy Spicer, issued a Mechanically Propelled Vehicles Order on 23 May 1936 banning road travel across most of Palestine except for those holding a police permit. There were Collective Punishments (Amendment) Ordinances on 23 and 28 May 1936. The Emergency Regulations (Manufacture of Explosives) Order on 1 June 1936 prohibited explosives manufacture and banned a detailed range of chemicals. The Police (Amendment) Ordinance on 1 June 1936 tackled the issue of people congregating, closing cafes and bars on pain of fines or six months in jail for the patron. There were also orders for shops to open to help break the rebels’ general strike. Police could arrest without a warrant, search suspects on a whim, detain without trial, search premises without a warrant, prohibit arms, and disarm anyone, and soldiers had similar powers. Before the first ceasefire on 12 October 1936, the British drew up a final Order: the Palestine Martial Law (Defence) Order in Council 1936 on 26 September 1936, not published in the Palestine Gazette (and so not enacted), but signed by the Privy Council in London on 20 November. It introduced the notion of military courts and military rule, allowing the High Commissioner to delegate to the General Officer Commanding his administrative powers—​thus establishing martial law.40 The October 1936 ceasefire, agreed in some measure because rebels feared the heavy punishment of the mooted martial law, nullified this Martial Law Order, whose subject—​the exercise of power and the delegation of full 38 Police (Amendment) Ordinance (No. 2) of 1936, 18 May 1936, by Wauchope, in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices, Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1936, Vol. 1, 201 repeating parts of the 1926 Police Ordinance in Doukhan, Laws of Palestine, 1926–​1931, Vol 3, 1174. 39  Knives and Daggers Ordinance 1936, 18 May 1936, signed by Wauchope, in Supplement No. 1 to the Palestine Gazette Extraordinary No. 594, 18 May 1936, in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices, Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1936, Vol. 1, 199–​200; The Palestine Police: Annual Administrative Report, 1936 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Press, 1936), 71; Knives and Daggers Ordinance 1936, 9 June 1936, in Supplement No. 2 to the Palestine Gazette Extraordinary No. 602, 11 June 1936, in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices, Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1936, Vol. 2, 608. 40  Parliamentary Archives, Houses of Parliament, Foreign Jurisdiction, 1890. Order in Council, dated 26 September 1936, entitled The Palestine Martial Law (Defence) Order in Council 1936. Presented to the House of Commons in Pursuance of Section 11 of the Act. Privy Council Office, 20 November 1936.

The Architecture of Colonial Control    175 power to the army—​re-​emerged with a vengeance in September 1937 when the second phase of the revolt erupted with the insurgent assassination of British official Lewis Andrews in Nazareth on his way to church, and of his police bodyguard, Peter McEwan. (Both are buried in the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Andrews’ epitaph reading ‘Who gave his life for this land’.) But the British never enacted the full martial law embodied by the September 1936 Order, unwilling right to the end of the revolt to give the army complete governmental executive and judicial functions. The suspension of the revolt in October 1936 paved the way for a British mission to Palestine headed by Lord Peel to decide the country’s future, the British Palestine Royal (or Peel) Commission of 1937, after which there was a Woodhead Commission in 1938 and then a London conference and White Paper in May 1939. Palestinians adamantly opposed the conclusion of the Peel Commission on 22 June 1937 to partition the country into Arab and Jewish areas—​helping to prompt the second phase of the revolt—​but such diplomacy was characteristic of the British strategy of effecting a long-​term political solution using managed military force, cowing subject people before any political settlement. Britain also worked the diplomatic track with friendly Arab leaders in Iraq, Transjordan, and Saudi Arabia to convince rebels to end the violence. This came to nothing, as the Zionist project and Palestinian resistance were irreconcilable and so dashed British hopes of a long-​term solution, and in 1945 there was a Jewish insurgency, after which Palestinians and Israel went to war in 1948 and the British left. The Peel Commission did not slow the accumulation of new regulations that eventually transitioned into the 1939 Emergency Powers (Colonial Defence) Order in Council and the 1939 Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, there to meet the menace of another world war. The Criminal Code of December 1936 streamlined and codified criminal law. In January 1937, a new amendment further tackled newspaper censorship. In a notice in the same Palestine Gazette Extraordinary, amendments to both the Collective Punishments (Amendment) Ordinance, 1935, and Collective Punishments (Amendment) Ordinance, 1936, conclude with a six-​page list of villages on the schedule. Significantly, London issued the Palestine (Defence) Order in Council in March 1937, while the Peel Commission was deliberating, the authorities preparing for renewed violence. The Order allowed the High Commissioner ‘unfettered discretion’ to introduce as required Defence Regulations.41 The Order succeeded the Palestine Martial Law Order in Council of September 1936 and opened the way for forms of military rule and justice, without any right of appeal. The Order permitted civil and military courts to work in combination—​difficult, as they had different codes of procedure—​and allowed, using a form of words from the 1936 Martial Law Order, the infliction of fines upon bodies of persons or upon corporations and the forfeiture and destruction of property as punitive measures, whether the actual offenders can or cannot be identified . . . that judgements, orders and proceedings of such military courts shall not be called in question, whether by writ or otherwise, or challenged in any manner whatever by or before any court . . . any provision of a law which may be inconsistent with any Defence Regulation shall, whether that provision shall or shall not have been amended,

41  The Palestine (Defence) Order in Council (1937), in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices, Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1937, Vol. 2, 260–​264.

176   Matthew Hughes modified or suspended in its operations under this section, to the extent of such inconsistency have no effect so long as such Regulations shall remain in force . . . The High Commissioner may, if he thinks fit, by Proclamation delegate to the General Officer Commanding the Forces in Palestine all or any of his powers . . . on such condition (if any) as he may specify.42

The acceptance of punitive group punishment without evidence and the imposition of military rule were explicit recognition of what was already happening. The statement that new defence regulations would supersede all other laws, even if defence regulations were inconsistent with those laws, recognized the real foundation of colonial power. The military with the High Commissioner’s agreement could manage the criminal courts with its own judges and codes of procedure, and it could set the laws with which security forces arrested, charged, tried, and sentenced suspects. New regulations made some civil offences criminal, and they transformed civil business like making a telephone call into a crime, too. The Defence (Military Courts) Regulations of 11 November 1937 operationalized the new system with military courts for certain serious offences, although it did not do away with civil criminal courts that sat throughout the revolt. As with the 1936 Emergency Regulations, revisions in the form of Defence (Amendment) Regulations, of which there were eleven in 1937, followed the 1937 Order. The Government made twenty-​seven amendments in 1938, with Defence (Amendment) Regulations (No. 1) removing another safeguard from the justice system by permitting coroners to dispense with an inquest if a death resulted from military operations, a significant alteration to standard procedures in the case of a death.43 The Government had forbidden its officers to hold inquests on persons killed by security forces as far back as 1929, and when civil official Aubrey Lees pushed for them in 1936, ‘both the suggestion and the offer were declined’.44 Coroners noted that they would be noting nothing, as one did for a body with a skull fracture from a soldier’s bullet: ‘and in pursuance of Section 19c of the Emergency Regulations I dispense with inquest’.45 Other amendments covered the press, placards, border fences, forfeiture of contraband, limits to ammunition for licensed firearms, taking photographs, closure of post offices, and permits to travel. The text of the October 1938 Defence (Military Commanders) Regulations marked emphatically the incremental move from civil to military rule, shifting the balance between military field commanders and civil officials by transforming the latter into advisers for the former, but without proclaiming full martial law. Civil officials remained in post and now worked for the army. Low-​level notices tackled day-​to-​day opposition. A Proclamation on 8 December 1938 from Brigadier H. C. Harrison warned inhabitants against making ‘deliberately false accusations’ against soldiers: ‘the public are hereby warned that any person deliberately circulating such false information is liable to be dealt with by me under 42 Ibid.

43 Defence

(Amendment) Regulations (No. 1) 1938, signed by Battershill, 19 January 1938, in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices. Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1938, vols. 2 and 3 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Press, 1939), 90. 44 LHCMA, Letter, Lees to MacDonald (Secretary of State for Colonies), 8 January 1939, Lees Papers, 5/​8. 45  Israel State Archive, Coroner’s Report, Haifa and Samaria District, 3 May 1939, Death of Abdul Khalik Masud Salami of Saida, M/​4826/​49.

The Architecture of Colonial Control    177 Emergency Regulations’.46 Dissent was now illegal. Amendments banned toy pistols and closed shops indefinitely—​rather than forcing them to stay open, as happened in 1936—​ and post offices could refuse to send packages.47

Conclusion When London issued the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act in August 1939 to prepare Britain for war with Germany, which then prompted more Defence Regulations in Palestine, the revolt was over. Britain had won. The legal-​administrative force of the colonial state, or its violence—​the ‘restriction on or alteration of natural action, behaviour, or inclination . . . undue or enforced constraint . . . the abuse of power or authority to persecute or oppress’—​had overwhelmed Palestinians and rebellion.48 Put differently, rebels had found no good counter-​measures to the administrative power of the Emergency State. Inchoate Palestinian resistance was no match for the British State, supported by an army with long traditions of suppressing colonial revolt. Had London not pushed for a diplomatic solution in October 1936 and had it not then been distracted in the second phase of the revolt by the Munich crisis over Czechoslovakia up to September 1938 that required withholding troops, the British would have crushed the revolt more rapidly. The troop surge in late 1938 after Munich suppressed the rebellion in about six months. Britain’s colonial legal architecture in Palestine was flexible and exemplary, and so powerful that the colonial authorities had no need to torture, kill, and hang masses of rebels. This is not to detract from the violence and brutality of British counter-​insurgency—​ discussed in full elsewhere49—​but to make the point that lethal violence was not a central element to the suppression of colonial dissent. Instead, a punitive, well-​established legal system was intrinsic to politically driven British colonial repression. The military was not autonomous, but there to support the state’s swift retributive, collective justice that targeted property as it did the people. The soldier’s job was to enforce the law and make apparent the emergency rule of the colonial state at a time of mass civil disturbance. The army did this effectively, making real to subject populations the collective punishment norm of colonialism, embodied in law, and to be internalized by the people. Field officers moaned continually about the need for full martial law and summary justice, but their senior commanders knew full well that victory depended on working with the colonial civil executive that had transformed the law and recalibrated citizenship to make acceptable and so enable successful pacification.

46  Proclamation, 8 December 1938, by Brig H. C. Harrison (Military Commander, Central Area) in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices. Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1938, vols. 2 and 3, 1,575. 47  Defence (Amendment) Regulations (No. 5) 1939, 4 March 1939, signed by Battershill in Ordinances, Regulations, Rules, Orders and Notices. Government of Palestine. Annual Volume for 1939, Vols. 2 and 3 (Jerusalem: Government Printing Press, 1940), 165–​166, 497. 48 Violence, n. in Oxford English Dictionary at www.oed.com (accessed 30 January 2020). 49 Hughes, Britain’s Pacification, 307ff.

178   Matthew Hughes

Select Bibliography Callwell, C.E., Small Wars: Their Principles and Practices (London: HMSO, 1906 [1896]). Drohan, Brian, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2017). Hughes, Matthew, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt in Palestine, 1936–​39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Hussain, Nasser, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Kelly, M.K., The Crime of Nationalism: Britain, Palestine and Nation-​Building on the Fringe of Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017). Staniland, Paul, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2014). Swedenburg, Ted, Memories of Revolt: The 1936–​1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Wagner, Steven, Statecraft by Stealth: Secret Intelligence and British Rule in Palestine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019). Whittingham, Daniel, Charles E. Callwell and the British Way in Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Chapter 9

L ate C ol onial C ou nt e r-​ Insurgenc y as a n Intellectual C ha l l e ng e The Development of Dutch Tactical Doctrine during the Indonesian War, 1945–​1949 Christiaan Harinck Counter-​Insurgency, Doctrine, and Decolonization, 1945–​1962 The first wave of violent decolonizations, the roughly two decades starting with the Indonesian and Vietnamese declarations of independence in August and September 1945 and ending with the French retreat from Algeria in 1962, was a stunning mirror image of the start of the modern colonization process in the nineteenth century. By 1945, several anti-​colonial movements possessed or soon acquired the necessary organizational strength, ideological cohesion, population support, means of communication, and the bare minimum of arms to start a potentially successful insurrection. Many more would follow in the coming years. At the same time, the changed international political conditions of the post-​1945 world, and the financial, social, political, and military effects of the Second World War on their metropolitan societies, limited the ability of colonial powers to amass either the resources or the domestic and international political capital needed to quell these anti-​colonial movements. As relatively easy as it had been to carve out vast colonial empires a century before, so difficult was it after 1945 to retain them or even leave with some imperial dignity and influence left. During these decolonization wars, and in the shadows of the World War just gone and the Cold War fast developing, the modern western understanding of counter-​insurgency was born.1 Although modern counter-​insurgency theory has its roots in the nineteenth century 1 For a general overview, see I.F.W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-​ insurgencies (London: Taylor & Francis, 2001).

180   Christiaan Harinck and its dichotomy between regular and irregular war, it is highly debatable to what extent the concept of counter-​insurgency as we understand and debate it today really existed before the late 1950s.2 In its simplest definition, insurgency stands for armed rebellion, and counter-​ insurgency for the effort to quell that rebellion. More specifically, insurgency today refers to a type of politico-​military conflict and counter-​insurgency to theoretical military models on how to combat them. The Indonesian War was extremely bloody, not a low-​intensity conflict, as were most but not all of the wars of decolonization. There are various ways to interpret the violent nature of decolonization, and various elements to emphasize. Conversely, the development of counter-​insurgency theory can be viewed through different lenses and placed in various contexts. In this chapter, the emphasis is on linking the two: understanding the violent nature of decolonization partly as the result of a specific development of military thought and practice, and understanding the birth of modern counter-​insurgency in light of the experience of these wars of decolonization. Studying this link sheds light on various themes relevant to both the study of decolonization and the advent of modern warfare, bringing these two subjects into dialogue. The decolonization wars of the second half of the twentieth century (and, for that matter, the colonial wars prosecuted before 1939) are still often discussed through either the lens of colonial or military history, even where violence and brutality are at the centre of the discussion.3 This state of affairs is changing, albeit slowly. Integrating both approaches is vital, as one cannot be fully understood and meaningfully interpreted without the other. For a discussion of the influence of the Second World War experience and new post-​war political realities on (colonial) counter-​insurgency, see J.C. Jansen and J. Osterhammel, Decolonization: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 63–​70; É. Tenenbaum, ‘Beyond National Styles. Towards a Connected History of Cold War Counterinsurgency’, in B. Heuser and E. Samir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 313–​331; M. Thomas, ‘From Sétif to Moramanga: Identifying Insurgents and Ascribing Guilt in the French Colonial Post-​War’, War in History, 25/​2 (2018), 227–​253; P. Romijn, ‘Learning on “the Job”. Dutch War Volunteers Entering the Indonesian War of Independence 1945–​46’, in B. Luttikhuis and D.A.D. Moses (eds.), Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence. The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 91–​110. For a discussion of the colonial roots of modern counter-​insurgency, see A. Marshall, ‘Imperial Nostalgia, the Liberal Lie, and the Perils of Postmodern Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 21/​2 (2010), 233–​258; C. Olsson, ‘De la Pacification Colonial aux Opérations Extérieures: Retour sur la Généalogie des “Coeurs et des Esprits” ’, Questions de Recherche /​Research in Question, 39 (2012), 1–​33; P.K. MacDonald, ‘ “Retribution Must Succeed Rebellion”: The Colonial Origins of Counterinsurgency Failure’, International Organization, 67/​2 (2013), 253–​286. 2  J.E. Gumz, ‘Reframing the Historical Problematic of Insurgency. How the Professional Military Literature Created a New History and Missed the Past’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​4 (2009), 553–​ 588; M. Bürgin, ‘From the Classics to Cultural History: Perspectives for Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Research’, in Th. Brocades Zaalberg, J. Hoffenaar and A. Lemmers (eds.), Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: Irregular Warfare from 1800 to the Present (Den Haag: NIMH, 2011), 245–​255; D. Porch, ‘The Dangerous Myths and Dubious Promise of COIN’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 22/​2 (2011), 239–​257; S. Scheipers, ‘Counterinsurgency or Irregular Warfare? Historiography and the Study of “Small Wars” ’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 25/​5-​6 (2014), 879–​899. 3  For an example of either approach, see P. Dwyer and A. Nettelbeck (eds.), Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); G. Fremont-​Barnes (ed.), A History of Counterinsurgency (two volumes) (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015).

Late Colonial Counter-Insurgency    181

Definition Regarding counter-​insurgency, this chapter emphasizes the importance of seeing the roughly twenty years from the end of the Second World War to the end of most colonial empires by the mid 1960s as a transitional period during which older, colonial forms of counter-​insurgency evolved into new, modern ways of (understanding) counter-​insurgency. In C. Olsson’s insightful analysis of the genealogy of counter-​insurgency,4 this transition from ‘late-​colonial’ to ‘post-​colonial’ counter-​insurgency involved a change in emphasis on the goals of military action and the underlying ideology informing them.5 Put simply, while an enemy-​centric approach never lost its appeal, a population-​centric approach gradually became more prominent in most counterinsurgencies after 1945, while, at the same time, the means employed to win over a population or force it into submission became somewhat more subtle and sophisticated. Underlying this change was, among other things, a slow but marked shift from colonialist racial and cultural stereotypes and the notion of a civilizing mission to new post-​war political ideals involving progress and the universality of democracy and freedom. At the same time, the belief in the legitimacy of intervention and repression, and perhaps even more important, the will to do it, still guided those in positions of power and command.6 In retrospect, the modern counter-​insurgency theory that arose out of this period was a synthesis of old and new ways of thinking.7 Before we delve into the Dutch military’s intellectual struggle during the Indonesian War, a few words on doctrine are in order. Doctrine is central to this chapter. But what is it exactly, and why should we study it? In a broadest sense, doctrine is an army’s body of knowledge about how to conceptualize and conduct military operations, potentially ranging from the grandest strategical to the lowest tactical levels. This body of knowledge includes both formal written doctrine and informal doctrine passed on during training or wartime service.8 This chapter mostly concerns itself with formal, tactical doctrine. The use of doctrine as a historical source comes with several caveats. As doctrine is a prescriptive ideal on how operations should be conducted, it is dangerous to conflate it with the reality of the actual conduct of those operations. Looking at the ‘lessons learnt’ and the revision of doctrine during or just after a particular war in order to determine how that war was actually fought has numerous pitfalls. The lessons learnt are always a particular 4 Olsson, ‘De la pacification colonial’. For a broader, narrative-​ based discussion of the period, see M. Burleigh, Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–​65 (London: Penguin, 2013). 5 Olsson notes the following immediate military goals for both late colonial and post-​ colonial counter-​insurgency: (1) to identify, localize, and destroy the enemy; (2) to convince the population of supporting the colonial power; (3) to deter the population for supporting the insurgents; and (4) to prevent and/​or counter the enemy’s ideas gaining a foothold on the population. Olsson, ‘De la pacification colonial’, 18–​20. 6 C. Wasinski, ‘La Volonté de Réprimer. Généalagie Transnationale de la Contre-​ Insurrection’, Cultures & Conflits, 79–​80 (2010), 161–​180; Christian Olsson, “Legitimate Violence’ in the Prose of Counterinsurgency: An Impossible Necessity?’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 38/​2 (2013), 155–​171. 7  Foremost among these are the works of R. Thompson, J.J. McCuen, and D. Galula. 8 A.J. Britle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942–​ 1976 (Washington D.C.: Center of Military History U.S. Army, 2006), 4–​5.

182   Christiaan Harinck interpretation and selection of the myriad of strategic, operational, and tactical experiences during the war (something to keep in mind when reading the classical counter-​insurgency texts). Moreover, these interpretations were typically articulated in technical jargon, often in a sanitized form, thereby obscuring both the vagaries and visceral nastiness of actual combat. This is not to suggest an intention to deceive, but merely to recognize how modern bureaucratic militaries function. Clearly, doctrine is not always followed to the letter during operations. But this should not lead us to dismiss the study of doctrine as irrelevant for the study of how troops actually operate—​far from it. Tactical doctrine plays an important role in the training of troops—​ thereby forming the basis for their later conduct during active operations. Later operational and battlefield behaviour at variance with doctrine should be interpreted as deviations, whether deliberate or in spite of the prescribed form, raising poignant questions about the condition and performance functions of the army in question. This is relevant in any war situation, but especially so in the context of twentieth-​century counter-​insurgency, where more often than not a conventional military power is confronted by insurgents that raise questions not only about how to fight such a different kind of war, but also about the very definition of war and the role of the military in keeping order. Studying doctrine and its development therefore remains vital. When placed in its organizational and cultural context, and used with the previously mentioned caveats in mind, doctrine offers a rich source not only into an army’s standard operating procedures, but also its conceptualization of war, including the underlying concepts, norms, and assumptions.9

Pre-​war Tactical Regulations The branches of the armed forces involved in the Indonesian War were the colonial Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL), the metropolitan Royal Ground Forces (KL), and the Royal Navy (KM) (an independent air force did not yet exist). Collectively, these branches are referred to as the Dutch military. The existence of a separate colonial army had important repercussions, as will become apparent. Due to various factors, the majority of the Dutch forces deployed in Indonesia were from the metropolitan army rather than the colonial army, making close cooperation between the two an imperative. As the metropolitan army had some experience in regular warfare but only very limited experience in policing duties and none in counter-​insurgency, all eyes were on the KNIL. In 1945, the KNIL by comparison had more than a century of experience in colonial warfare and imperial policing. But to what avail? The absence of foreign enemies and the lack of opportunities for further colonial expansion meant that the KNIL had primarily focused on the latter for most of the first half of the twentieth century. This task was relatively light, compared to the savage campaigns of conquest of the previous century. Between 1914 and

9 W.E.

Lee, ‘Warfare and Culture’, in W.E. Lee (ed.), Warfare and Culture in World History (New York: NUYP, 2011), 1–​13; M. Kitzen, ‘Western Military Culture and Counterinsurgency. An Ambiguous Reality’, Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies, 40/​1 (2012), 1–​24; H. Bennett, ‘Minimum Force in British Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 21/​3 (2010), 460.

Late Colonial Counter-Insurgency    183 the Japanese invasion of 1941/​1942, there was only one major anti-​colonial uprising in 1926–​ 1927, which was suppressed fairly quickly. As a result of the relative calmness of the interwar period, in addition to the massive personnel expansion of the KNIL just before the Japanese invasion, its swift defeat in 1942, and the KNIL’s very limited role in the Allied war effort afterwards, most KNIL officers and soldiers who returned to duty in the autumn of 1945 had relatively little direct experience in colonial policing and anti-​guerrilla operations. What the KNIL as an organization knew about these roles in 1945 was to a large extent based on existing regulations and the knowledge of its own history. The main and most accessible source for that knowledge were the KNIL’s interwar regulations on the use of the armed forces in keeping the colony pacified, the Precepts for the Politico-​Policing task of the Army (Voorschrift voor de uitoefening van de Politiek-​politionele Taak van het Leger—​VPTL).10 Derived from earlier editions but first published in 1928, the VPTL was the codification of the experiences of the KNIL during the last stages of colonial expansion early in the twentieth century, especially the protracted and violent pacification of Aceh. It was immediately reissued when fighting broke out between the returning Dutch forces and Indonesian nationalists in late 1945, and would remain the basis for many tactical regulations and training directives issued over the course of the Indonesian War.11 The VPTL can best be seen as a set of practical guidelines for the deployment of the armed forces in anti-​guerrilla campaigns, policing, and crowd control operations. The VPTL focused on the tactical level, meaning that it dealt only with the lowest levels of military action. The VPTL did not discuss matters such as strategic analysis, instructions on area control, the details of cooperation with the civil authorities, and actions in an operational context above platoon level. To a large extent, these issues were not addressed in any other regulations (but would partly be covered in officers’ training). This system might have worked during the relatively peaceful interwar years when continuity in personnel and institutional memory were strong, but it was to prove problematic after 1945. What did the VPTL offer? The largest part of text elaborated how to act in such a way that ‘resistance fighters’ and ‘malicious people’ were eliminated, while the population remained or became sympathetic to Dutch rule. The basic answer the VPTL provided was swift and violent action against any resistance, and an attitude of benevolence and respect to the local population and their customs. This was not merely a sharp insight into the need to separate insurgents from their actual or potential local support base. It was also an analysis rife with orientalist tropes and colonial prejudice. The dichotomy of the peace-​loving majority of the population versus the few rotten apples bent on disturbing peace and order is of course a stereotype characteristic of colonial regimes and their depiction of local oppositionists.12 To 10 KNIL, Voorschrift voor de uitoefening van de Politiek-​politionele Taak van het Leger (Bandung, 1928) (hereafter: VPTL). 11 For more on the background and context of the VPTL, see J.A.A. de Moor, ‘Colonial Warfare: Theory and Practice. The Dutch experience in Indonesia’, Journal of the Japan-​Netherlands Institute (1990), 98–​114; P.M.H. Groen, ‘Colonial Warfare and Military Ethics in the Netherlands East Indies, 1816–​1941’, in Luttikhuis and Moses (eds.), Colonial Counterinsurgency, 25–​44. 12  C. Fasseur, ‘Cornerstone and Stumbling Block. Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia’, in R. Cribb (ed.), The Late Colonial State in Indonesia. Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies, 1880–​1942 (Leiden, KITLV, 1994), 31–​56; P. Porter, Military Orientalism. Eastern War through Western Eyes (London: Hurst, 2009).

184   Christiaan Harinck the colonial mind, the local population was naturally inclined to order, but it was also easily tempted to resist. Anti-​colonial ideas were contagious, and the colonial authorities saw the Indonesian people as particularly prone to influence from charismatic religious or political leaders. The population was always seen and interpreted in collective terms; resistance leaders did not convince individuals, but groups. As a result of this collectivist approach, entire areas were classified as either ‘peaceful’ or as ‘areas of resistance’.13 The Indonesian adversary was interpreted in typical colonial, orientalist terms: on the one hand he (the characterizations were always gendered) was skilled, cunning, and devious, attacking stealthily. On the other, he was prone to fanaticism and tactically foolish but very dangerous behaviour; when local people became intoxicated with religious zeal, the VPTL warned, mass attacks of death-​defying fanatics were to be feared. As a result of this duality, the VPTL mandated constant vigilance, even in ‘apparently peaceful’ areas. For even after a successful military action, ‘oriental fanaticism’ could result in renewed resistance.14 To avoid these situations, any resistance had to be contained and crushed as soon as possible. Attack was always the solution, even in a broader strategic context of defence. Never should the initiative fall into the hands of the opponent. The entire VPTL is drenched in this cult of the offensive. Offensive action was not only seen as a correct solution to almost every tactical problem, it also had a political dimension; offensive action helped maintain the state’s prestige. In practice, this amounted to a continuous offensive patrolling in areas labelled ‘restless’.15 Somewhat contrary to its strong offensive spirit, the VPTL also counselled several limits on the use of force. Before the start of each operation, the commanding officer was required to issue specific instructions for the use of force to his men. The use of force was not only constrained by such instructions, but also by the general maxim that ‘by acting tactfully—​ including the avoidance of anything that can provoke resistance, without endangering one’s own safety—​we often achieve more than by the use of force alone’.16 The reason for the limitation of violence was not so much ethical as it was utilitarian: excessive violence could alienate the rest of the population from the Dutch cause.17 This relative restraint can also be seen in the VPTL’s prescribed tactical conduct and unit organization. It viewed colonial policing as an infantryman’s job. Machine guns and hand grenades had their uses in crowd control, but were otherwise to be used only in the direst of situations. The use of cavalry, armoured vehicles, or artillery was extremely limited in practice and theory, and the use of naval and air assets was simply absent from the manual.18 The instructions seem clear, but their effect is questionable. The pre-​war practice of colonial policing by the KNIL showed little of the VPTL’s prescribed control and restraint. As Petra Groen, among others, has shown, KNIL actions during the interwar period, although small-​scale, were often highly punitive, more like nineteenth-​century colonial warfare than

13  VPTL, 11, 26, 34–​35. See also chaps. 5–​8, 12, and 16. For an excellent introduction to the military side of the colonial mind (in the context of the French Empire), see Martin Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind, Vol 2: Violence, Military Encounters and Colonialism (Lincoln NE: UNP, 2011). 14  VPTL, 28, 31, 36–​37, 63. 15  Ibid., 29, 30–​31, 66, 123. 16  Ibid., 10–​11 (citation at 10). 17  Ibid., 26, 27, 31–​33. 18  Ibid., 12–​19.

Late Colonial Counter-Insurgency    185 the policing actions prescribed in the VPTL. In practice, the intimidating, deterrent nature of violence remained to be recognized as paramount to imperial policing.19 However, the difference between theory and practice should not be exaggerated. The common thread of the VPTL, quick and decisive action against all forms of armed resistance, corresponded to the hard practice. Nor was it difficult to find sufficient justification for severe measures in the VPTL itself: after all, it fostered permissive ideas of collective punishment by warning against an adversary who fought barbarically and a population that could never be fully trusted, while clearly distinguishing between safe and unsafe areas. In addition, the prescribed response to the population was seldom formulated in absolute terms. The imperial objective, maintaining order and safety, also turned out to be feasible in practice with less friendly methods than those prescribed by the VPTL. In other words, as Patrick Porter writes about colonialism and occupation regimes in general: ‘history leaves us an uncomfortable insight: that occupations of brutality can succeed’.20 Although the VPTL would become a doctrinal cornerstone during the Indonesian War, it is illuminating to compare the colonial regulations with those of the metropolitan army in the Netherlands (within the Dutch armed forces, the colonial army was a separate establishment, although close cooperation existed during the Indonesian War). Since the late nineteenth century, Dutch public law allowed for ‘military assistance’ in case of grave public unrest. In practice, only a few designated units were used in this role, but this changed during the Second World War. In the wake of the liberation of the country in 1944–​1945, the government feared uprisings provoked by food shortages, former Nazi-​sympathizers, or, as was considered more likely, communist agitators. As a result, the army’s role as an instrument of order was taken seriously. Henceforth, all active units were to be trained for use in quelling rebellion and civil unrest. The basis for this training was laid out in a set of regulations developed during the years of the Netherlands government’s exile in London during the German occupation. The regulations were based on earlier Dutch models, augmented with recent British training pamphlets and instructions. The result was a curious blend of instructions for crowd control and fighting in build-​up areas.21 Interestingly, many of the instructions and underlying assumptions were similar to the VPTL’s. This alerts us to the importance of seeing these instructions in their wider context. As Christophe Wasinski explains, there was a common western discourse on the use of the state’s armed forces in fighting rebellion and civil unrest—​the core of which was ‘the will to put down’, in Wasinski’s words.22 Both the VPTL and the metropolitan regulations were different expressions and manifestations of that common discourse. The measures taken after 1944–​1945, and the content of the relevant instructions, show that the Dutch national army as an institution was open to the idea of suppressing civil unrest by military means, and not afraid to use a lot of force—​at least in theory. As a result, the officers and soldiers coming directly from the Netherlands needed some conceptual 19 

Groen, ‘Colonial Warfare’, 40–​42.

20 Porter, Military Orientalism, 60. 21  NA

NLD, GS-​NL 2588, revised reprint of regulations no. 1599 ‘Handleiding voor het beteugelen van woelingen’, 26 October 1946. The relevant British manuals are ‘Fighting in Build-​up Areas’ (1943 and 1945) and ‘Infantry Training’ (1944 and 1945). 22  Wasinski, ‘La Volonté de Réprimer’, 161,

186   Christiaan Harinck adjustment and rethinking, for which they were dependant on the knowledge of the KNIL. What they learned from the KNIL, however, was very much in line with their views on keeping/​restoring order through violent means. Some might have abhorred the extent of the brutality displayed in the colonies in practice, but very few would have contested the underlying principles.

1945: Improvization The Indonesian revolution caught the Netherlands at a vulnerable time. Both the metropolitan and colonial army were still in disarray. Their post-​war rebuilding had only just begun. At the same time, most of Indonesia was not yet back in Dutch hands. By October 1945, Allied control of the Indonesian archipelago was limited to most of the smaller outer islands and only a few bridgeheads on the main islands of Java and Sumatra, which, in line with the Potsdam Accords, were largely manned by British-​Indian forces, not Dutch troops.23 From the beginning, the Dutch government and the armed forces struggled to define the conflict in Indonesia. Initially, it was thought that the colony could be brought back under control through the use of lightly equipped infantry battalions from both the KL and the KNIL. The severe fighting in October and November 1945 between Indonesian revolutionaries and mostly British-​Indian forces convinced the government in The Hague that a stronger military response was needed. As Brigadier H.P. Gardham, head of the British Military Mission to the Netherlands Government (BMMNG), reported to his superiors in London: Intelligent opinion realises that law and order is essential before a proper solution to the problem of the Netherlands East Indies can be achieved. The use of [British] fighters and bombers has been received as an indication of the length of time that may be required before the present chaotic state of anarchy is resolved.24

As a result, it was decided to upgrade the existing and future infantry units to full combat establishments and provide them with additional armoured artillery, and air support. The Dutch government and the army staffs in the colony and the metropole were supported in these decisions and assisted in their implementation by the British. British backing was substantial: the government in London, South East Asia Command (SEAC), the British forces in Indonesia, the British training facilities in the UK used to train Dutch soldiers, seconded NCOs and officers, and the BMMNG were all involved.25 The doctrinal effect of these measures and the underlying analysis informing them gave rise to a certain duality. The General Staffs of both the KL and the KNIL envisaged the current and future operations in Indonesia falling somewhere between the situation of imperial policing as found in the VPTL and full regular combat as taught in all the army’s standard tactical regulations. Interestingly, there existed no separate conceptual framework for this

23  For

the British involvement in Indonesia, see R. McMillen, The British Occupation of Indonesia 1945–​1946 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). 24  NA UK, FO 371/​49461, BMMNG, rapport no. 8 (16 November–​15 December 1945). 25 McMillen, The British Occupation, 101–​102.

Late Colonial Counter-Insurgency    187 intermediary form of combat. As the officers of the C-​Division were told before deployment, fighting in Indonesia was ‘pacification’ that made use of ‘the means of modern warfare’.26 As a result, tactical instructions could mention the examples offered by the experiences of the KNIL in the colonial past, German anti-​partisan warfare, and the American seizure of Japanese-​held islands in the Pacific side by side.27 In the rest of this chapter, we will analyse the extent to which Dutch armed forces were able to conceptualize this intermediate style of warfare and bridge the doctrinal gap between the VPTL and the standard tactical regulations. The need for clear instructions was especially acute for the many units of volunteers and later conscripts sent from the Netherlands to Indonesia. These soldiers had no experience in imperial policing and anti-​guerrilla operations and had limited time to train before deployment. The army’s initial solution was to reissue the VPTL in basically unaltered form alongside several new, short training directives and instructions derived from it.28 From early 1946 onwards, a designated training unit was established in the Netherlands to produce trained officers and NCOs who could then prepare their own troops for combat operations in an Indonesian context. Simultaneously, some attempt was made to provide the outgoing troops with some cultural and political information on Indonesia. Given the time constraints and the lack of qualified staff, the latter was often of low quality.29 As the time available for training had been short in the Netherlands, many units arriving in East Asia were deemed to be insufficiently prepared for duty—​this analysis not only applied to their lack of preparedness for the specific conditions of fighting in Indonesia, but also to their general military competence. To remedy this, the first units to arrive received additional training by units from Britain’s South East Asia Command. Later on, new arrivals received additional training in the field from more experienced Dutch units.30

1946–​1947: Modernizing Old Ideas In the context of improving the existing training literature and attempting to bring the insights of the VPTL up to date with the recent experience of combat in Indonesia, several additional tactical training directives were produced over the course of 1946 and into early 1947. Most of these training directives were the product of the developing collaboration between the training and doctrine departments of the colonial and metropolitan armies. As a rule, the core material of these new instructions originated within the staffs of a few of the brigades and divisions active in Indonesia, as well as the colony’s School for Reserve Officers. It is important to note that these new training directives were considered and

26 

NA NLD, IIB 16, TA 10, 12–​13. See, for example, NA NLD, SNI 2452, ‘Tactische aanwijzingen no II’, 16 October 1946, 1. 28  For the early examples, see NA, MOP-​NI 1, Aanwijzingen voor de Nederlandsche troepen, 1945; BRO, VS 27, KNIL/​KL, Wenken voor het optreden van een peloton L.I.B. in Indische terreinen, 1946. 29  For a view of the early training efforts and their results, see Romijn, ‘Learning on “the Job” ’. 30 The relevant British tactical publications were Military Training Pamphlet No. 51, Preparation for Warfare in the Far East, 1945, and Military Training Pamphlet No. 52 Warfare in the Far East, provisional, 1944. 27 

188   Christiaan Harinck treated as additional material—​the basic tactical training that troops received in Indonesia and the metropole was based on the standard British infantry training pamphlets (the exception being the Dutch Marine Corps, which was organized, equipped, and trained along US lines). The tactical instructions specifically relating to operations in Indonesia could thus be characterized as an addendum to the existing body of tactical doctrine. The Indonesia-​specific tactical instructions drew on the VPTL, but added a few new insights based on operational reports of the first months of fighting, and adjusted the VPTL’s instructions in regard to army organization and equipment. As the VPTL had largely ignored the use of heavy infantry weapons, armoured vehicles, artillery, and air power, some new publications on these subjects also appeared. This new body of training literature was characterized by a more modern and less colonial approach to fighting the guerrilla enemy as compared to the VPTL. The scope was rather limited, nonetheless. The new directives mainly focused on adaptation to the tropical climate, basic tactical challenges, and the organization and fighting methods of the enemy. What they did not offer was an penetrating analysis of the nature and scope of the conflict. While many colonial ideas and stereotypes were gradually ditched from the training materials, the soldiers were still taught that the conflict was primarily a military problem requiring a military solution. In fact, the manuals fell more into line with regular warfare doctrine than the pre-​war VPTL manual had done. This can be seen for example in the oft-​repeated mention of the notion of ‘military necessity’, meaning that humanitarian, political, or other non-​military considerations were always subordinate to immediate tactical concerns. Interestingly, ‘military necessity’ as a concept is not to be found in the VPTL itself. The strong regular military focus of these new directives and manuals is equally apparent in the sources listed: apart from the VPTL and recent military and intelligence reports on the fighting in Indonesia, Allied tactical manuals from the Second World War figured prominently. As a result of this focus, very little, if any, attention was paid to the role of civilians in the conflict.31 If they were ever mentioned, it was usually in the form of warnings, resulting in an implicit official distrust of the entire population, in line with pre-​war colonial thinking. No attempt was made to offer the troops guidelines for differentiating between combatants and non-​combatants. In the context of sudden dangers and the enemy’s devious methods, a premium was placed on the troops’ own safety.32 Nor were the high levels of likely civilian casualties as a result of the use of heavy weaponry addressed. Manuals and field instructions did stress the need for a restraint on small-​ arms fire and the use of heavy weapons—​but the stated reasons related only to discipline, cohesion, and the need to save ammunition (and thus money). That being the case, the new manuals did not shy away from advocating the use of heavy infantry and support weapons against enemy targets or villages suspected of harbouring enemy fighters. Dutch tactical thinking in these years was somewhat like a collision on an intersection where older colonial and more modern regular military thinking and low-​and mid-​intensity combat came

31  For an introduction, see B. Luttikhuis and C.H.C. Harinck, ‘Nothing to Report? Challenging Dutch Discourse on Colonial Counterinsurgency in Indonesia 1945–​1949’, in Dwyer and Nettelbeck (eds.), Violence, 265–​286. 32  For an explicit ignoring of the safety of non-​combatants, see NIMH, DNI, 949, Staff 2e Infanterie Brigade, ‘richtlijnen mil. Optreden’, 9 December 1946, 2.

Late Colonial Counter-Insurgency    189 together. Or, to put it differently: compared to the pre-​war VPTL, the emphasis now was more on fighting and less on imperial policing. As noted, the newly published doctrine and training material focused on low-​level tactics. Their chosen emphasis was very much enemy-​centric. Issues of pacification and area control were dealt with in directives and mission specific orders at brigade, division, and eventually army level. This was an organic development with room for different interpretations between the various military commands.33

1947–​1948: The Challenges of Guerrilla Warfare The Indonesian conflict was characterized by guerrilla warfare, although Republican forces sometimes attacked Dutch positions with human wave tactics during the first year of the conflict. Again, it is important to stress the relatively confined geographical spaces in which the initial fighting took place. The Dutch only held a few bridgeheads on the major islands of Java and Sumatra. Fighting there was largely restricted to the porous border zone between the Dutch-​held areas and those under Indonesian Republican control. Most of the other islands of the Indonesian archipelago were under Dutch control before the end of spring 1946. But major resistance to the return of Dutch rule broke out on Sulawesi and Bali. These islands were only brought under Dutch control after brutal campaigning; the Dutch colonial special forces especially gained notoriety for their conduct in Sulawesi. Nevertheless, Java and Sumatra were always the main focal point of the war.34 The conflict appeared to take a turn for the better when the Dutch and Indonesian negotiators reached a preliminary deal in autumn 1946. The treaty, which was the result of several difficult rounds of negotiation and sustained pressure from the British government, included the de facto recognition of the Indonesian Republic, but also the formation of an Indonesian Federation, not unlike the ‘Union française’ model of Associated States in Indochina. It was to consist of the Indonesian Republic and the smaller, nominally pro-​ Dutch islands. The deal was heavily criticized in both Indonesia and the Netherlands. The Dutch parliament never ratified the resulting treaty, paving the way for a major escalation in military operations, something the Dutch army command in Indonesia had been pressing for from the start. In the view of the Dutch commander, General Simon Spoor, and his subordinates, peace in Indonesia was only attainable through the destruction of the ‘extremist’ Indonesian Republic. Military victory was the perquisite for political talks with the ‘moderate’ elements within the Indonesian opposition. An attempt was made to instil frontline units with these views. In an information bulletin from January 1947, for example, soldiers could read that ‘the time will come when we will deal for once and for all with the “bad boys”, the extremists, 33 For

an early example, see NA NLD, Collection Buurman van Vreeden 73, ‘operaties Java’, 28 March 1946. 34 For Bali, see G. Robinson, The Dark Side of Paradise. Political Violence in Bali (Ithaca, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

190   Christiaan Harinck terrorists or whatever you might call them’. Referring to recent military operations in various places, among them the notorious counter-​terror campaign in Sulawesi, the bulletin stated that the ‘[Indonesian] chaps have had a foretaste of what is to come. The situation there was no longer sustainable, we had to intervene forcefully’.35 These views were unexceptional within a colonial military elite, but they were woefully out of step with the war’s development and the changing balance of forces. Having rejected ratification, and facing perceived Indonesian breaches of the treaty’s terms plus intense political and military pressure for a strategic breakthrough, the Dutch government finally gave the green light for large-​scale military intervention. The underlying plan was a compromise between military and political demands. As a result, the aptly named ‘Operation Product’ aimed not at the destruction of the Indonesian republican centre of power, but rather at the conquest of the economically crucial regions of Java and Sumatra. Within a matter of weeks, Dutch forces took most of Java and large parts of Sumatra, but the operation ended sooner than hoped because the Dutch government gave in to intense international pressure to stop it. As a result, and much to the chagrin of the Dutch army command in Indonesia, the Republican heartland on central Java remained out of reach. This large-​scale military offensive drastically changed the operational and tactical situation on Java and Sumatra. Dutch forces now had to control a much larger territorial space, with no reinforcements in sight, while the Indonesian Republic survived.36 To make matters worse, the remnants of the Indonesian Republican forces, in conjunction with allied (but sometimes rival) militias, began a relatively effective guerrilla campaign. While Indonesian forces were not able to recover large tracts of land or inflict major defeats on the Dutch enemy, they severely strained the Dutch forces and limited their control over the newly won territories. Dutch attempts to establish civil administration in these areas were severely hampered. As a result, the second half of 1947 saw an escalation of the fighting, which also challenged the way the army analysed the conflict. While the army stood its ground, it was unable to defeat the infiltrating forces of the Indonesian army and local militias. For officers and soldiers on the ground, the most important solution to combat the increasingly effective guerrilla tactics of the enemy was to increase the level of force employed. This was reflected in greater resort to torture, which, although officially illegal, became more commonplace especially during interrogations. Other transgressions included the summary execution of suspects and prisoners, but often heightened use of force registered in an intensification of ordinary methods, including the use of heavy infantry weapons and supporting arms such as artillery and airpower. Requests for artillery and air force support rose dramatically in this period, producing more civilian casualties than previously. Other attempted solutions to the problem of large-​scale guerrilla incursion were evident in changes to military organization, notably the increasing employment of locally recruited forces and greater use of special forces.

35 

NA NLD, SNI 292, LVD circulaire, 10 January 1947, 2. Marsroutes, 103, 106–​111; Elands, Van Gils en Schoenmaker, De geschiedenis, 75; Robert Cribb, ‘Military Strategy in the Indonesian Revolution: Nasution’s Concept of ‘Total People's War’ in Theory and Practice’, War & Society 19/​2 (2001): 143–​154, 149. 149; NA, SNI, inv. nr. 321, operatief rapport KNIL en KL 5-​8-​47-​11-​8-​47. 36 Groen,

Late Colonial Counter-Insurgency    191 The intense guerrilla phase that followed the major Dutch offensive of mid-​1947 came to a halt in early 1948. Both sides were suffering and again started to look for a diplomatic solution (under pressure from the international community). The resulting Renville Treaty of 17 January 1948 brought the Dutch army some respite as enemy activity sharply decreased. New tactical ideas were proposed in this brief transitional phase of both relative peace and large areas of Java and Sumatra still beyond Dutch military reach. The Dutch commander, General Simon Spoor, devised a plan to bring all the areas conquered in the 1947 offensive under tighter administrative control. On the tactical level, the plan marked a reversal of the recent trends. Instead of militarization, Spoor called for closer civil–​military cooperation. Pacification was reconceptualized as a three-​stage process. In most of the phases, the army was to be confined either to a policing role or used solely as a reserve, while the civil authorities would increasingly take charge.37 Unfortunately for Spoor, the plan was never fully implemented, as guerrilla warfare flared up again over the course of 1948 and units maintained or quickly returned to their previous heavily militarized modus operandi.38 Assessing this turn in Dutch military thinking is not easy, as it remains unclear to what extent Spoor did have new insights on the nature of the conflict, the importance of civil–​military cooperation, and the central role the population played in this conflict. Given the similarities with the VPTL and with colonial pacification strategies in general, Spoor’s plan can also be seen as a harking back to ‘the good old days’ of pre-​war colonial policing, suggesting that this doctrinal shift was more of an exercise of wishful thinking than the culmination of new analysis. While Spoor developed his new pacification plan, Colonel Victor J.A.M. van Arcken, a teacher at the colonial School for Reserve Officers, tried to update his course on tactics in the light of recent experiences with major guerrilla warfare. In 1949, his course would make it into a new set of training directives to be adopted throughout the army. Van Arcken was a keen and critical observer, and he went out of his way to collect and subsequently incorporate into his teaching the experiences of frontline units. Interestingly, from his corrections and warnings, we get a clearer sense of the Dutch tactical response to the Indonesian guerrilla. Van Arcken particularly lamented the infantry’s reliance on heavy weapons and air support, the tendency being to use these weapons as a replacement for actual infantry action.39 Despite his many qualities, Van Arcken was not the most innovative thinker. His course on tactics offered both insight into the problems of—​and solutions to—​combating guerrilla warfare, but it remained strongly within the existing conceptual framework. Van Arcken sought to improve and even optimize the current approach, not to change it. Van Arcken’s views seem to have been endorsed by most officers in both the colonial and metropolitan armies. Over the course of 1947 and 1948, the military authorities in Batavia and The Hague argued over the state of preparedness of new troops. During these discussions, the basic tenets of the Dutch tactical approach to the problem of guerrilla warfare were reinforced. Tellingly, although the officers involved recognized the gap between imperial policing and low-​intensity combat on the one hand, and the larger post-​1945 colonial 37  T. Brocades Zaalberg, ‘The Civil and Military dimensions of Dutch Counter-​Insurgency on Java, 1947–​49’, British Journal for Military History, 1/​2 (2015), 67–​83. 38 For the Dutch military’s own assessment of the worsening situation, see NA NLD, SNI 491, ‘Appreciatie van de toestand—​maart–​juni 1948’. 39  BRO, VS 34, SROI Bandung, ‘Stencil Tactiek’, vol. 6, 9.

192   Christiaan Harinck guerrilla warfare on the other, they did not see the need to bridge this gap with a revised doctrinal approach. During one of the discussions, a metropolitan army general even stated that the only change required to small unit tactics in Indonesia consisted of taking the difficult tropical climate and terrain into account. More remarkably, the colonial officers present did not disagree.40 Increased Indonesian guerrilla activity in the second half of 1947 made the VPTL’s limitations even more apparent. The Dutch military response was not to rethink the VPTL, but to rely more strongly on the standard regular warfare tactical doctrine. Officers, it was thought, could switch between regular warfare and imperial policing/​counter-​insurgency tactics depending on the intensity of the opposition they faced, preventing the need for more fundamental revisions in thinking to address the gap between the two. As stated, even Van Arcken’s course on tactics did not change this situation. In so far as the need to update the VPTL and its derivatives was stated, it focused on the need to take better account of the fact that the enemy was equipped with modern small arms.41 Multiple, deeper questions went unaddressed. The treatment of civilians in the combat zone and their role in supplying the Republican forces, the importance of economics, the connections between social conditions and political affiliations, and the potentially horrendous results of increased levels of violence all remained largely outside the scope of new training manuals and other publications.

1949: Doctrinal Swansong Never scrupulously observed by either side, the Renville Treaty of early 1948 started to unravel during the second half of 1948. The treaty was contested both within the Indonesian Republic and the various other anti-​colonial factions, as well as among the Dutch political and military elites. Indonesian guerrilla forces ramped up their guerrilla campaign, which reinforced the already strong conviction of Dutch army high command in Indonesia that lasting peace and a ‘proper’ political solution could only be achieved by the destruction of the Indonesian Republic. Again, the Dutch government decided that a major military offensive was needed. Between 18 December 1948 and 5 January 1949, practically all the remaining Republican territory on Java was overrun. Additional territorial gains were made on Sumatra. During the operation, the majority of the Indonesian Republican government was captured. This major success quickly turned into an embarrassing reverse as the international community pressured the Dutch government to halt the offensive, release the Indonesian politicians, and resume peace talks. This was not the only setback for the Dutch. The army discovered once more that conquering territory was not enough to destroy Indonesian guerrilla formations. Over the first three months of 1949, Indonesian Republican forces came under severe pressure, but they escaped destruction by splitting up into smaller units. Soon, the Dutch faced more targets than they could find and destroy with their available military resources. The war

40  41 

NA NLD, IIB 19, minutes of ‘Indische gevechtsopleiding’, 20 November 1947, 2. NA NLD, SNI 462, rapport by Le Fèvre de Montigny.

Late Colonial Counter-Insurgency    193 turned into an increasingly deadly attritional struggle—​about half of the conflict’s overall death toll occurred in the war’s final eight months between December 1948 and the ultimate armistice in August 1949.42 In these circumstances, the weaknesses and failures of the Dutch strategy and tactical doctrine were starkly exposed. Even if it had been politically willing and mentally able to adjust the tactics and strategy at hand, the Dutch army lacked the manpower and time needed to change course. As renewed negotiations began to reap results by April–​May 1949, it became apparent that a political solution was in the making that included the restoration of the Indonesian Republic and the recognition of sovereignty and independence. The morale of individual units and the army as a whole collapsed as a result. Risk-​aversion became the norm, further stifling any impetus to modify the army’s doctrine. The cumulative impact of the lessons of 1949 certainly warranted a thorough revision of the army’s tactical doctrine. And some officers did continue their quest for tactical improvement. In 1949, Van Arcken’s course on tactics was published as a new tactical field manual for the metropolitan army units undergoing training. Of potentially more importance was a new set of tactical directives being developed at the colonial School for Reserve Officers. The results were produced on 14 August, the day before the final armistice came into effect: Gevechtshandleiding Indonesië Anno 1949 (Combat Manual Indonesia 1949). It would be the last ‘Indische’ doctrinal publication, which in retrospect we can classify as the beginnings for a completely new VPTL. However, the manual was obviously delivered too late to be of any use before the end of the conflict, and it was quickly shelved. Be that as it may, Gevechtshandleiding Indonesië Anno 1949 does offer an insight into what the army was able to learn during the final months of the conflict. Despite continuities with its predecessors, there are some striking novelties in the Gevechtshandleiding. Where the VPTL and its wartime amendments only paid attention to the (tactical) actions of small units in patrol and combat situations, Combat Manual Indonesia also addressed area control at company and even battalion level, and strongly emphasized the importance of intelligence and field security. Perhaps more importantly, the fate and importance of the civilian population in the guerrilla war were dealt with in great detail. ‘All commanding officers need to understand that the civilian population must be spared’, the manual told its readers, emphasizing its importance by using capital letters.43 The need for considerate treatment of the population was part of the pre-​war VPTL, but during the conflict the subject was virtually ignored in the tactical doctrine applied. Interestingly, Gevechtshandleiding recognized that the highly militarized approach to combatting the Indonesian rebellion as represented by major army offensives and enemy-​ centric tactical doctrine had had adverse effects on the population, undermining the Dutch war effort. But instructions about the use of force were not changed even so. Rather, although the military dilemma of counter-​productive high-​intensity operations was recognized, the army saw no viable alternative, either in theory or in practice. The end of the conflict the day after the new guidance was published made Gevechtshandleiding the swansong of

42 

For an overview and explanation of the war’s casualties, see https://​imper​ialg​loba​lexe​ter.com/​2017/​ 08/​14/​do-​the-​indo​nesi​ans-​count-​calc​ulat​ing-​the-​num​ber-​of-​ind​ones​ian-​vict​ims-​dur​ing-​the-​dutch-​ind​ ones​ian-​dec​olon​izat​ion-​war-​1945-​1949/​ 43  BRO, VS 33, Gevechtshandleiding Indonesië Anno 1949, 2, 62a.

194   Christiaan Harinck the development of tactical doctrine during the war in Indonesia. For all its nuance, it still showed that the army as an institution had not changed its basic line of thinking. The same conclusion may be drawn from a long-​running discussion among officers in 1949 on the uses of airborne infantry. Air force captain August G. Deibel collected and distributed comments from fellow officers on an earlier, more speculative piece he had written on this subject. In these discussions, the limitations of military action, the need for better protection of the population, and the political nature of modern guerrilla conflict were all acknowledged. But in their search for answers to the guerrilla problem, these officers ultimately favoured military and technical solutions. Some even considered it possible to repeat the success of the colonial campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the help of the latest technology. More than politics and propaganda, modern tactics and military technology (including soon-​to-​be adopted helicopters) were seen as offering a potential breakthrough.44

Conclusion Although its core views, adaptability, effectiveness, and capabilities were thoroughly tested during the Indonesian War, the Dutch army proved remarkably impervious to change. The failings of the heavily militarized, enemy-​orientated approach to strategy and tactics started to become apparent from at least late 1947 onwards, but the army needed the major setbacks of 1949 before drawing that conclusion. By then, it was too late, although it remains open for debate how far the army’s strategy and tactics would have changed in the case of a more prolonged conflict. Despite being limited in conception and fatally flawed in application, the army’s conflict analysis and its use of two different but supposedly complementary sets of tactical doctrine—​ one with its roots in colonial policing, the other in regular warfare—​just about enabled the Dutch forces to sustain operations to the end of the conflict. But this partial effectiveness was less decisive than the fact that Dutch colonial military commanders could not conceive a fundamentally different approach. The nature and scope of colonial counter-​insurgency might have changed around the middle of the twentieth century, but the existing modes of thinking proved too strong, and the available time too short, to effect significant change.45 Actual deployment in Indonesia required a constant balancing act between the two opposing modes of interpretation of imperial policing and full (anti-​guerrilla) combat. In practical terms, the standard infantry doctrine still held pride of place, supplemented by a series of Indonesia-​specific guidelines developed between 1945 and 1948, and all of which built on the VPTL. A more holistic doctrine for the type of action in Indonesia, reflecting its strong political nature and, militarily speaking, recognizing the greater intensity of engagements than assumed by the VPTL, was not available. The final publication and 44 NA NLD, SNI 731, HQ military Aviation, publication no. 127.5, ‘Luchtmarechaussee: voorstel en commentaar’, 6 July 1949 and publication no. 127.6, ‘Luchtmarechaussee: verder commentaar’, 30 November 1949. 45  When elsewhere change did occur, the past was not entirely left behind. See P.L. MacDonald, ‘The Colonial Origins of Counterinsurgency Failure’, International Organization, 67/​2 (2013), 253–​286.

Late Colonial Counter-Insurgency    195 discussions in 1949 suggest that it was probably unrealistic to expect that this could have been produced during the war. The ideological underpinnings of pre-​war practice and theory had by now largely fallen away, without something new taking their place. The consequence was that soldiers—​be they a brigade staff officer or a platoon commander—​were left to strike some sort of balance themselves. Often, they resorted to simple military, enemy-​ centric solutions, with devastating effects for ordinary Indonesians. This leads us to an important point in considering the development of counter-​insurgency thinking over the course of the twentieth century. There was no natural path towards a more ‘enlightened’ and less overly militarized view of these type of conflicts, nor, more generally, to a reconceptualization of these kind of conflicts as a category of their own. Neither can their absence be entirely explained away as the stubborn holding on to old colonialist modes of thinking. As discussed in this chapter, specific developments and situations (among them the major effects of the Second World War and the difficulty in conceptualizing the Indonesian uprising given its size and scope) made the Dutch army abandon its more population-​orientated approach to repressive policing, as pursued in the 1930s, turning to a much stronger militarized modus operandi from 1945 on. After the fall of Indonesia to the Japanese in 1942, the Netherlands was left with only relatively small colonial possessions that were largely decolonized in a peaceful way. So there were no readily available comparisons within the Dutch experience of late colonial counter-​insurgency. The Indonesian experience was singular. One of the relevant unique features in this context is that the Indonesian War ended the Netherlands’ place among the major colonial powers. After the loss of Indonesia, only a foothold in Southeast Asia and a few possessions in the Caribbean and South America remained. Although the Dutch navy would be kept busy because of these imperial remnants, the colonial army was disbanded soon after the end of the Indonesian War, while the metropolitan army became fully occupied with its NATO duties in countering the Soviet and Eastern Bloc threat in Europe. It was not until the UN peacekeeping operations in Lebanon (1979–​1985) that the Dutch military was again confronted with the thorny issues of asymmetrical warfare and counter-​insurgency. As a result, the Dutch counter-​ insurgency effort in Indonesia had almost no lasting institutional or doctrinal effect. This is crucial to remember when placing the Dutch experience within the wider development of counter-​insurgency practices and theories during this period. Most of the developing doctrine, and especially the classical counter-​insurgency texts of the late 1950s and early 1960s, were post-​bellum reflections on the successes (and more often than not) failures of past campaigns. For militaries whose countries continued to play some sort of imperial role, either as guardians of a dwindling empire or at the frontline of the global Cold War, such as those of Britain and France, it made sense to reflect on the past and prepare for the next insurgency. For the Netherlands, there was neither the rationale or the will to do this—​a tendency probably reinforced by the lack of public discussion at home about the violent end of the Dutch colonial empire in the 1950s and early 1960s. In addition, linguistic barriers, combined with the Netherlands’ diminished international role and the fact that the war ended in defeat, likely prevented foreign militaries from studying the Dutch counter-​insurgency campaign in Indonesia—​the effects of which are still visible today in the historiography. Despite the fact that Indonesia is one of the major countries in South East Asia, and that the Indonesian War in terms of intensity and casualties ranks among the largest, it continues to be forgotten in many discussions of counter-​insurgency and violent decolonization in this period. This underscores the point that our understanding is still based on a few paradigm-​like cases

196   Christiaan Harinck and set interpretations.46 Ending on a general note, we would be well advised to take both a geographically and thematically broader perspective and appreciate that the period witnessed a general trend towards tactical and strategic reconceptualization in what was a gradual, haphazard, and sometimes contradictory process. Particular circumstances created locally specific responses, which make more sense when analysed on their own terms than when set within the much-​abused linear concept of counter-​insurgency.47

Select Bibliography Brocades Zaalberg, T., ‘The Civil and Military Dimensions of Dutch Counter-​Insurgency on Java, 1947–​49’, British Journal for Military History, 1/​2 (2015), 67–​83. Groen, P.M.H., ‘Colonial Warfare and Military Ethics in the Netherlands East Indies, 1816–​ 1941’, in B. Luttikhuis and D.A.D. Moses, eds., Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence. The Dutch Empire in Indonesia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 25–​44. Gumz, J.E., ‘Reframing the Historical Problematic of Insurgency. How the Professional Military Literature Created a New History and Missed the Past’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​4 (200), 553–​588. Hack, K., ‘The Malayan Emergency as Counter-​Insurgency Paradigm’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​33 (2009), 383–​414. Heuser, B., and E. Samir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Kitzen, M., ‘Western Military Culture and Counterinsurgency. An Ambiguous Reality’, Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies, 40/​1 (2012), 1–​24. Luttikhuis, B., and C.H.C. Harinck, ‘Nothing to Report? Challenging Dutch Discourse on Colonial Counterinsurgency in Indonesia 1945–​1949’, in P. Dwyer and A. Nettelbeck, eds., Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 265–​286. MacDonald, P.K., ‘  “Retribution Must Succeed Rebellion”: The Colonial Origins of Counterinsurgency Failure”, International Organization, 67/​2 (2013), 253–​286. McMillen, R., The British Occupation of Indonesia 1945–​1946 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005). Olsson, C., ‘De la Pacification Colonial aux Opérations Extérieures: Retour sur la Généalogie des “Coeurs et des Esprits” ’, Questions de Recherche /​Research in Question, 39 (2012), 1–​33. Romijn, P., ‘Learning on “the Job”. Dutch War Volunteers Entering the Indonesian War of Independence 1945–​46’, in Luttikhuis and Moses, eds., Colonial Counterinsurgency, 91–​110. Scholtz, L., ‘The Dutch Strategic and Operational Approach in the Indonesian War of Independence, 1945–​1949’, Scientia Militaria, South African Journal of Military Studies, 46/​ 2 (2018), 1–​27. Wasinski, C., ‘La Volonté de Réprimer. Généalagie Transnationale de la Contre-​Insurrection’, Cultures & Conflits, 79–​80 (2010), 161–​180.

46  For a great discussion of the paladin among the counter-​insurgency paradigms, see K. Hack, ‘The Malayan Emergency as Counter-​Insurgency Paradigm’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​33 (2009), 383–​414. 47  For an excellent overview of the similarities and differences in the end of empire for the various colonial powers, see M. Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact. A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Malden, MA/​Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). For a more detailed look at the relations between various counter-​insurgencies, see Heuser and Samir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies.

Chapter 10

The Geneva C onv e nt i ons , Insurgenc y, a nd Dec ol oniz at i on Boyd van Dijk While born on the European battlefield, the Geneva Conventions have shaped the nature of anti-​colonial insurgencies in profound ways. Subaltern actors have used them to challenge imperial claims on the international stage. Strikingly, however, few have addressed the fact that the history of these rules goes back to Henry Dunant’s failed business project in colonial Algeria. His search for renewed funding brought him to Solferino, in 1859, when he saw the carnage of wounded soldiers inspiring him to call for the birth of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Geneva Convention.1 One decade later, he even wished to broaden their scope to include insurgency as a response to the brutal suppression of the Paris Commune (1871).2 These remarkable changes beg the question: what is the relationship between the Conventions, insurgency, and decolonization? Historians of empire often see international law as either irrelevant or marginal to the nature and course of anti-​colonial insurgencies, if not war more generally.3 In other cases, however, they frame law as an enabler of imperial brutality.4 This chapter focuses less on issues of compliance, or whether law facilitates or restrains imperial violence, than on historicizing international humanitarian law (IHL) during periods of decolonization.5 How was IHL deployed by anti-​colonial and imperial actors? To what extent did IHL change the nature

1  Boyd van Dijk, ‘Internationalizing Colonial War: On the Unintended Consequences of the ICRC Interventions in Southeast Asia, 1945–​49’, Past and Present (2021). 2 James Crossland, War, Law and Humanity: The Campaign to Control Warfare, 1853–​ 1914 (London, 2018). 3  One prominent exception: Fabian Klose, ‘The Colonial Testing Ground, The ICRC and the Violent End of Empire’, Humanity (2011). 4  Mark Condos, ‘License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867–​1925’, Modern Asian Studies (2016); and Kim Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare, Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal (2018). 5  This approach is influenced by Will Smiley, ‘Lawless Wars of Empire? The International Law of War in the Philippines, 1898–​1903’, Law and History Review (2018), 4.

198   Boyd van Dijk of wars of decolonization? And how should we understand IHL’s role in undermining or legitimizing imperial counter-​insurgency?6 In revisiting these questions, this chapter aims to develop new analytical and historiographical perspectives on IHL’s history in relation to decolonization. Conceptualizing IHL as an international regime of rules for warfare and political repression in relation to individual ‘victims of war’, it demonstrates that this framework was at the core of many of decolonization’s most formative debates. Whereas colonial powers often framed their enemies as IHL transgressors, insurgents used this same body of law to internationalize their anti-​colonial struggles and discredit imperial adversaries. Through claim-​making, they exploited the Conventions as part of a broader agenda to revolutionize global politics. The point of this chapter is not to suggest that IHL always directly shaped the course of these struggles, or to replicate the stereotype of IHL as ‘utopian’, nor to exaggerate the impact of law on decolonization. Rather, it seeks to move the historiography’s lens beyond singular narratives of IHL’s past in order to gain a sharper focus on the diversity of sources, voices, and actors shaping decolonization. Recognizing IHL’s diverse origins and analysing what law meant in times of anti-​colonial insurgency opens the entirety of its history to new types of analysis transgressing disciplinary and methodological boundaries. This chapter shows that IHL mattered, in the realm of decolonization as much as in civil wars which have received extensive scholarly attention over recent decades.7 During this period, scholars have largely neglected IHL’s role in anti-​colonial insurgencies, despite the presence of extensive archival materials on this subject. Indeed, anti-​colonial insurgencies are full of references to IHL concepts (i.e. prisoners of war, combatant status, relief entitlements, civilian protection, and so on). The first part of this chapter discusses the existing master-​narrative of IHL’s past in relation to decolonization and then shows how this view has been recently contested. The discovery of new archival sources, in combination with renewed attempts to historicize and theorize IHL even further, has fractured existing narratives of its contested past.

Building and Breaking the Master-​Narrative The original master-​narrative of IHL featured a special understanding of history. In essence, it developed a historical trajectory of IHL’s past as one connecting modern efforts to humanize warfare with ancient equivalents of it.8 It also placed the discipline of IHL within an invented tradition of rules of warfare that crossed both time and cultures. The goal of this approach was to make IHL look more universal and suggest a progressive historical trajectory as a force for good, transforming originally inhumane forms of warfare.9 What is

6  Fabian Klose, ‘Human Rights for and against Empire, Legal and Public Discourses in the Age of Decolonisation’, Journal of the History of International Law (2016). 7  Stathis Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge, 2006). 8 Amanda Alexander, ‘A Short History of International Humanitarian Law’, European Journal of International Law (2015), 113. 9  Ibid., 111.

The Geneva Conventions    199 missing from this narrative of progress, however, is any notion of historical discontinuity, non-​universality, or processes of unlearning that shaped IHL’s past. This master-​narrative often claimed that IHL was driven primarily by humanitarian considerations. It dissociated itself from the politics that underpinned IHL’s past. We can see an equally problematic element at play in the most important counter-​narrative of IHL’s past. For orthodox realist international relations’ (IR) scholars, IHL represented a project of inevitable failure, which reinforced the stereotype of its irrelevance in wartime. Whereas realists depicted IHL’s storyline as one of state power triumphing over international law, proponents of the master-​narrative felt forced to counterbalance this view by stressing the law’s progressive role in ‘humanizing’ armed conflict. These two clashing narratives of failure and progress, of moving from barbarism to humanity, and of ‘utopian’ internationalism, continue to shape our view of IHL’s historical trajectory.10 Neither teleology nor realist critique can make sense of IHL’s history, however. Since the 1990s, there has emerged a new body of scholarship that critically engages with both narratives from different disciplinary angles. Historians of war have traced IHL’s recent past; international historians looked at the impact of legal diplomacy on the changing character of war; critical legal scholars traced IHL’s colonial origins; and constructivist international relations’ scholars focused on non-​state actors’ engagement with IHL in times of civil war. The recurrence of violations in the 1990s served as another motive for this growing scholarly interest in IHL’s past. Geoffrey Best’s pioneering study War and Law Since 1945 represents the first comprehensive attempt by a (diplomatic) historian to produce a major history of IHL’s recent past.11 Representing an important figure in the historiography of war and diplomacy, Best’s main contributions lay in problematizing the master-​narrative while stressing the importance of IHL’s contested origins. He also broke with triumphalist histories. Still, his attempt to historicize IHL suffered from a few major shortcomings: among other things, it placed remarkably little emphasis on the historically significant role of empire. Best offers no substantial discussion of the impact of subaltern anti-​colonialism, the transformative role of Soviet conceptions of anti-​imperialism, and imperial considerations on IHL’s development in the twentieth century, except for parts of the making of the 1977 Additional Protocols. Since the early 2000s, different studies, concepts, and methodologies of international and imperial history have reconsidered the origins of international orders, which overlapped with a historical turn within the scholarship of international law. As noted by Jennifer Pitts, this ‘historicizing moment’ led to a critical dialogue between various disciplines.12 In the fields of international and imperial history, early modern historians like Lauren Benton have revealed the inextricable links between the development of the law of nations and imperial expansion, and how this legacy still affects contemporary legal understandings.13 Scholars such as Karma Nabulsi have made a similar argument for the history of IHL.14 10 

Rotem Giladi, ‘Rites of Affirmation: Progress and Immanence in International Humanitarian Law Historiography’, unpublished paper. 11  Geoffrey Best, War & Law Since 1945 (Oxford, 1997). 12  Jennifer Pitts, ‘The Critical History of International Law’, Political Theory, 43 (2015), 541–​552, 541. 13  Lauren Benton, Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–​1850 (New York, 2013). 14  Karma Nabulsi, Traditions of War: Occupation, Resistance and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

200   Boyd van Dijk Other imperial historians have looked at the role of law, not necessarily international law, in facilitating colonial violence. This type of violence was characterized by them as ‘rule by law’, permitting a great deal of legalized brutality without having to invoke draconian measures such as martial law. Under this permissive regime of domestic law, security forces could employ indiscriminate violence: from night arrests, enforced disappearances, and sexual violence to targeted killing. This demonstrative type of violence was often employed as a deterrent to force insurgent communities, whose loyalties were put in doubt, into submission.15 The result was the gradual erosion of the distinction between fighter and civilian, a boundary that ‘in practice [was] often indiscernible to military personnel in the first place’. Imperial historians have shown to what extent domestic law could be mobilized by imperial officials to undermine anti-​colonial insurgencies.16 This growing scholarship of imperial and international historians has triggered not only a greater sensitivity to IHL’s exclusionary and colonial origins, but also a shift to analysing its history from a more transnational, or even global, perspective. This transformation resonates with a broader change within international history specifically analysing the interactions between international norms and imperial actors. Still, this booming historiography continues to wrestle with the question of international law and its impact—​and whether this is a legitimate topic for non-​lawyers to study in the first place. Whereas historians of empire are used to focusing on the nature of imperial violence, international historians have demonstrated the extent to which international organizations tended to ‘amplify rather than [abate] imperial contestation’.17 They have written a great deal about the role of the ICRC,18 the League of Nations,19 the United Nations,20 the Mandates’ legal hermeneutics,21 practices of violence, processes of exclusion, and the role of anti-​ colonial actors. Much less common, however, are historical investigations that assess the degree to which actors and their actions were shaped by international legal considerations. The point of this is not to suggest that international or imperial historians have entirely overlooked or ignored the impact of international law.22 To the contrary, some imperial historians have demonstrated convincingly how international legal norms gradually eroded the imperial powers’ freedom to instrumentalize violence in times of insurgency.23 What this chapter suggests, instead, is that IHL’s impact on such conflicts was rarely as marginal or peripheral as this particular historiography seems to imply. As said before, IHL mattered, 15 Martin Thomas, ‘Violence, Insurgency, and Ends of Empire’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford, 2017). 16 Ibid. 17  Susan Pedersen, ‘Empires, States and the League of Nations’, in Susan Pedersen, Glenda Sluga, and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-​Century History (Cambridge, 2017), 116. 18  Andrew Thompson, ‘Humanitarian Principles Put to the Test, Challenges to Humanitarian Action during Decolonization’, International Review of the Red Cross (2016). 19  Susan Pedersen, The Guardians, The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015). 20  Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, 2009). 21 Natasha Wheatley, ‘Mandatory Interpretation: Legal Hermeneutics and the New International Order in Arab and Jewish Petitions to the League of Nations’, Past and Present (2015). 22  One prominent example of an imperial historian engaging with questions of law: Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights, Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca, 2017). 23  Thomas, ‘Violence, Insurgency, and Ends of Empire’.

The Geneva Conventions    201 particularly in the Cold War and decolonizing environments throughout which subaltern actors frequently invoked its key principles and institutions. A greater focus on this interaction of particular subaltern actors with IHL could help account for the historiography’s gradual incorporation of international legal questions into its mode of thinking. Historians now face the challenge of exploring what role IHL played in shaping twentieth-​century anti-​ colonial insurgencies.

The Algerian War The Algerian War of Independence (1954–​1962) was one of the most important anti-​colonial insurgencies of the twentieth century. Apart from causing mass suffering, it also profoundly shaped the character of international law. So far, international history treatments of the defining decolonization conflict have devoted considerable attention to the Algerians’ usage of UN instruments to defeat French colonial rule globally.24 Most studies have focused on the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) and the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic’s (GPRA) international legal offensives, which claimed the French had broken UN agreements and the 1949 Geneva Conventions during this conflict. To back up their claim, Algerian lawyers had to develop a sophisticated legal argument with the Conventions to defeat French colonialism. Their main objective was to internationalize the conflict by claiming that Algeria was not an integral part of France, as Paris was repeatedly claiming, but had its own right to independence. They expressed this claim in numerous places: at the United Nations, in the FLN’s White Paper, as well as in Mohammed Bedjaoui’s Law and the Algerian Revolution.25 Up to this point, most historians have framed the Algerian instrumentalization of European legal instruments against their own creators as a double effort to ‘internationalize’ anti-​colonial insurgencies. In instrumentalizing law to put international pressure on the French, they claimed that their struggle with France was profoundly international, since Algeria was a separate but occupied nation, just as France’s conduct was in violation of international norms.26 This argument initially failed to resonate with some other states and organizations: whereas the Arab League proved unwilling to back this Algerian claim, the United States continued to support its Cold War ally.27 However, from the 1950s onwards the FLN gradually began achieving more success on the international stage. It opened up new diplomatic posts across the globe, ultimately triggering a ‘diplomatic revolution’, to quote Matthew Connelly’s famous dictum.28 The 24  Raphaëlle Branche, ‘Entre droit humanitaire et intérêts politiques, les missions algériennes du CICR’, Revue Historique (1999). 25 Amanda Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I’, Melbourne Journal of International Law (2016). 26  Emma Stone Mackinnon, ‘Contested Legacies of the Algerian Revolution in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions’, in Kevin Jon Heller and Ingo Venzke (eds.), Contingency and the Course of International Law (Oxford, 2021). 27  Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I’. 28  Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution, Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post‑Cold War Era (Oxford, 2002).

202   Boyd van Dijk Algerians unleashed a major diplomatic offensive and gained the Arab League’s favour, as well as that of US diplomats and Third World states. The Algerians made frequent use of the UN, ICRC, and IHL, turning them into key assets for national liberation movements and their efforts to elevate the anti-​colonial struggle internationally.29 By the end of the decade, the Algerians had achieved most of their key objectives (especially gaining recognition for their claim of self-​determination) in this regard.30 The rise of the Third World bloc at the UN enabled the Algerians to bring their case in front of international observers, which would have critical consequences both on how the conflict was understood and (de-​)legitimized internationally.31 In December 1960, the UN General Assembly would adopt a foundational declaration, Resolution 1514, recognizing the Algerian—​and other colonized territories’—​right to self-​ determination. Using this and other resolutions to strengthen his organization’s international legal position, Bedjaoui stressed the conflict’s international nature to make the Geneva Conventions fully applicable. Originally, the FLN’s White Paper had suggested a less expansive legal approach, arguing that even if the conflict was not international, it was still ruled by Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which applied to ‘non-​ international armed conflicts’ (NIACs). This provision, which provided a set of minimal rules for humane treatment, applied exclusively to (civil and) colonial wars like the one in Algeria. By contrast, Bedjaoui argued that his movement was fighting a truly international armed conflict.32 Amplifying this argument—​and answering one of the chapter’s questions regarding IHL’s impact on the nature of decolonization—​the FLN publicly announced its willingness to accede and comply with the 1949 Conventions as exemplified by its humane treatment of French prisoners. In saying this, the FLN tried to lend credibility and legitimacy to its claim of self-​determination. Like other national liberation movements, it wished to demonstrate to the outside world its intention of being able to comply with the ‘civilized’ rules for warfare. Another key element behind this pragmatic strategy was to assure captured FLN fighters of the same type of treatment through reciprocity-​based rights as POWs.33 In recent years international legal historians have done groundbreaking work in further exploring the FLN’s legal innovations. Among other things, they have demonstrated the means by which anti-​colonial actors such as the FLN undermined imperial powers’ ability to justify their attempts to revitalize colonialism after 1945. This historiographical intervention to widen the literature’s geographical scope through analysing the role and impact of Global South actors has produced important insights. Most critically, it has deepened our understanding of how both the ICRC and IHL acted as platforms for anti-​colonial activism—​and how these legacies would eventually affect their separate historical trajectories.34 In turn, 29 David Forsythe, The Humanitarians, The International Committee of the Red Cross (Cambridge, 2005). 30  Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I’. 31 Fabian Klose, ‘“Source of Embarrassment”, Human Rights, State of Emergency, and the Wars of Decolonization’, in Stefan-​ Ludwig Hoffmann (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2010). 32  Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I’. 33 Ibid. 34  François Bugnion, Le Comité International de la Croix-​ Rouge et la protection des victimes de la guerre (Geneva, 2000).

The Geneva Conventions    203 these insights helped to trigger new historical questions that seek to trace alternative historical trajectories of other possibilities, of how IHL could have been otherwise. What explains IHL’s post-​1949 trajectory?, scholars ask. Why have other genealogical paths been deliberately ignored or avoided? And how can we make sense of IHL’s sudden rise in the 1970s? These questions have been addressed most powerfully by international legal historians.

International Legal History and International Relations Antony Anghie’s Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law shed important light on how international law, through the concept of sovereignty, was deeply implicated in European imperial practices. While studying topics other than the laws of war,35 he demonstrated how civilizational binaries were at the core of international law, with its direct ties to European expansion.36 Challenging the master-​narrative, he argued that international law remains a quintessentially Western discipline, which tends to conceal its ‘intimate relationship’ with imperialism.37 His work, combined with that of the other Australian critical legal scholar Anne Orford, has spurred a growing interest among international legal scholars, including historians, in how international law has been implicated in expanding Western domination. Moreover, it has given rise to a booming critical legal historiography using Third World approaches to exploring international legal history.38 Another key scholar within this field of critical legal approaches who similarly challenges IHL’s master-​narrative is Frédéric Mégret. Borrowing from postcolonial theory and Anghie’s work, he has stressed the colonial origins of IHL. While breaking with the master-​narrative, he demonstrated that the discipline’s origins should not be traced back to Dunant’s trip to Solferino, or other formative experiences in the European heartland, but rather to the colonial encounter. In redefining the question, he turned the literature’s attention to exploring how IHL’s mechanisms of difference had more exclusive dimensions than usually accepted in pre-​existing historiography.39 In challenging the master-​narrative’s premise of IHL’s universality, Mégret unveiled the discipline’s ideological significance for imperial projects trying to legitimize the violence they use to suppress anti-​colonial insurgencies.40 35  With the exception of a brief essay focusing on the so-​called War on Terror. See Antony Anghie, ‘On Critique and the Other’, in Anne Orford (ed.), International Law and its Others (Cambridge, 2009), 389–​400. 36  Antony Anghie, ‘Finding the Peripheries: Sovereignty and Colonialism in Nineteenth-​ Century International Law’, Harvard International Law Journal (1999), 1–​80; and Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2004). 37 Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 310–​313. 38 Arnulf Becker Lorca, Mestizo International Law: A Global Intellectual History, 1842–​ 1933 (Cambridge, 2015); and Umut Özsu, Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (Oxford, 2015). 39  Frédéric Mégret, ‘From “Savages” to “Unlawful Combatants”: A Postcolonial Look at International Humanitarian Law’s “Other”’, in Orford (ed.), International Law and its Others, 265–​317. 40  Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, ‘Rethinking the History of Internationalism’, in Pedersen, Sluga, and Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms, 8.

204   Boyd van Dijk Regardless of these hierarchies, decolonization and the Cold War, two fundamentally contentious periods defined by interstate competition, did not forestall IHL’s development. In fact, it grew out of these tensions, as Amanda Alexander has shown. She has made equally clear that, despite the master-​narrative’s suggestion of longevity, IHL’s history is of most recent vintage. Before the 1960s, the term itself was hardly invoked by practitioners; most would refer to the laws of war or the law of armed conflict.41 This changed in the 1960s, however, because of the efforts of two men: while ICRC drafter Jean Pictet discussed IHL most extensively in his PhD, Seán MacBride, Secretary-​General of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), pushed both states and the ICRC to accept its relevance in light of recent experiences. A former Irish guerrilla fighting the British Empire, MacBride played a key transformative role in the rise of IHL following the recent wars of decolonization and the Cold War’s killing fields. As ICJ Secretary-​General, MacBride continuously advocated the interests of prisoners, in doing so expanding human rights into the domain of insurgency and IHL. His main objective was to revolutionize the existing Conventions by pleading at different human rights conferences for the direct application of human rights to armed conflict.42 Due to these efforts, the UN General Assembly accepted on 19 December 1968 the Indian-​tabled Resolution on Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflicts, which lies at the origins of the 1977 Additional Protocols.43 These treaties, which form the bedrock of contemporary international legal frameworks such as the responsibility to protect doctrine,44 were the result of a highly contentious drafting process in which the newly decolonized nations played a vital role. During the 1960s these states attached high priority to decolonizing IHL and fighting racism, thereby ensuring that these issues became of primary international legal concern. As a result, anti-​imperial legal claims would at last be heard in contemporary UN and IHL fora.45 In addition to international legal historians, constructivist international relations’ scholars have done equally important work in reshaping IHL’s history. Their exploration of anti-​colonial rebels and secessionist IHL strategies has uncovered IHL’s history from below. Prior to this, most existing IR scholarship has focused on states and international organizations. By contrast, constructivist scholars examined the role of non-​state armed groups in shaping IHL’s past. While much of the literature is still situated within the confines of IR scholarship, constructivist scholars have also worked across disciplinary boundaries. In particular, Tanisha Fazal has demonstrated why secessionist groups in particular saw IHL as a vital means to (re)gain their place on the international stage.46 Her work on the international legal diplomacy of secessionist actors underlines a broader trend connecting the history of self-​determination claims with the new historiographies of empire, decolonization, and the Cold War.

41 

Alexander, ‘A Short History of International Humanitarian Law’, 114. Ibid., 118–​119. 43  Ibid., 120. 44 Giovanni Mantilla, ‘Social Pressure and the Making of Wartime Civilian Protection Rules’, European Journal of International Relations (2019), 2. 45  Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I.’ 46 Tanisha Fazal, Wars of Law, Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Ithaca, 2018). 42 

The Geneva Conventions    205

New Avenues of Historical Thinking Drawing from political theory and other theoretical models, today’s scholars of IHL offer new perspectives on old historical questions by emphasizing the vital contributions of anti-​colonial and socialist actors in reshaping wartime international law. They have also recently pushed the argument forwards by making creative use of newly available archival documents in both state and non-​state archives. In 2015, the ICRC opened its archives for the years between 1966 and 1975, with important records covering the Nigerian Civil War, the Vietnam War, the Saudi–​Yemeni War, the wars of national liberation in Southern Africa, and the making of the Additional Protocols. Exploiting these new research opportunities, scholars such as Giovanni Mantilla have transformed the history of IHL and decolonization in remarkable ways.47 Jessica Whyte’s critical legal scholarship tracing the history of the Protocols is an excellent example of this new trend. She has stressed the vital role of anti-​colonial delegates, a diverse cohort of postcolonial actors from Africa, Asia, and beyond, in reframing IHL’s path through contesting imperial legacies. These actors drew on anti-​imperialism, anti-​racism, and self-​determination as key instruments in a global effort to gain recognition for national liberation struggles as international armed conflicts. They also wished to obtain the extension of POW rights to guerrillas fighting against colonial rule and foreign occupation, as well as against racist regimes. Anti-​colonial delegates used the international legal stage of IHL, exploiting UN principles such as self-​determination to reframe anti-​colonial struggles as a legal battle against preexisting IHL norms.48 For many Western delegates, these demands to decolonize the Geneva Conventions represented a serious threat. Principally, they feared losing Western dominance over IHL debates and that key legal constraints might be abandoned, with potentially destructive consequences for their soldiers should they be captured by insurgent forces. These fears were exacerbated by the fact that Third World and Soviet bloc states were working together to decolonize the Conventions while condemning South African Apartheid, Portuguese colonialism, and US aggression in Southeast Asia. In doing so, this broad coalition of anti-​colonial delegates claimed that their goal was not to overturn the existing Conventions, but to align them with the UN General Assembly’s overarching anti-​colonial agenda.49 The fact that these same delegates, hungry for ‘status recognition (as legitimate participants) and status enhancement (as influential rule-​makers)’,50 increasingly dominated the General Assembly meant that their arguments could not be ignored by powerful Western states, forcing them to come to terms with Third World claims.51 The influential Egyptian 47 

Giovanni Mantilla, ‘Forum Isolation: Social Opprobrium and the Origins of the International Law of Internal Conflict’, International Organization (2018). 48 Jessica Whyte, ‘The “Dangerous Concept of the Just War”: Decolonization, Wars of National Liberation, and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions,’ Humanity (2019), 313–​341, 315. 49  Ibid., 315–​317. 50  Mantilla, ‘Social Pressure and the Making of Wartime Civilian Protection Rules’, 7. 51  Giovanni Mantilla, ‘The Origins and Evolution of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocols’, in Matthew Evangelista and Nina Tannenwald (eds.), Do the Geneva Conventions Matter? (Oxford, 2017), 35–​68, 53.

206   Boyd van Dijk advocate Georges Abi-​Saab, who also gave advice to the UN Secretary-​General and later acted as judge of several international criminal tribunals,52 underlined the ‘revolutionary’ nature of these efforts to ‘restructure . . . international society’.53 A critical element underpinning this process was the changing political landscape, which saw Western states in a much weaker international position than any time before. Back in 1949, the European imperial powers had shaped the Geneva Conventions, but, by the 1970s, their previous preeminence had been undercut by the rise of postcolonial and socialist voting majorities.54 A majority of African and Asian states from across the Cold War divide now dominated the entire debate fora from both the UN and global Red Cross movement.55 Even some national liberation movements became involved in drafting the Protocols; the result was a highly contested lawmaking process that took years, if not decades, to finish.56 Due to this increasing anti-​colonial pressure, the Western bloc ultimately acceded to key demands in order to avoid having to accept more serious political costs. These compromises did ‘not rest on a sincere change of heart’, according to Mantilla, but rather originated in ‘concern for their social image’.57 The Western bloc’s acknowledgement that national liberation struggles could be treated in IHL as international armed conflicts was at least partly motivated by their expectation that such wars would soon be a thing of the past, thereby removing the proposal’s short-​term threat to their core interests. Another element that facilitated Western approval was the incorporation of a powerful reciprocity clause into the First Additional Protocol, which, Western delegates thought, would ensure that national liberation movements could not easily politicize its usage.58

Vietnam and the NIEO The war in Vietnam played an equally important role in the Protocols’ drafting, but its actual significance is relatively poorly understood—​and deserves closer attention from international legal historians. To be sure, the atrocities against US POWs during the Vietnam War, combined with growing pressure from ‘Third’ and ‘Second’ World states, broke the United States’ initial opposition to strengthening the existing Conventions.59 Concerned about the fate of US soldiers captured by North Vietnamese forces, US military officials began to express greater interest in updating the Conventions relating to enforcement and military imprisonment especially. Their main goal was to improve POW protection regardless of the

52 For more insights into Abi-​ Saab’s international legal thought, see Umut Özsu, ‘Organizing Internationally: Georges Abi-​Saab, the Congo Crisis, and the Decolonization of the United Nations’, European Journal of International Law (2020). 53  Quoted from Mantilla, ‘Social Pressure and the Making of Wartime Civilian Protection Rules’, 7. 54  Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I’. 55  Mantilla, ‘The Origins and Evolution of the 1949 Geneva Conventions’, 56. 56  Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I’. 57  Mantilla, ‘The Origins and Evolution of the 1949 Geneva Conventions’, 58. 58 Ibid. 59  Ibid., 4, 11.

The Geneva Conventions    207 nature of the conflict, in order to put pressure on Cold War adversaries to follow the POW Convention.60 Still, it is vitally important not to overemphasize the impact of this seemingly progressive US response to the Vietnam War’s atrocities. Despite the public outcry over the My Lai massacre in 1968 and the congressional pressure (and legal changes) that followed,61 US representatives in Geneva expressed continuing opposition to greater civilian protection against indiscriminate targeting as the US Air Force was bombing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.62 They gave in only after pressure from radical Third World delegates and the adoption of a weakened compromise text brokered by moderate Egyptian partners, and because of secret Soviet–​US back-​channelling in the wake of Cold War détente.63 Regardless of Reagan’s later resistance to ratifying the Protocols, these new rules not just weakened the ICRC’s original proposals, but also failed to make an end to US indiscriminate bombing, with critical consequences for how the so-​called War on Terror is being conducted today. Reflecting upon one of the chapter’s core questions regarding IHL’s role in legitimizing counter-​insurgency, it is equally important to note that anti-​colonial delegates realized that US opposition to prohibiting civilian targeting and admitting Vietnam’s National Liberation Front (commonly known as the Vietcong) as a potential participant in the Protocols’ negotiations was another sign of IHL’s continuing double standards. Washington’s continuing threats not to accept Vietcong representation reinforced this belief. The Vietnam War further demonstrated that IHL could not provide sufficient protection to ‘protected persons’. To give one more example, South Vietnamese civilians were frequently targeted by the US Air Force in part because they lived in South Vietnamese territory, which, because it was legally ‘allied’ territory, did not fall within the Civilian Convention’s narrower scope.64 Forty-​five years after the Vietnam War, scholars are still grappling with the question of analysing its exact impact on IHL’s trajectory, and to what extent the latter shaped the conflict’s nature as violations were being uncovered. Another unresolved historical question involves the connection, or the absence thereof, between the rise of the New International Economic Order (NIEO) and attempts to decolonize IHL in support of the Global South. The NIEO represented a loose set of proposals to challenge the structural inequalities of the world economy in favour of developing Third World interests.65 There was no single agenda, however; actors disagreed on the means to 60 

Ibid., 54–​55. One important legal consequence of these developments was the introduction of Judge Advocate Generals who had to advise military commanders on targeting-​related questions. Janina Dill, Legitimate Targets? Social Construction, International Law and US Bombing (Cambridge, 2015), 148. 62  While originally framing the 1968 My Lai massacre and the Vietnam War more generally as a breakthrough moment for US attitudes towards civilian protection, Mantilla’s most recent work contests this idea. In a recent article, he suggests that ‘no primary evidence’ exists demonstrating this direct link. He does admit that ‘learning from atrocity’ regarding civilian protection ‘did eventually occur’, but this happened only over time and not soon after My Lai’s occurrence. Mantilla, ‘The Origins and Evolution of the 1949 Geneva Conventions’, 54–​55. Mantilla, ‘Social Pressure and the Making of Wartime Civilian Protection Rules’, 11–​12. 63  Mantilla, ‘Social Pressure and the Making of Wartime Civilian Protection Rules’, 19–​20. For the consequences of this weak compromise, see Dirk Moses, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge, 2021). 64  Alexander, ‘International Humanitarian Law, Postcolonialism and the 1977 Geneva Protocol I’. 65  Nils Gilman, ‘The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction’, Humanity (2015), 1–​16. 61 

208   Boyd van Dijk achieve this end, which ultimately led to the NIEO’s downfall—​unlike the Protocols from that same period. A key figure in this movement was Bedjaoui himself; he used his recent experiences as a model for the NIEO’s future development. Still, the precise connections between his attempts to decolonize IHL on the one hand and, on the other, his contestation of international law’s economic inequalities remains a mystery.66 Interestingly, though, analysing Bedjaoui’s conception of sovereignty in relation to both projects offers important insights for different disciplines. For Bedjaoui, the central task in reimagining existing international law was to empower the Global South’s sovereignty while forcing the Global North to accept the NIEO’s restrictions on terms of trade, among other things.67 This tradeoff of postcolonial sovereignty resurfaced in IHL debates during the 1970s. In this period, drafters of the Protocols from both the ‘Third’ and ‘Second’ Worlds voiced similar conceptions of sovereignty while expressing fierce opposition to the ICRC’s attempts to regulate internal political repression and the suppression of secessionist movements. Numerous African and Asian states were, at the time, using violent means to consolidate their recently gained sovereign powers against opposing political forces at home.68 Postcolonial states opposed extending the scope of the Geneva Conventions as a result. Many also withheld access for outside observers such as the ICRC to visit prisons and other detention facilities holding their political opponents.69 The paradox was obvious—​certainly in the eyes of critical Western observers: while in favour of extending protections to anti-​ colonial guerrillas abroad, these same postcolonial states rejected doing the same for their opponents at home. In some accounts,70 however, we can find little engagement with this important sovereignty-​related debate that lies at the core of the Second Additional Protocol. To remedy this, future scholarship should assess the consistency of postcolonial arguments and what impact they had on IHL in the Global South—​and what, then, remains of their overall historical significance as players in the remaking of the Conventions after 1949.

Algeria and Southeast Asia Using Bedjaoui’s La Révolution Algérienne et le Droit as a lens, Emma Stone Mackinnon has recently returned to the FLN’s legal arguments from the 1960s, with the aim of tracing the Additional Protocols’ deeper intellectual history and expanding Matthew Connolly’s groundbreaking analysis. A political theorist and intellectual historian, Mackinnon has problematized the familiar depiction of the Algerian argument as a straightforward claim for nationhood and broadened Connolly’s narrow legal scope by explicitly focusing on the Conventions.71 In contesting the existing literature’s assumptions, she has shown that 66 

Ibid., 5.

68 

Mantilla, ‘The Origins and Evolution of the 1949 Geneva Conventions’, 53–​54.

67 Ibid.

69 Ibid. 70 

Whyte, ‘The “Dangerous Concept of the Just War” ’. Mackinnon notes, Connolly does not ‘explicitly cover the [FLN] appeal to the Geneva Conventions’. Mackinnon, ‘Contested Legacies of the Algerian Revolution in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions’. 71 As

The Geneva Conventions    209 the FLN’s claims about the Conventions were more sophisticated than often implied. The Algerians combined their demand for international legal personality with a broader insistence that decolonization should be an object of international concern. Brought together, these claims were, as Mackinnon argues, an ‘assertion of both humanitarian rights and humanitarian responsibilities’.72 In solving one of the chapter’s important puzzles regarding the deployment of IHL by anti-​colonial actors, Mackinnon convincingly demonstrates that FLN claims about the Algerian War’s international character involved more than sovereignty alone. Their argument turned on international involvement per se. The GPRA argued that it was acting like a regular government, that its fighters were behaving like a regular army, and that they were fighting a conflict of an international character. Accordingly, the Algerians claimed that their fighters in enemy hands should be treated as prisoners of war, not as ‘criminals’, as the French were claiming. In a broader sense, French control over Algeria and its legal claims to sovereign internal authority underlined subaltern arguments about the Conventions’ relevance to decolonization.73 The Algerian struggle was conceptualized in different ways: as a war of national liberation, which placed the Algerian fight into a longer history of Francophone resistance; as anti-​colonial politicking, representing a worldmaking force that sought to decolonize international law;74 and as aggression, to contest the French occupation by preexisting international legal means dating back to Nuremberg’s condemnation of Nazi aggression.75 Bedjaoui paid a great deal of attention to national liberation, linking the FLN’s struggle with De Gaulle’s Free French forces who fought against Vichy and Axis enemies. Bedjaoui knew that French drafters in 1949 had used this model of national liberation as a means to widen the POW Convention’s scope for De Gaulle’s non-​recognized forces during the previous war. Strikingly, Bedjaoui’s conception of decolonization resembles that of his later work for the NIEO in relation to reconceptualizing sovereignty.76 The Algerians argued that the conflict also had crucial implications for the UN Security Council and its concern for the maintenance of international peace and security. They invoked the dramatic refugee situation in neighbouring Maghreb countries and the involvement of other states as proxy supporters as proof of the conflict’s international character. These arguments raised questions about whether such types of insurgencies might be considered truly internationalized by international (legal) actors. Or, as Mackinnon writes, they ‘allow us to see colonialism not simply as a violation of the right of national self-​ determination of the colonized nation . . . but as a system maintained [and counteracted] by international networks’.77 This key insight begs the question whether the foundations for internationalizing insurgency by means of IHL were first pioneered by an Algerian nationalist, or by the Bandung

72 Ibid. 73 Ibid.

74  Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-​Determination (Princeton, 2019). 75  Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001). 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid.

210   Boyd van Dijk Conference of 1955, as has been often suggested.78 Yet in the 1940s, the ICRC had applied the 1929 Geneva Conventions to the wars of decolonization then raging in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.79 At the time, there existed no official state of war in either French Vietnam, Dutch Indonesia, or Mandate Palestine. But ICRC officials were able to radically change the international legal system relating to insurgency years before the Algerian War broke out and the Bandung Conference began. To better understand this shift, we need to return to Sukarno’s violent struggle against Dutch colonial rule following Japan’s surrender in August 1945. While Sukarno successfully deployed the United Nations to defeat imperial rule,80 the Dutch sought to use the ICRC in an effort to gain the release of Indo-​European subjects held captive in Republican camps. In these circumstances, the ICRC obtained Sukarno’s promise to apply the 1929 Convention and to help evacuate thousands of prisoners. In turn, the Indonesian Republicans gained the ICRC’s trust and triggered the full internationalization of the colonial war by mid-​1947, with the start of the first major Dutch military offensive. These military actions were widely condemned and forced Dutch authorities to accept greater international involvement in subsequent days. Indeed, this set the stage for new ICRC actions as well as India’s symbolic relief flights to aid the Republican cause. The Indonesians were able to use the ICRC and the Conventions as new weapons to empower their position internationally.81 Using this precedent, ICRC legal experts began preparing new texts for the future Conventions, intending to widen their scope. They promoted the legal internationalization of colonial (and civil) wars, which opened a Pandora’s box of ideas and legal consequences, with the creation of the first post-​1945 binding international legal provision for anti-​colonial insurgencies. This provision, incorporated into all four Geneva Conventions of 1949, was named Common Article 3 (CA3) relating to NIACs. It was this that enabled the FLN to later use the same mechanism to defeat the French on the international stage. After 1949, ICRC experts used CA3 as a tool against imperial claims seeking to protect their sovereign powers against outside interference. The threat of ICRC inspections would continuously cause concern among colonial officials, illustrating its quickly changing role on the global stage.82 After 1949, the ICRC would increasingly expand its geographical scope towards the Third World, radically changing its role as an international humanitarian agency.83 In this period, ICRC delegates repeatedly discomfited colonial administrations by engaging with national liberation movements and secessionist groups, thereby conferring some measure of legitimacy on both and protecting many of their imprisoned members. 78 

Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah (eds.), Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Cambridge, 2017). 79  Samuel Crow, ‘Indonesia’s Diplomatic Revolution, Lining Up for Non-​Alignment, 1945–​1955’, in Christopher Goscha and Christian Ostermann (eds.), Connecting Histories, Decolonization and the Cold War in Southeast Asia (Stanford, 2009). 80  Crow, ‘Indonesia’s Diplomatic Revolution, Lining Up for Non-​Alignment, 1945–​1955’. 81  Van Dijk, ‘Internationalizing Colonial War’. 82 Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, The British Army and Counter-​ insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge, 2012). 83 Thompson, ‘Humanitarian Principles Put to the Test’, 50; and Cindy Ewing, ‘The Colombo Power: Crafting Diplomacy in the Third World and Launching Afro-​Asia at Bandung’, Cold War History, 2018.

The Geneva Conventions    211 But this same story of international law subverting imperial claims also raises questions as to whether the pre-​existing laws of war had been (ir)relevant to previous imperial wars. As legal historian Will Smiley asked, how were the pre-​existing laws of war interpreted during the colonial insurgencies in the years before the world wars? Maartje Abbenhuis’s most recent work has showed how the Hague Conventions were frequently invoked to contest colonial brutality at the turn of the century, from the Congo horrors to the Boxer Rebellion.84 European observers regularly defended their principles, she demonstrates, by bringing the brutal conduct of ‘civilized’ states within their own empire into ‘sharp relief ’.85 While building on existing scholarship,86 Smiley turned our attention away from some of these questions, of whether the law applied to pre-​1914 imperial wars or was entirely followed by fighting parties. Instead, drawing exclusively on American archival materials (he acknowledges his non-​engagement with extra-​European materials), he traced the discussion among US officers fighting against Philippine insurgents at the turn of the century about what law meant.87 He focused on their actual practice and mid-​ranking officers in the Philippines, rather than on politicians or leading policymakers based in Washington.88 Challenging critics of the master-​narrative, Smiley paid significant attention to Mégret’s demystifying analysis of the pre-​1914 laws of war. In Smiley’s view, many US commanders did acknowledge international law’s relevance, and more so than suggested by Mégret, but they did so strategically in order to showcase their superiority while unleashing brutal violence against Filipino insurgents. So while not considering the law irrelevant to the conflict, US officers often made use of its permissive elements and rules as instruments by which they could justify their brutal military actions. This selective if not strategic usage of international law helped to shield the federal government in Washington from any future claims against it.89 Another striking feature of the impact of international law on the conflict in the Philippines was the application of POW status to Filipino insurgents. Customarily, soldiers were entitled to belligerent privilege: the right not to be punished for deadly, or otherwise brutal, acts committed in wartime. Until recently, however, most historians had assumed that such benefits would not apply to anti-​colonial insurgents, since they would be considered liable to punishment rather than being protected by the law. However, Smiley showed that captured Filipinos would often be given immunity from prosecution, requiring US captors to treat them as POWs and in line with metropolitan legal standards. This broader view of law was not entirely uncontested, though. Some US commanders argued that criminal law was the proper legal framework for dealing with captured insurgents, especially those from non-​white backgrounds.90 84 

Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–​ 1960 (Cambridge, 2001). 85 Maartje Abbenhuis, The Hague Conferences and International Politics, 1898–​ 1915 (London, 2019), 118. 86  See John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, 2001); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2005); and Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007). 87  Smiley, ‘Lawless Wars of Empire?’, 4. 88 Ibid. 89  Ibid., 9–​10. 90  Ibid., 11–​13.

212   Boyd van Dijk In shifting our attention away from exclusion-​related questions to how international law was actually interpreted in times of anti-​colonial insurgency, Smiley broadened the analysis of international law in times of imperial war. As scholars have shown before in relation to empires other than the American one, he demonstrated that US commanders did not want to reject the applicability of international law, but to interpret it selectively the better to instrumentalize it. The brutality they unleashed against Filipino subjects was often articulated by means of law, especially through its most permissive elements sanctioning brutal violence. This legalizing strategy enabled US officers to license extremely punitive measures of counter-​insurgency, from torture to the burning of villages, through a mixed set of legal principles. Through this strategy, the US army sought to legitimize its imperial endeavour overseas and gain the favour of more liberal critics within their domestic audiences. Of course, this does not mean that US officers acted more humanely. Nor did they punish violations of the laws of war in the appropriate manner; many transgressions were never even prosecuted. Nonetheless, international law provided a legal baseline for the conduct of counter-​ insurgency, at least insofar as it helped to ‘structure’ the US army’s violent actions in colonial settings. Still, this story requires more research to discover whether this legal strategy was exceptionally American, as Smiley appears to imply, or a wider phenomenon typical of (liberal) empires in this period, and how indigenous peoples sought to challenge it.91

Conclusion In revisiting the relationship between decolonization, insurgency, and international law, this chapter has three key take-​away points. First, it demonstrates the need to explore further the entangled connections between IHL, insurgency, and decolonization. To understand this relationship, historians might usefully pay closer attention to the role of previously marginalized actors and acknowledge IHL’s mixed origins. This field of international law is the product of a diverse group of actors, from states to anti-​colonial activists, whose agendas, interests, and strategies often fiercely clashed, with critical consequences for how the international legal system developed in the period of decolonization. Recognizing IHL’s different protagonists holds out the promise of tracing its past more clearly, while further extending the literature’s geographical scope of analysis. Second, historians might pay closer attention to why, and how, non-​Western actors invoked the principles and norms of IHL—​and when they ignored or rejected them. To what extent did these legal strategies and conceptions reflect indigenous notions of humanity, justice, and military necessity? It is the task of global intellectual historians to answer some of these questions. It would also help if scholars started scrutinizing their own methodological frameworks: instead of searching for single origins, as the master-​narrative has done so far, they should accept IHL’s entangled history. Closer attention to the law’s internal contradictions, paradoxes, intersections, and hierarchical foundations would yield a more sophisticated understanding of IHL’s colonial and insurgent connections. Finally, this 91 

Smiley, ‘Lawless Wars of Empire?’, 37–​38.

The Geneva Conventions    213 chapter enables us to move beyond IHL’s master-​narrative. The existing (counter-​)narratives of its past either as a long struggle to contain human passions, or as a deeply imperial project, remain too one-​sided. Historicizing IHL’s past encourages us to develop subtler analyses.

Select Bibliography Fazal, Tanisha, Wars of Law, Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Ithaca, 2018). Getachew, Adom, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-​ Determination (Princeton, 2019). Hull, Isabel V., Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, 2005). Klose, Fabian, ‘The Colonial Testing Ground, The ICRC and the Violent End of Empire’, Humanity (2011). Mantilla, Giovanni, ‘Forum Isolation: Social Opprobrium and the Origins of the International Law of Internal Conflict’, International Organization (2018), 317–​349. Moses, Dirk, The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (Cambridge, 2020). Orford, Anne, International Law and its Others (Cambridge, 2009). Smiley, Will, ‘Lawless Wars of Empire? The International Law of War in the Philippines, 1898–​ 1903’, Law and History Review (2018), 1–​40. Stone Mackinnon, Emma, ‘Contested Legacies of the Algerian Revolution in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions’, in Kevin Jon Heller and Ingo Venzke, eds., Contingency and the Course of International Law (Oxford, 2021). Whyte, Jessica, ‘The “Dangerous Concept of the Just War”: Decolonization, Wars of National Liberation, and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions’, Humanity (2019), 313–​341.

Chapter 11

‘More an Inspi rat i on than a Det e rre nt ’ ? Ca pital Puni sh me nt AND British C ol onia l C ou nter-​I nsu rg e nc y, c.1916 –​197 3 Stacey Hynd Insofar as it is related to the fear of terrorism, the death penalty seems particularly ineffective as a deterrent since we are dealing with political fanatics who are prepared to put their lives at risk in carrying out their actions and the sinister organisers of such activities would value the aura of martyrdom which the prospect of execution would bring.1

Within the British Empire, capital punishment was more than simply a legal sanction or a deterrent punishment: it was a political tool and lethal arm of the coercive networks that underpinned colonial governance.2 Executions as political rituals were ‘both performative and constitutive of colonial power’.3 During colonization, executions emerged as a central icon of imperialism, symbolizing the raw power of the encroaching colonial order and the arrival of new forms of law and social control to the colonized world.4 In times of threat to colonial order, capital punishment (re-​)assumed its status as a pre-​eminent strategy of 1 

TNA, CJ 4/​2497, Capital Punishment Northern Ireland, Memorandum Annex A, c.1977. Hynd, Imperial Gallows: Murder Violence and the Death Penalty in British Colonial Africa, c. 1915-​ 60 (London: Bloomsbury, 2023) ; Taylor Sherman, ‘Tensions of Colonial Punishment: Perspectives on Recent Developments in the Study of Coercive Networks in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean’, History Compass, 7/​3 (2009), 659–​677. 3  Kim Wagner, ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’: The Amritsar Massacre and the Spectacle of Colonial Violence’, Past & Present, 233 (2016), 185–​225. 4  David Killingray, ‘Punishment to Fit the Crime?’, in Florence Bernault (ed.), Enfermement, Prison et Châtiments en Afrique: du 19e siècle à Nos Jours (Paris: Karthala, 1999), 181–​204. 2 Stacey

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    215 colonial violence, drawing on metropolitan traditions of mobilizing the death penalty to maintain social order.5 The nature of executions and the targeting of the death penalty as part of counter-​insurgency operations shifted over time, however. From the infamous ‘death by cannon’ executions of the 1857 Indian Mutiny to the 354 men and women hanged following the 1865 Morant Bay uprising in Jamaica, nineteenth-​century colonial governments frequently resorted to public hangings and mass executions to shore up the fragile authority of their rule in the face of anti-​colonial rebellions.6 Capital punishment’s form and function was at that time intrinsically localized, shaped by local understandings of race, caste, religion, and the relationship between colonized bodies and souls.7 By the twentieth century, however, colonial law had become more standardized and bureaucratized as the metropole sought to extol the values of British ‘justice’ and the equality of colonial subjects before the law as part of ‘civilized’ governance; and also, crucially, sought to avoid scandals caused by the contested application of legal violence on colonial bodies. Public and mass executions were phased out, and the force of the death penalty was tempered through the application of mercy.8 Nevertheless, late colonial penality was marked by persistent tensions between desires for punishment, deterrence, and reform; between claims to the civilizing value of the ‘rule of law’ and a continued belief in the necessity of violence in controlling colonized populations. ‘Decivilizing spurts’ of judicial violence and executions erupted when law and order or settler bodies were deemed under threat, most infamously during the Kenyan Emergency of 1952–​1960, referred to by colonial forces as the ‘Mau Mau rebellion’.9 By the later 1950s, changing sensibilities, marked by the rise of humanitarianism and anti-​colonial sentiment, had an undeniable impact on the use of capital punishment. However, metropolitan moves towards abolitionism coincided with a rise in anti-​colonial violence that drove colonial governments to resist metropolitan pressure to restrict their use of the ‘extreme penalty of the law’.10 So when states of emergency were declared during the decolonization era, the use of capital punishment became a climacteric but contested aspect of counter-​ insurgency tactics. This chapter investigates the legal, security, and political rationales that underwrote counter-​insurgency capital punishment and its effective derogation of the ‘rule of law’ in empire. Capital punishment was always a disputed penalty, inhabiting contested space between discourses and practices of the ‘rule of law’ and colonial ‘civilization’ and the perceived necessity of violence in maintaining authority over colonized subjects. Kolsky asserts that 5 

See V.A.C. Gattrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–​1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 6 Wagner, ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’; Jamaica, Report of the Royal Commission 1866 (London: HMSO, 1866), 1,143. 7 Clare Anderson, ‘Execution and its Aftermath in the Nineteenth-​ Century British Empire’, in Richard Ward (ed.), A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 171. 8 Hynd, Imperial Gallows. 9 See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Transformation [1936], trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 273–​314; David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 2005). Whilst colonial discourse deployed the term ‘Mau Mau’ to describe insurgent forces, insurgents were more likely to describe themselves as the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army (KLFA). 10  See TNA, CO 1032/​467, Abolition of Death Penalty; CO 859/​635 Abolition in UK and Future Policy in Colonial Territories.

216   Stacey Hynd the history of colonial violence ‘cannot be understood by traversing from one cataclysmic event to the next’, whilst Wagner argues instead that moments of ‘acute vulnerability during rebellions (real and imagined) reveal the inner workings of colonial rule’ as the British enacted extreme forms of violence to preserve law and order, and their own lives.11 The relationship between the norm and the exception, across time and space, must be considered to explain the form and function of colonial counter-​insurgent violence, particularly within legal frameworks. Historians need to analyse the ‘connected histories of judicial killing’ that highlight how the death penalty was mutually constituted between metropole and colony, between emergency and normative colonial orders.12 The death penalty was a powerful synecdoche for wider tensions within colonial counter-​insurgency between law and violence, individual punishment and military advantage, deterrence and martyrdom. This chapter analyses the role of capital punishment in British late-​colonial counter-​ insurgency, focusing on the targeting and timing of the death penalty within a wider repertoire of colonial strategies of law and violence. There is no single explanatory framework for the use of capital punishment within colonial counter-​insurgency, but commonalities exist within its use across Ireland, Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus—​and indeed its lack of use in Nyasaland, Aden, and post-​1966 Northern Ireland. This chapter makes four main arguments. Firstly, rather than just a legal sentence, capital punishment was an expressly political penalty whose use was shaped by shifting socio-​political climates, military contexts, and legal frameworks. Secondly, both capital sentencing and executions had multiple functions—​gathering intelligence, deterrence, individual punishment, revenge—​ because the death penalty had multiple audiences: insurgents, colonized society, settlers and security forces, imperial authority, and public/​international opinion. Thirdly, whilst capital punishment was purportedly a targeted, legalistic assertion of the rule of law, shoring up the juridical façade of colonial counter-​insurgency, it was in fact an emotional, irrational punishment and a sign of the weakness of colonial states and emergency regimes rather than their strength. Fourthly, the shifting usage of capital punishment reveals the significance of the internationalization of anticolonial insurgencies, the growth of human rights discourses, and the vulnerability of British colonial rule to public and international opinion.

From Martial Law to Emergency Regulations: Extending and Enacting the Death Penalty Institutionalized violence operated differently in the colonies from the metropole, with colonial rule characterized by high levels of normative, incumbent violence.13 When British ‘civilization’ and rule were threatened, extreme violence was the response. The tactics 11  Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 2; Wagner, ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’. 12  Anderson, ‘Execution and its Aftermath’, 191. 13  Bruce Berman, ‘Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence: Colonial Administration and the Origins of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya’, British Journal of Political Science, 62 (1976), 143–​175.

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    217 adopted by colonial security forces against insurgents were ‘bluntly coercive, always racially coded, and sometime terroristic’, but they also normally operated within the auspices and contingencies of colonial legal systems.14 As John Comaroff has argued, colonial states routinely engaged in ‘lawfare’, mobilizing legal restrictions as an instrument of state violence, and during rebellions ‘British officers sought to wield the law as a weapon that could restrain their enemy’s freedom of action’.15 But there were often significant tensions between legal and political and security forces during anti-​colonial rebellions, as colonial judiciaries viewed themselves as enforcers of the rule of law, independent of politics. One reason then for utilizing formal capital punishment in the midst of rebellions, alongside extra-​judicial killings and other forms of violence, was to provide a vector for due process, and head off a lawyer’s rebellion that would weaken state counter-​insurgent capabilities: courtrooms were key battlefields in colonial counter-​insurgency. Before 1939, colonial counter-​insurgency was prosecuted through martial law. Executions were commonly used by military authorities to punish captured insurgents, for crimes including murder, high treason, and spying, as with the forty-​eight prisoners executed during the 1899–​1902 Anglo-​South African War and the thirty-​six hanged after the 1915 Chilembwe Uprising in Malawi.16 The most infamous and contentious executions of early twentieth-​ century counter-​insurgency followed the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. Ninety rebels were sentenced to death following secret military court trials, fifteen of whom were executed by firing squad for armed rebellion ‘for the purpose of assisting the enemy’ under General Maxwell’s orders, with Roger Casement hanged for treason three months later.17 Intended to reassert British authority, these executions generated an enormous backlash in Irish public opinion, creating a new generation of martyrs for the Republican cause.18 The death penalty was also deployed during the 1936–​1939 Arab uprising in Palestine, where between 108 and 112 men were hanged after conviction by military courts under ‘statutory’ martial law and emergency regulations.19 After 1939, however, the British moved from conducting counter-​ insurgency campaigns under martial law to relying on emergency regulations. As French argues, political expediency rather than moral or legal principles fuelled this switch: emergency regulations allowed security forces sufficient latitude for action with few of the political drawbacks of declaring martial law, allowing them to maintain that counter-​insurgency 14 

Martin Thomas, ‘Violence, Insurgency and the End of Empire’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 505–​506. 15  John L. Comaroff, ‘Colonialism, Culture and the Law: A Foreword’, Law & Social Inquiry, 22/​2 (2001), 306; Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (New York: Cornell University Press, 2017), 45. 16  Great Britain, Papers relating to the Administration of Martial Law in South Africa (London: HMSO, 1902), Cmnd. 981, 121–​129; Stacey Hynd, ‘Law, Violence and Penal Reform: State Responses to Crime and Disorder in Nyasaland, c.1915–​64’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37/​1 (2011), 431–​447. 17  Seán Enright, Easter Rising 1916: The Trials (Newbridge: Merrion, 2013), 33. 18 Charles Townsend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 308. 19  Matthew Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine: The British Army, the Colonial State and the Arab Revolt, 1936–​39 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 97–​99; Hansard, HC Deb 31 January 1947, vol. 432 cc1300–​58; Anglo-​American Committee of Inquiry on Jewish Problems in Palestine and Europe, A Survey of Palestine: Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Anglo-​American Committee of Enquiry, Vol. 1 (Government Printer: Palestine, 1946).

218   Stacey Hynd campaigns were police actions rather than wars.20 Emergency law supplanted criminal law, allowing individual freedoms to be heavily curtailed and enforcing severe penalties on any proven or suspected collusion with rebel forces. For Thomas, this ‘rule by law’ created the permissive security environment in which colonial ‘dirty war’ flourished.21 The 1939 Emergency Powers (Colonial Defence) Order in Council regulations provided a common foundation for late colonial British counter-​insurgency operations, one that was adapted to suit local legal and security contexts.22 As many judges served across multiple jurisdictions, emergency regulations developed with comparison between Cyprus, Kenya, and Malaya, with colonial legal adviser Kenneth Roberts-​Wray sitting like a testy, veridical spider in the middle of an imperial legal web attempting to ensure emergency regulations did not violate the ‘rule of law’ or lead to ‘expeditious injustice’.23 Unlike in Portuguese and Dutch territories where domestic abolition of the death penalty constrained its colonial use, the extension of capital punishment to encompass a broad scope of insurgent activities became a central feature of British emergency regulations.24 In peacetime, colonies only used capital punishment for the crimes of murder and treason. However, across Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus, emergency regulations broadened its application to encompass various firearms and bombing offences, carrying and possessing ammunition and incendiary devices, and consorting with terrorists, with additional local variations reflecting the specific socio-​military dynamics of insurgencies: in Kenya, oathing became a capital offence; in Malaya, supplying food; and in Palestine, interfering with infrastructure. These extended emergency capital regulations assisted security forces in proving criminal guilt where witnesses refused to speak by redefining crimes and modifying the burden of proof, resulting in a loss of proportionality in sentencing. Where colonial authorities lacked evidence for a murder conviction for persons they suspected of involvement in rebel attacks, they could instead charge them with other emergency capital crimes that were easier to secure a conviction on, such as consorting with terrorists or possession of ammunition, securing another route to ‘impos[ing] the punishment such conduct deserve[d]‌’ in their eyes.25 The extension, and limitation, of capital crimes under emergency regulations reflected the (perceived) intensity of insurgent violence and the ebb and flow of military campaigns. In Kenya, the Lari massacres in March 1953 sparked a massive extension of the death penalty, whilst in Cyprus, shifts from discretionary to mandatory capital sentences were justified as responses to the ‘wanton murder and savage brutality’ of EOKA bombing campaigns and armed offences.26 The scope of capital crimes in Cyprus was reduced in April 1957 ‘to create conditions favourable to peaceful settlement’, with carrying or possession of ammunition, 20  David French, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 1945–​67 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 103. 21  Thomas, ‘Violence, Insurgency and the End of Empire’, 505–​506. 22 French, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 76. 23  TNA, CO 822/​734, New Regulations to Speed up the Processes of Justice, Minute by Roberts-​Wray, 31 March 1953. 24  Fernando O. Gouveia da Veiga, ‘Portuguese Africa’, in Alan Milner (ed.), African Penal Systems (London: Routledge, 1969), 217; Robert Cribb, ‘Legal Pluralism and Criminal Law in the Dutch Colonial Order’, Indonesia, 90 (2010), 61. 25  TNA, FCO 141/​ 4602, Death Sentence—​General Policy 1957, Harding to Secretary of State, c.20 February 1957. 26 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 152; TNA, FCO 141/​4306, Cyprus: Extension of Death Penalty, Broadcast by Governor, 22 November 1956.

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    219 bombs, or explosives and consorting with terrorists being removed from the list of capital offences, with further reductions in September 1957 for continuing peaceful conditions.27 As violence re-​escalated, the death penalty was pushed to its ‘approved maximum severity’, re-​ establishing death sentences for various firearms, ammunition, and incendiary offences and adding consorting with terrorists by April 1958.28 These regulations, however, came in for severe criticism from London for their draconian scope.29

A Time to Die: Timing and Targeting of the Death Penalty Under emergency regulations, the death penalty became a key symbolic and practical weapon in late colonial British counter-​insurgency. In Malaya, around 226 people were executed for emergency offences between 1948 and 1960, from over 1,000 captured guerrillas.30 Most infamously, in Kenya, some 1,090 Gikuyu men were hanged for their involvement in the Mau rebellion in 1952–​1958.31 Conversely, during the Palestinian civil war in 1946–​1948 only seven men were hanged, and in Cyprus between 1955 and 1959 thirty-​eight EOKA suspects were condemned to death during the Emergency, with nine actually being executed, despite emergency regulations establishing a more extensive liability to the death penalty than in Kenya or Malaya.32 What accounts for these differences in the rate and extent of the death penalty? Whilst demographics and conflict duration obviously play a role, capital punishment was ultimately a political penalty shaped by varying socio-​political climates, military contexts, and legal frameworks, and its usage was shaped by tensions between, and within, colonial administrations and security forces, and legal personnel. Different legal systems shaped the extent of capital trials and conviction. In 1916 Ireland, Field General Court Martial regulations mandated secret trials with no legal representation.33 Death sentences imposed by military courts in the 1936–​1939 Palestine Uprising required confirmation by military commander, but with the High Commissioner retaining the prerogative of mercy.34 In Malaya, federated court systems mean there is a lack of central data, but executions came under local state control, with the British reluctant to intervene in mercy 27 

TNA, CO 96/​1086, Death Penalty Legislation Cyprus. TNA, FCO 141/​4306, Cyprus: Extension of the Death Penalty under Emergency Regulations and Returns, Jan 1956-​Dec 1959. 29 A.W.B. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 919–​920. 30 Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948–​ 60 (London: Frederick Muller, 1975), 140. 31  TNA, CO 822/​1256 Capital Punishment in Kenya during Emergency; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 291. 32 John Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 30, 21; Hansard, House of Lords Debate 23 April 1947, vol. 147, cols. 55–​56; TNA, FCO 141/​4306, Extension of the Death Penalty. 33 Enright, Easter Rising 1916, 45. 34 Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 74, 97–​99, 199. 28 

220   Stacey Hynd decisions.35 In Kenya, settler pressure shaped the decision-​making of both Governor Baring and General Erskine, with Baring persuading London to accept significant legal change to avoid threatened mob rule, lynching, and the collapse of the legal system.36 Whilst legal officers, including Attorney-​General Whyatt, initially resisted the extension of capital powers, fearing abrogation of the rule of law, in April 1953 special emergency assize courts were instituted that held capital powers with relaxed laws of evidence and procedure, and that were staffed by district magistrates after many senior judges stepped down or took promotion elsewhere in protest.37 Additionally, there was only one African lawyer in Kenya, with many Emergency capital cases taken on poverty briefs by Indian lawyers.38 Conversely, Greek Cypriot barristers turned Cyprus’ ‘judicial system into a battlefield in its own right’ with their legal activism and representation of accused EOKA insurgents, whilst concerns about the political reliability of the local judiciary forced authorities to import British lawyers to act as judges.39 Insurgent groups who could rely on legal representation or at least a judiciary willing to assert their independence were better able to limit the number of death sentences imposed on their fighters. Another factor shaping capital punishment was that not all convictions resulted in execution: colonial states routinely used mercy to temper the death penalty as a selective instrument of racialized justice.40 The final decision on confirmation of sentence normally lay with the Governor in his power to apply the royal prerogative of mercy. Gubernatorial mercy decisions routinely responded to political contexts, rather than simply the nature of an individual crime.41 District Commissioners’ reports on public opinion on offences and likely reactions to executions, and additional police intelligence, were taken into account.42 Incomplete evidence on Palestine and Malaya hampers comparative analysis of mercy rates, but in Ireland in 1916, only 16% of the ninety death sentences handed down resulted in execution. During the Palestinian civil war in 1946–​1948, 25% were hanged—​seven from some twenty-​eight death sentences—​and similarly in Cyprus nine of thirty-​eight death sentences were confirmed, or 24% of sentences; all bar one for murder or attempted murder. Kenya displayed by far the lowest rates of mercy, with 69% of death sentences ending on the gallows. Between October 1952 and March 1958, from some 3,000 people tried in total, 1,574 men were sentenced to death, with some 1,090 executions and 240 sentences commuted.43 One key difference was that Kenyan authorities, like Malayan courts, proved more willing to enforce capital sentences for crimes other than murder. Anderson states that 1,090 Gikuyu hanged during the Emergency, 346 were convicted for murder. All others were hanged for Emergency regulation capital offences, with 472 found to have been in possession of arms or

35 

Many thanks to Karl Hack for this information.

36 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 113, 151–​152. 37 TNA,

CO 822/​ 734, Setting up of Special Courts; CO 822/​ 437–​ 41, Proposals to Deal with Disturbances Arising from the Activities of Mau Mau Secret Society Kenya. 38 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 106. 39 Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights, 29. 40 Hynd, Imperial Gallows, 77-​131. 41  TNA, CO 926/​1090, Death Sentence in Cyprus, report 15 July 1957. 42  TNA, FCO 141/​3159, Cyprus: Capital Punishment—​Persons under Sentence of Death. 43  TNA, CO 822/​1256, Capital Punishment in Kenya during Emergency.

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    221 ammunition, sixty-​two convicted for administration of oaths, and 210 for consorting with terrorists.44 Mercy decisions were shaped by pre-​existing socio-​political and cultural dynamics as well as perceptions of insurgents’ crimes. Racial, and ethnic, prejudice strongly influenced commutation figures: the highest rates of mercy and lowest number of executions occurred in ‘white’ Irish and Greek-​Cypriot communities, and the highest number of executions for black Africans convicted during the Kenyan Emergency. In Palestine, the rates of execution were higher for Arabs during the 1936 Uprising than for Jews during the civil war.45 Capital sentences were also generally not imposed on insurgent leaders, but rather on rank-​and-​file insurgents who were easier to capture and held to be more open to suasion. As such, many of the condemned were youths, particularly in Cyprus, Palestine, and Kenya. Eighteen was the standard minimum age for a capital sentence across the British Empire, but in peacetime youths were normally spared execution as they were considered too immature to be knowing, determined offenders.46 During counter-​insurgency operations, however, this stance altered. In Cyprus, Attorney-​General Henry unsuccessfully argued that 16-​year-​ olds should be hanged to combat EOKA’s mobilization of teenage and youth insurgents.47 The nine Cypriots executed by the colonial governments were all aged 19 to 23.48 Women sentenced to death routinely had their sentences commuted on grounds of their gender and this generally held under emergency conditions, although General Maxwell chafed at being pressured to commute Constance Markievicz’s sentence after the Easter Rising.49 Malaya was apparently the only colony to hang women for Emergency offences.50 Even there most women were spared execution, with Lee Meng, regarded as one of the most ruthless Min Yuen in Ipoh, granted mercy after international pressure against her execution, and orders were given in 1953 to not execute women because of ‘the propaganda value to our opponents’.51 The timing of capital sentencing, and particularly of executions, was strongly linked to security conditions and the (perceived) success of counter-​insurgency operations. The Easter Rising executions in Ireland occurred after the battle had been won, but conversely executions in Malaya appear to have been front-​loaded in the early days of the Emergency. Half of the executions occurred before October 1950, but they slowed rapidly by late 1951 when some 162 had been hanged, with 180 ‘bandits’ sent to the gallows by October 1952.52 Executions declined after 1952–​1953 as counter-​terror operations became more centralized 44 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 291. 45 

Adjusted for population, rates of execution were almost as high in the Palestinian uprising as they were during Mau Mau. 46  See Hynd, Imperial Gallows, 95. 47  TNA, FCO 141/​3159, Capital Punishment, Minute by Deputy Governor, 21 February 1957. 48  Government of Cyprus, ‘Corruption of Youth in Support of Terrorism’ (Nicosia, Government Printer: 1957), 23. 49 Enright, Easter Rising 1916, 72. 50  Noel Barber, The War of the Running Dogs: How Malaya Defeated the Communist Guerrillas, 1948–​ 60 (London: Collins, 1971), 172–​176. 51 Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 140; TNA CO 1022/​306, Representations about the sentence of death passed on Lee Ten Tai, 13 February 1953. 52 ‘113th Bandit Hanged’, Singapore Standard, 21 October 1950; ‘180th Red Hanged in Taiping’, Singapore Standard, 1 October 1952.

222   Stacey Hynd and focused on population control than ‘hearts and minds’ campaigning; rather than hanging people for possession of arms and ammunition, executions were restricted to ‘cold blooded murder’ and uncooperative captured enemy personnel.53 In Kenya, capital punishment was primarily deployed during the most intense period of the Emergency between April 1953 and December 1956, when emergency assize courts tried 2,609 suspected ‘Mau Mau’ on capital charges in 1,211 trials, from 3,000 persons across the whole Emergency.54 As Anderson outlines, Kenya’s hangman was at his busiest between April 1953 and June 1955, at the height of the military battle for dominance, with Nairobi central prison holding over 170 men on (a severely overcrowded) death row.55 After 1957, with the military battle won, hangings became more restricted and only murderers were executed. The timing of executions was particularly precise, political, and contentious in Cyprus. The nine EOKA fighters who went to the gallows were executed not only for what they did but also for when they were tried and when their convictions were due for confirmation. The first executions occurred on 10 May 1956, but the retaliatory hanging of two British soldiers helped force a hiatus until executions resumed on 9 August and 21 September 1956 following a heightened period of EOKA attacks. To avoid adverse publicity, executions were suspended following the Prime Minister’s orders whilst capital convictions were being discussed at the United Nations in early 1957.56 The final execution on 14 March 1957 was of the 19-​year old Evagoras Pallikarides, who had been convicted only of possessing a firearm. EOKA declared a truce immediately after his hanging, which in turn led colonial authorities to commute sentences for EOKA fighters convicted for murder.57 British use of the death penalty increased in the later stages of the 1936–​1939 Palestine Uprising as security forces intensified counter-​insurgency operations.58 Between 108 and 112 men were hanged overall, with fifty-​four death sentences confirmed in 1938 (from 382 military court trials) and fifty-​five confirmed in 1939 (from 526 trials): so around 10% of all trials resulted in executions.59 It was apparently widely thought in military circles that the Zionist uprising had not been effectively crushed because insufficient force had been deployed, including too few hangings.60 During early stages of the 1946–​1948 Palestinian civil war, High Commissioner Alan Cunningham’s restrained response included an aversion to the death penalty: ‘I do not believe [executions] would have the slightest effect in reducing terrorism and might well increase it. I should say with the example of Ireland and even the Arab rebellion before me, I am dead against reprisals’.61 Courts apparently had ‘instructions from HMG that the death penalty should be avoided if at all possible’, likely aware of the 53 Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 383; Karl Hack, ‘Everyone Lived in Fear: Malaya and the British Way of Counter-​Insurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4 (2012), 671–​699. 54 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 6. 55  Ibid., 291. 56  TNA, CO 926/​1090, Death Sentence in Cyprus, D. M. Smith to Melville, 11 February 1957. 57  Ibid., report 15 July 1957. 58 Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 12, 43, 379; Jacob Norris, ‘Repression and Rebellion: Britain’s Response to the Arab Revolt in Palestine of 1936–​39’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36/​1 (2008), 25–​45. 59  Anglo-​American Committee, A Survey of Palestine. 60 Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 89. 61  Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine Triangle: The Struggle between the British, the Jews and the Arabs, 1935–​48 (London: André Deutsch, 1978), 290.

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    223 potential negative ramifications of executing Jewish freedom fighters in the aftermath of the Holocaust.62 This policy of not enforcing death sentences was heavily criticized as violence escalated, however, particularly after the reprieve of eighteen Lehi fighters convicted for the Haifa railway raid on 11 June 1946.63 Faced with deteriorating security and political situations, the British cabinet gave approval for executions of Jewish insurgents in Palestine on grounds that failure to enforce death sentences encouraged terrorism, adversely affected troop morale, and alienated Arab opinion.64 On 16 April 1947, British authorities hanged four Irgun fighters in Acre jail, without any preceding announcement, causing outrage among both local and American Jewish communities and US politicians. This intensified after two other condemned fighters on death row blew themselves up in jail with a smuggled hand grenade to avoid execution, seizing control of the narrative and symbolism of their deaths.65

A Spectacle for Multiple Audiences: Intentions and Receptions of the Death Penalty Capital sentencing and executions had multiple functions within colonial counter-​ insurgency, from tactical to symbolic, because the death penalty had multiple audiences—​ insurgents, colonized society, settlers and security forces, imperial authority, and public/​ international opinion. However, those functions were contested, and their reception sometimes differed from their intentions. At one level, the death penalty was about judicially punishing individual insurgents for their crimes. However, colonial capital punishment was performative as much as punitive. Executed insurgents became synecdoches for colonial retribution, being sentenced and killed as individuals not simply for their crimes but for their capacity to represent symbolically collective insurgent bodies and causes. Late colonial emergency executions often served as a form of vengeance rather than strict justice, particularly in cases where the accused was held to have targeted British security personnel or prominent loyalists, and where death sentences were enforced for non-​murder capital convictions. The most commonly cited justification for the death penalty, however, was as a deterrent, to prevent further escalation of violence. Authorities in Cyprus repeatedly propounded their belief in the ‘deterrent effect of a mandatory death penalty (even though only one execution has in fact been carried out)’.66 Officials held that imprisonment was insufficient as a deterrent to prevent people joining insurgencies, particularly with the prospect of amnesty at close of conflict.67 Rhetorics and languages of violence were shaped by imperial 62  Imperial

War Museum Sound Archive, 11077, RAA Smith, reel 3, cited in French, British Way in Counterinsurgency, 92. 63 French, British Way in Counterinsurgency, 92. 64  TNA, CAB 129/​18, Execution of Condemned Terrorists, 26 March 1947 65 Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 305. 66  TNA, CO 96/​1086, Death Penalty Legislation Cyprus, Higham to Melville, 15 November 1957. 67  TNA, FCO 141/​3159, Capital Punishment.

224   Stacey Hynd geographies: whilst the metropole wrote in terms of justice, legality, and deterrence, peripheral actors tended rather to combine discourses of deterrence and retribution/​revenge.68 This repeated emphasis on capital punishment’s deterrent function proved almost paradoxical, particularly as insurgent violence continued in the face of widespread executions in Kenya and Malaya. Significantly, in the interwar period, officials across African and other British territories had stressed that capital punishment was in fact not an effective deterrent in a colonial context, because local populations held differing beliefs on death, or hangings lacked cultural resonance within their societies, or because, due to commutation and prison hangings, communities did not believe that executions were actually carried out.69 And yet, immediately that colonial rule and settler bodies came under threat, there was a rapid, knee-​ jerk insistence on the power of executions as a deterrent in colony after colony. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, the extension of the death penalty to emergency offences can be read as serving a specific ‘judico-​political function’, being ‘a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted’.70 Creating, and criminalizing, insurgency as a capital offence was about order, the assertion of colonial control, and the rule of law; it was a reassertion of the ritual legitimacy of a colonial state and its ‘sovereign right to kill and let live’.71 However, the death penalty was in some respects a sign of the weakness of colonial states and emergency regimes rather than their strength. As Wagner notes, exemplary violence revealed ‘a colonial order that was never sufficiently strong to do without exemplary punishment or demonstrative violence’, and executions in their excess highlight the loss of control inherent in emergencies like Kenya’s.72 As in Palestine and Kenya, executions began in Cyprus after arguments that ‘reprieve would have seriously affected the morale of the armed forces’.73 Executions could be a pressure-​release valve on security forces’ fears and frustrations. Demands for executions reveal political fears, and sometimes the reality, of the loss of discipline among security forces, an admission that colonial states did not always control their own agents. Counter-​insurgency executions were sometimes an attempt to restore order aimed at colonizers as much as the colonized. On a more pragmatic, tactical note, emergency regulations securitized capital punishment, coopting the death penalty to serve military as well as political ends. Extended regulations in the Palestine Uprising sought ‘to intimidate rebels and convince their leadership to accept a ceasefire’.74 A significant function of the death penalty in Cyprus, Malaya, and Kenya was to serve as an intelligence-​gathering tool; harsh sentences were intended to convince insurgents to trade information for their lives.75 In Cyprus, authorities believed extending capital crimes to be ‘responsible in great measure for recent successes in the liquidation of terrorists in Limassol. One youth who was plainly aware he was liable to the 68 

See TNA, CO 926/​1093, Representations in Capital Punishment in Cyprus.

69 Hynd, Imperial Gallows, 161. 70 

Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: la naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 48–​49. Foucault, ‘Faire vivre et laisser mourir: la naissance du racisme’, Les Temps modernes (February 1991), 57. 72  Wagner, ‘Calculated to Strike Terror’, 216–​218, 244. 73 ‘More Hangings in Cyprus? Perils of Leniency and Severity’, The Manchester Guardian, 14 March 1956. 74 Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 65. 75  TNA, CO 926/​561, Emergency Regulations; Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights, 34–​35; Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 876. 71 Michel

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    225 death penalty . . . proceeded to make a 26 page statement’ implicating others.76 Similarly, in Malaya captured insurgents who turned informer would avoid conviction or execution, whilst in Kenya, the threat of the death penalty was used as leverage to persuade Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) fighters to flip allegiance and join psych-​ops counter gangs, and fake executions were apparently staged in detention camps to intimidate detainees.77 Overall, capital punishment was intended to function as a ‘civilized’ form of violence, a carefully targeted assertion of the rule of law, shoring up the juridical façade of colonial counter-​insurgency and disguising the ‘savage’, unregulated violence of colonial dirty war. Officials in Cyprus repeatedly stressed the restraint of judicial executions and their justification in the face of EOKA outrages, noting in publicity statements that there had been only ‘nine executions with the last in March 1957, by which time EOKA had killed over 250 people’.78 In reality, however, the death penalty was also an intrinsically emotional, irrational punishment: violence is rarely either solely rational or irrational, and strategic forms of violence often rely on emotion to generate their impact.79 French argues that one of Templer’s most significant contributions to the conduct of the Malayan Emergency was his ability to stem ‘panic and emotion’ in the British community, as when resisting calls for public execution.80 It was in Northern Ireland, however, in the 1960s–​1980s, that authorities most clearly admitted the ‘particular emotional call’ of the death penalty.81 Both police and politicians repeatedly noted the ‘emotional or even irrational’ nature of discussions surrounding the death penalty in Northern Ireland.82 The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Jim Prior, noted in 1983 that he had voted for the reintroduction of the death penalty for terrorism in 1975 but subsequently recognized that ‘this was a mistaken and emotional response’.83 Whilst colonial authorities lauded the death penalty as an effective sanction, it was one that could be inverted and coopted by insurgent forces. One tactic that constrained executions in Cyprus and Palestine was insurgent retaliation. The April 1947 Irgun hangings were infamously followed by the execution of two British sergeants and the public display of their bodies. This incident provoked riots among British forces in Palestine and widespread outrage in the UK, and is thought to have been a significant factor in convincing the Labour government to surrender the mandate.84 Two British soldiers were also hanged by insurgent forces in Cyprus, whilst fears of retaliatory attacks on security forces were routinely cited as reasons not to use capital punishment in Northern Ireland in the 1960s–​1980s.85 In Kenya, KLFA forest fighters appropriated hangings as a tool of internal discipline, with Alphonse 76 

TNA, FCO 141/​4602, Death Sentences, Harding to Secretary of State, c.20 February 1957. The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 140; Bruce Berman, Control and Crisis in Colonial Kenya: The Dialectic of Domination (London: James Currey, 1990), 374. 78  TNA, CO 926/​1090, Death Sentences in Cyprus. 79  See Émile Durkheim, ‘Two Laws of Penal Evolution’, Année sociologique, 4 (1901), 65–​95. 80 French, British Way in Counterinsurgency, 94. 81  TNA, CJ 4/​2497, Capital Punishment Northern Ireland, Memorandum Annex A. 82  Peter Hodgkinson, ‘The United Kingdom and the European Union’, in Peter Hodgkinson and Andrew Rutherford (eds.), Capital Punishment: Global Issues and Prospects (Winchester: Waterside Press, 1996), 195. 83  TNA, CJ 4/​4558, Capital Punishment, Secretary of State to Chairman of Waveney Conservative Association, 9 July 1983. 84 Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency, 30, 21. 85  TNA, FO 371/​123889/​1081/​942, EOKA Execution of two UK Army Corporals; PREM 151/​1736 Legal Procedure 1973. 77 Short,

226   Stacey Hynd Nganga, the self-​styled ‘Chief Justice of Mau Mau’, confessing to ‘ordering the hanging of about a hundred Mau Mau for offences against the sect’.86 Martyrdom cultures also made executions potentially counter-​productive. The Easter Rising executions were embedded within longer histories of English violence and Irish (Catholic) martyrdom to create a powerful new generation of martyrs for the Republican cause, and fear of creating further martyrs was a significant reason for avoiding executions during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.87 In Cyprus, public sentiments held convicted EOKA fighters as ‘heroic patriot[s]‌whose execution would not be justice, but martyrdom’.88 British authorities quietly buried hanged men within Nicosia jail to avoid ‘unseemly demonstrations’, but it subsequently became a site of memorialization of Cypriot ‘martyrs’.89 The seven Irgun and Lehi fighters executed during the Palestinian civil war are now commemorated and celebrated as part of the Olei Hagardom (Hebrew, ‘those who ascended to the gallows’), national martyrs in Israel. The lack of such cultural resonance for executions and martyrdom in Malaya and Kenya was perhaps one reason for less restraint in ordering hangings. The method of execution was as revealing of the nature of colonial counter-​insurgency and its internal power dynamics as the death penalty’s targeting. In both Kenya and Malaya, the early days of emergencies saw demands for public, expedited executions from settler, and loyalist, communities, intended to instil fear among insurgents and their sympathizers. In Malaya, unofficial members of the Federal Executive Council called for summary trials, asserting that ‘clear-​cut cases of possession of arms and murder should be immediately brought to trial, and . . . immediately carried out’.90 But these calls for ‘public execution on the spot to serve as an example to potential criminals’ were resisted on grounds of due process and a preference for leveraging the threat of death to gather intelligence from captured insurgents: informants were deemed more useful than corpses.91 In Kenya, settlers demanded the reintroduction of public executions, preferably immediately following trial and without right to appeal, so that Africans could witness British justice in action—​rather hypocritically, considering their denunciations of the ‘impulsive savagery’ of Mau Mau.92 Although mobile gallows were initially used to conduct some executions among offenders’ communities in Kenya, both colonial and metropolitan authorities proved staunchly resistant to the widespread use of public or mass executions, knowing this would bring international accusations of ‘uncivilized’ governance.93 The rejection of public execution served

86 

‘Casualties in Kenya: Mau Mau Dead Total 7,811’, The Manchester Guardian, 29 January 1955, 1. PREM 151/​1736, Legal Procedure 1973, Memorandum, 29 March 1973. See David Matthew Doyle, ‘Republicans, Martyrology, and the Death Penalty in Britain and Ireland, 1939–​90’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015), 721. Martyrdom discourses shifted to hunger strikers: see Tony Craig’s chapter in this volume. 88  TNA, FCO 141/​3159, Capital Punishment, District Commissioner’s Office, Famagusta, 3 May 1957. 89  TNA, FCO 141/​4602, Death Sentence. 90  TNA, CO 537/​3692, Minutes of Extraordinary Meeting of the Federal Ex Co Kuala Lumpur, 26 June 1948. 91  TNA, CO 1022/​58, Policy for Emergency Regulations, Officer Administering the Government of Malaya to Lyttelton, 2 November 1951. 92  TNA, CO 822/​734, New Regulations. 93  TNA, WO 32/​2062, GOC East Africa to VAG, 31 October 1952; TNA, CO 822/​702, Lari Massacre Trials; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 154. 87  TNA,

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    227 to symbolically distance late colonial judicial executions from longer histories of extreme colonial violence—​like the 1857 Indian Mutiny—​and the extra-​judicial, summary executions that pervaded counter-​insurgency campaigns. It also avoided damaging local cultural and religious associations, as in Palestine where regulations dictated that executions were held within Acre jail, well away from Jerusalem.94 More prosaically, public executions were security risks, with a possibility of insurgent attack to rescue colleagues or disrupt the spectacle of colonial power. Executions were therefore normally conducted behind prison walls, according to established penal procedures. The Easter Rising martyrs in Ireland were shot by firing squads under military procedures, but otherwise hanging was the preferred method of execution. The concealment of executions within prisons raises questions about the scope of colonial power and the efficacy of the death penalty’s deterrent functioning. Far from being imposing spectacles of colonial power, counter-​insurgency executions became selectively publicized, semi-​clandestine rituals. Whilst the gallows for the 1953 Lari massacre trials could be ominously viewed from the courthouse, propaganda was otherwise restricted to publication of death notices and official witnesses to hangings, and Anderson notes that those hanged during the Kenyan Emergency were (with a few exceptions like Dedan Kimathi) largely anonymous, buried in unmarked graves to avoid memorialization.95 Colonial states could not employ public executions then, but with the high level of other forms of visible violence such as detention camps, public beatings, torture, and summary killings, such didactic punishments were less necessary within counter-​insurgency frameworks. The comparatively low number of executions in Malaya has been linked to the extrajudicial killing of insurgents in jungle ambushes, but also to the deportation of Chinese rebels who might otherwise have faced the death penalty.96 By 1957 in Kenya, captured KLFA fighters were being killed in the forest rather than arrested, which lowered conviction rates.97 Use of the death penalty was determined in part in conjunction with wider repertoires of colonial violence, as well as socio-​political climates.

Human Rights and Public Relations: Abolitionism and Anti-​C olonialism The shifting usage of capital punishment in the 1950s–​1960s reveals the significance of the internationalization of anticolonial insurgencies, the growth of human rights discourses, and the vulnerability of British colonial rule to public and international opinion. The rise of human rights, international humanitarian law, and memories of the Second World War led to international moral and politico-​legal reappraisals of various forms of violence in the 94 Hughes, Britain’s Pacification of Palestine, 42. 95 

TNA, CO 822/​734, New Regulations; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 155, 174, 342. Human Rights and the End of Empire, 834; Souchou You, The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small, Distant War (Copenhagen: NIAS, 2016), 58. 97 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 290. 96 Simpson,

228   Stacey Hynd late 1940s–​1950s, debates that were further fuelled by anti-​colonial liberation struggles.98 Collective punishments, forced displacement and resettlement, and detention without trial became particularly sensitive subjects for colonial authorities.99 Capital punishment, however, was initially less contentious as it was still routinely deployed in the metropole, and was allowed under European human rights law and the 1949 Geneva Conventions.100 Domestic campaigns against the death penalty only gained significant traction in Britain in the late 1950s, with the 1957 Homicide Act restricting capital punishment to certain categories of murder and the 1965 Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act establishing a moratorium on its use, leading to abolition in 1969 for the United Kingdom and 1973 for Northern Ireland.101 However, when colonial governments were consulted about whether abolitionist metropolitan legislation could, and should, be imposed in British colonies, most expressed strongly retentionist sentiments, explicitly noting the need to retain the death penalty to combat rising anti-​colonial unrest.102 Whilst the majority of capital convictions and executions had already occurred in Malaya and Kenya before 1956 when abolitionism gained significant ground in Britain, executions in Cyprus started three months after metropolitan executions were suspended in February 1956 for legislative debate, thus placing significant pressure on colonial officials in Nicosia to justify executions, particularly for offences other than murder.103 The execution of EOKA fighters Michael Karaolis and Andreas Demetriou on 10 May 1956 in fact became the trigger for Greece taking proceedings against Britain to the European Court of Human Rights.104 As Brian Drohan notes, the Cyprus executions reveal a key British vulnerability to public criticism, both domestically and internationally.105 There the Cypriot Bar Council worked alongside activists including Amnesty International’s co-​founder Peter Benenson and sympathetic British politicians to challenge emergency regulations.106 Human rights campaigning also influenced metropolitan public attitudes, compounded by imperial memory and the sympathetic profile of many condemned insurgents. Conservative voters petitioned MPs against the execution of Cypriot youths for carrying arms: ‘Anything more likely to lower this country’s already waning moral status in the eyes of the free world, as an example of imperialist barbarism, is difficult to imagine. Has the government forgotten Ireland where a similar course of action was equally immoral and proved equally futile?’107 Conversely, a lack of both domestic legal activism and international support for Mau Mau allowed capital punishment in Kenya to run relatively unchecked, with limited rights-​ based protests focusing on torture and detention instead, particularly after the Hola Camp 98 

See Boyd van Dijk’s chapter in this volume.

99 French, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 225. 100 

See Art 2(1) of the ECHR and Art 68 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Seal, Capital Punishment in Twentieth-​Century Britain: Audience, Justice and Memory (London: Routledge, 2014). The death penalty continued to be available for treason, piracy with violence, and certain military offences until its complete abolition in 1988. 102  TNA, CO 859/​635, Abolition and Future Policy in Colonial Territories, 1956–​1957. 103 Seal, Capital Punishment in Twentieth-​ Century Britain, 13; TNA, FCO 141/​ 4305, Political Repercussions of the Execution of Michalakis Karaolis. 104 Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 919. 105 Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights, 28. 106  TNA, FCO 141/​4593, Cyprus: Bar Council Activities. 107  TNA, CO 926/​1094, Representations on Capital Punishment in Cyprus. 101 Lizzie

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    229 massacre.108 For comparison, over 1,500 death sentences were handed down during the Algerian revolution, but from those between 198 and 222 people were guillotined, a significantly lower rate of execution than occurred in Kenya.109 A major factor behind this was the FLN’s success in leveraging international support and human rights activism to restrict the public, legal arm of French colonial violence.110 The apparently paradoxical decision to abolish capital punishment at the height of subversive killing in Northern Ireland shows how human rights campaigning intersected with pragmatic security decisions. Since the Easter Rising executions, the death penalty had proven a contentious punishment in Northern Ireland. Between 1922 and abolition in 1973, only one man was hanged for a terrorist murder, in 1942.111 Escalating Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence in the 1970s–​1980s however led to repeated attempts to reintroduce the death penalty, but the government stood firm on abolition. National security considerations and the potential martyrdom of Irish Republicans were pivotal factors in dissuading successive British governments from reintroducing the death penalty for politically motivated killings in Britain and Northern Ireland.112 Officials increasingly accepted that capital punishment did not work as a deterrent for premeditated, politically motivated offences, particularly where terrorists were already facing the threat of death at the hands of security forces and were ‘prepared to risk [their] own life as well as sacrifice the lives of others’.113 The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland noted that he agreed with a letter published by Irish historians warning that capital punishment of Irish terrorists would act ‘not as a deterrent but as a new inspiration for the IRA’, highlighting the propaganda value of executions.114 Earlier examples of retaliation, escalation, and martyrdom from within Ireland and across empire informed this judgement. Menachem Begin, former Irgun leader and Israeli Prime Minister, reportedly told British politicians that, far from serving as a deterrent, the execution of Irgun fighters had ‘galvanised’ his group, ‘got us the recruits that we wanted, made us more efficient . . . you were not sentencing our terrorists to death, you were sentencing a lot of your own people’.115 The restriction and subsequent abolition of capital punishment in the United Kingdom made it difficult to justify using this form of violence in colonial emergencies. There were no executions related to the 1957 Nyasaland Emergency, but with the establishment of a ‘police state’ and forty-​seven recorded extra-​judicial executions the deterrent and retributive functions

108 

See Yolana Pringle, ‘Humanitarianism, Race and Denial: The International Committee of the Red Cross and Kenya’s Rebellion, 1952–​1960’, History Workshop Journal, 84 (2017), 89–​107. 109 François Malye and Philippe Oudart, ‘Les Guillotinés de Mitterand’, Le Point (31 August 2001), 1,511; Sylvie Thénault, Une drôle de justice: les magistrats dans la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2004). 110  Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria, trans. Dona Geyer (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2013), 105. 111  TNA, CJ 4/​6863, Capital Punishment—​Terrorists. 112  Doyle, ‘Republicans, Martyrology, and the Death Penalty’, 706–​708. 113 TNA, CJ 4/​ 6863, Capital Punishment, Superintendent Balfour, 17 December 1987; Doyle, ‘Republicans, Martyrology, and the Death Penalty’, 706. 114  TNA, CJ 4/​4558, Capital Punishment, Secretary of State to Chairman of Waveney Conservative Association, 9 July 1983. 115  Amnesty International, When the State Kills . . . The Death Penalty v. Human Rights (London, 1989), 19.

230   Stacey Hynd of counter-​insurgent violence were fulfilled otherwise.116 Similarly, there were no executions of insurgents in Aden, where aerial bombardment, scorched earth tactics, and population displacement were the paradigmatic forms of colonial violence during the Radfan Uprising.117 In fact, by the 1960s, political controversies over the punishment of colonial murders shifted from targeting insurgents to felonious British servicemen, with Guardsman Gabriel being convicted of murdering an Arab man whilst off duty in Aden.118 Most infamously, the racial hierarchies of punishment were controversially inverted in Kenya with the execution of the white settler and Emergency veteran Peter Poole for murdering his African servant.119 After independence, postcolonial states frequently retained colonial legal systems, including emergency regulations, and drew heavily on colonial counter-​ insurgency strategies to combat their internal enemies: as such, former British colonies became amongst the world’s most prominent retentionist states of the death penalty.120 Even in the newly independent Irish Free State, ‘a practice that was abhorred [as a colonial punishment] was taken to with alacrity by the architects of independence’ with eighty-​one executions by firing squad during the 1922–​1923 civil war, despite (or perhaps because of) key figures like Taoiseach Eamon De Valera having themselves been held under sentence of death by the British.121 The hypocrisy of British attitudes towards counter-​insurgency violence was repeatedly exposed in decolonization-​era Africa, as the British government opposed the execution of anti-​government insurgents in Malawi and Southern Rhodesia in the 1960s. When British authorities decried the use of death sentences and public executions, African politicians retorted—​with good cause—​that hanging terrorists was simply ‘a repetition of the history of what the British did in this country’.122

Conclusions This account of the death penalty highlights the analytical value of disaggregating forms of colonial counter-​insurgency violence, of investigating the ebb and flow of their use throughout campaigns and in relation to one another, and of understanding how particular tactics of counter-​insurgency were mutually constituted between metropole and colony, between emergency and normative colonial order. Capital punishment was a political tool as well as judicial punishment whose use was shaped by shifting counter-​insurgency contexts, legal frameworks, socio-​political mores, and racism, explaining its varied use across late colonial states of emergency. Death sentences and executions were aimed at multiple, competing audiences and 116  Great Britain, Report of the Nyasaland Commission of Inquiry (London: Government Printer, 1959), Cmnd. 814. 117 Drohan, Brutal End of Empire, 81–​113. 118  TNA, FCO 8/​462, Guardsman Gabriel. 119  TNA, CO 822/​3009–​13, Miscellaneous Representations Concerning the Sentence of Death Passed on Peter H. R. Poole in Kenya, 1960–​1962. 120  Roger Hood, The Death Penalty: A Worldwide Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 121 Ian O’Donnell, Justice, Mercy and Caprice: Clemency and the Death Penalty in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 4; Doyle, ‘Republicans, Martyrology and the Death Penalty’, 712. 122  Hansard Malawi, 3rd session, 1965, 257; TNA, DO 154–​79, Southern Rhodesia: Law and Order Maintenance Act.

‘More an Inspiration than a Deterrent’?    231 thus held manifold functions: from gathering intelligence to deterrence or punishment, from instilling fear in colonized populations to restoring morale among colonial security forces and settlers, their use was both affective and rational. During colonial counter-​insurgency campaigns the judicial legitimacy and lethal ritual of state executions were intended to deflect attention from the less restrained punishments and strategic violence deployed in counter-​ insurgency campaigns. Executions formed part of a discourse of social defence, designed to buttress civilization against those beyond its confines. Due process and the rule of law may have been dead on their feet, but the performative facade of British ‘justice’ remained an important symbolic legitimator of British colonial authorities’ responses to insurgency. However, these functions could also be inverted or backfire on colonial forces as insurgents threatened their own hangings or as public sympathy reframed convicted insurgents as patriotic freedom fighters and martyrs. Analysing the death penalty highlights the limits as well as the excesses of colonial authority and violence, particularly during the rise of human rights discourses and laws in the 1950s–​1970s. British concern with reputation and moral criticism made rights-​ based activism and shaming relatively effective at constraining certain forms of violence: peno-​ legal more so than extra-​legal. Colonial law was a double-​edged sword for security forces, being both an oppressive instrument of state power and an avenue to challenge and limit that oppression, and this shaped late colonial usages of judicial violence and state killing, particularly when the death penalty was limited and then abolished in the metropole. Anti-​colonial activists’ protests against emergency capital punishment aimed to capture the image of the noose and refashion it into a lasso, a legal and public relations weapon to trip and hobble the colonial state. Ultimately, authorities came to accept that the death penalty had become more of an inspiration than a deterrent to insurgent forces, a sentiment that helped end its deployment in British colonial counter-​insurgency.

Select Bibliography Anderson, Clare, ‘Execution and its Aftermath in the Nineteenth-​Century British Empire’, in Richard Ward, ed., A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 170–​198. Anderson, David M., Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005). Doyle, David Matthew, ‘Republicans, Martyrology, and the Death Penalty in Britain and Ireland, 1939-​90’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015), 703–​722. Drohan, Brian, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (New York: Cornell University Press, 2017). French, David, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 1945–​67 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Simpson, A.W.B. Brian, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Thomas, Martin, ‘Violence, Insurgency and the End of Empire’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1–​24. Stacey Hynd, Imperial Gallows: Murder, Violence and the Death Penalty in British Colonial Africa, c. 1915-​60 (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), forthcoming.

Chapter 12

Sinning Qu i et ly

Law and Human Rights in British Colonial Counter-​Insurgency Brian Drohan In 1957, as colonial officials gained greater control over Kenya’s Mau Mau insurgency, Kenya attorney-​general Eric Griffith-​Jones penned a memorandum to the colony’s governor explaining that the frequent beatings and other forms of torture meted out to Mau Mau prisoners could legally continue as long as interrogators avoided ‘vulnerable parts’ of the body such as ‘the spleen, liver, or kidneys’. Even so, Griffith-​Jones noted, such practices should remain secret. ‘If we are going to sin’, he warned, ‘we must sin quietly’.1 ‘Sinning quietly’ accurately described how British officials approached colonial counter-​insurgency campaigns. But keeping their sins quiet proved more difficult than they imagined, thanks to legal and human rights challenges. Brutality was a common feature of colonial wars, as was opposition to these methods. Knowledge about colonial violence and atrocities was widespread within domestic British society during the height of empire and in the midst of Britain’s decolonization wars.2 The extremely violent suppression of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, the internment of Boer civilians in concentration camps during the 1899–​1902 South African War, and the 1919 massacre of hundreds of peaceful Indian demonstrators at Amritsar aroused heated public debate in the press and in Parliament. In these cases, outrage against atrocities grew largely from legal, political, and humanitarian concerns.3 Brutal methods were also used frequently during decolonization. Senior officials were well aware of what was happening and worked assiduously to keep their transgressions hidden. 1  Quoted in Ian Cobain, Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture (London: Portobello Books, 2013), 89. 2  For a detailed examination of the impact of colonial violence on British society, see Erik Linstrum, Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). 3  Aidan Forth, Barbed-​Wire Imperialism: Britain’s Empire of Camps, 1876–​1903 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–​1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Kim Wagner, Amritsar: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

Sinning Quietly   233 This chapter builds on colonial histories of government secrecy and avoidance of public scrutiny by examining interactions between British authorities who tried to keep sins quiet and other actors who challenged them by mobilizing ideas of law and human rights. While not a comprehensive study of all ways in which law and human rights shaped colonial counter-​ insurgencies, the chapter highlights several representative patterns. During the 1950s and 1960s, most legal and human rights claims concerned Britain’s use of measures such as collective punishment, detention without trial, and torture. Opposition to these practices came in three main forms: internal dissent from British officials and Members of Parliament; local advocacy from within a colony; and international opposition from nation-​states, non-​governmental organizations, and supra-​national agencies. Most British officials did not actively oppose legal and human rights challenges. Instead, Britain proved largely successful at deflecting criticism by denying allegations, by undermining the accusers, and, when denial failed and public scrutiny intensified, by superficially cooperating with investigators while quietly manipulating the information available to them—​a practice labelled ‘cooperative manipulation’.4 These actions cultivated doubt as to the truth of abuse allegations, which acted as a protective shield against additional scrutiny. The chapter begins with an overview of colonial legal structures as well as developments in international law and human rights. It then analyses how various actors mobilized law and human rights during three conflicts: the 1952–​1960 Kenya Emergency, where internal opposition to counter-​insurgency policies proved most influential; the 1955–​1959 Cyprus Emergency, characterized by local advocacy and Greek government appeals to international law; and the 1963–​1967 Aden Emergency, where independent organizations—​the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Amnesty International—​played important roles.

Colonial Law and Counter-​Insurgency While the rule of law in Britain rested on the notion of securing an individual’s rights, colonial law was designed to extend the remit of colonial authority. In Britain, law was supposed to apply equally to all individuals. The notion that colonialism extended these protections to imperial subjects regardless of status became a key justification for colonial rule. But such equality before the law did not occur in practice. Law defined and ordered colonized societies by creating points of interaction between agents of the colonial state and the populations they governed. Through colonization, colonial regimes inserted themselves into existing local power structures. In an effort to impose greater legal uniformity on these territories, colonial authorities subordinated the law of indigenous ethnic and religious communities to colonial law. According to the legal historian Lauren Benton, these efforts ‘established the colonial state’s claim to paramount legal authority, and nationalist movements everywhere came to identify the law as a crucial arena for the struggle for political control in the twentieth century’.5 4 

Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 4–​5. 5 Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–​ 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9.

234   Brian Drohan The belief that colonized peoples were inherently different and subordinate was held to justify governance built on racial hierarchies and contributed to the use of law as an educative process that acculturated subjects to imperial norms of behaviour and punishment. In many African colonies, governors could control Africans’ freedom of movement, impose collective punishments, and implement forced labour. Freedom of expression was also curtailed. In 1930s Cyprus, for example, authorities passed strict sedition and press censorship laws.6 In practice, colonial governors had broad authority that the Colonial Office in London was reluctant to circumscribe. When faced with security challenges such as insurgencies, colonial officials used the law to their advantage. Through what legal scholars have termed ‘lawfare’—​using law ‘as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective’—​colonial authorities transformed the law into a weapon.7 Officials developed a series of legal innovations that granted the state broad emergency powers. Drawing on nineteenth-​century laws enacted in India and Ireland, Parliament passed the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act during the First World War, which empowered the government with broad coercive powers to support the war effort. Orders in Council, which are declarations issued by the Monarch with the force of law, also empowered colonial governments, as demonstrated by Matthew Hughes’ chapter in this volume on the Palestine Revolt. The 1939 Emergency Powers (Colonial Defence) Order in Council, for example, permitted broad powers of detention and seizure of property. By the 1950s, colonial emergency laws regularly empowered officials to impose curfews and collective punishments, seize property, forcibly resettle local populations, and detain individuals without trial.8 In this sense, colonial states epitomized what philosophers have called ‘states of exception’, which the government had the power to declare when the usual ‘rules of the game’ did not apply. Emergency laws enacted in Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden differed in some details but included many of the same draconian provisions. Collective punishments, curfews, the forced resettlement of local populations, detention without trial, press censorship, and the application of capital punishment to a wide range of offences were all authorized. In Cyprus, colonial officials often used these powers to deport ‘troublesome’ individuals from the colony, such as the March 1956 deportation of Archbishop Makarios, a key Greek Cypriot leader. In a move that Greek Cypriots found particularly offensive, emergency legislation approved the judicial whipping of juveniles to punish children convicted of insurgency-​ related offences. In Kenya, emergency laws cleared the way for massive detention and forced resettlement programmes. In Aden, laws banned public gatherings of five or more people, 6 Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Diane Kirby and Catharine Colebourne (eds.), Law, History, Colonialism: The Reach of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); and John Reynolds, Empire, Emergency, and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 7 Charles Dunlap, ‘Lawfare Today: A Perspective’, Yale Journal of International Affairs (Winter 2008), 146. 8  Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 11–​22; Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (New York: Penguin, 2022), 15; David French, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 1945–​1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 76–​77; A.W. Brian Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 276–​322.

Sinning Quietly   235 thereby empowering security forces to break up workers’ strikes and protests. In each conflict, ‘these sweeping powers were designed’, as one official noted, ‘to preserve the ultimate authority of the metropolitan power and of the Governor’.9 Security imperatives took precedence over legal rights. Emergency legislation also limited the security forces’ authority, but these restraints proved superficial. Although the security forces’ use of violence was restricted to the minimum amount necessary to achieve success, there was no consensus on what this principle of ‘minimum force’ meant in practice. It was up to individual soldiers and commanders to determine the ‘necessary’ degree of violence in each situation. Furthermore, the minimum force concept did not apply in designated free-​fire areas that were a common feature of counter-​insurgency campaigns.10 The minimum force principle therefore was often not very minimal in practice. The security forces’ use of torture further revealed the superficiality of legal restraints. Although officially prohibited, torture was considered vital to the counter-​insurgency effort. In Kenya, officials regularly used torture to break hardcore Mau Mau prisoners. In the so-​ called dilution technique, described by one official as a ‘kind of rape’, guards forcibly stripped detainees naked, shaved their heads, and beat them if they resisted.11 Beatings continued until the detainee confessed to having taken a Mau Mau oath. In Cyprus and Aden, torture supported the intelligence collection effort. Interrogators identified detainees likely to know about insurgent activities and tortured them to obtain information. Furthermore, senior colonial officials knew that torture was happening. In April 1956, when the Cyprus governor considered clarifying ‘what is and is not permissible in the interrogation of suspects’, his senior advisors unanimously objected. Ambiguity allowed interrogators to extract information by whatever means necessary short of leaving physical evidence of abuse on the detainee’s body—​a clear definition of torture would restrict the interrogators’ freedom of action. The colonial secretary’s only advice was to keep ‘questioning of unusual rigour’ out of public view.12 When prohibited actions such as torture were perceived as beneficial to counter-​insurgency operations, officials usually looked the other way. During emergencies, colonial law served the operational objective of empowering security forces with broad authorities for waging counter-​ insurgency campaigns. This approach created an inherent disadvantage for anyone who challenged the state—​they would have to overcome a legal apparatus constructed to favour and support the state’s security interests. Colonial governments not only defined the ‘rules of the game’—​they could change the rules as they saw fit.

9  The National Archives of the UK (TNA) CO 1037/​ 19 Bennett to Eastwood, 21 December 1956. Quoted in French, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 82. 10  Ibid., 82–​86. 11  Terence Gavaghan, Kenya: White Terror, BBC interview, 17 November 2002, quoted in Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005), 322. 12  TNA FCO 141/​4314 Harding to Chief of Staff, 10 April 1956 and CO 926/​458 Colonial Secretary to Harding, 8 September 1956.

236   Brian Drohan

Human Rights, International Law, and Decolonization Through formal mechanisms and normative claims, developments in international law and human rights after the Second World War challenged the ability of colonial powers to define and change the ‘rules of the game’. The most prominent formal international legal agreements to emerge after the Second World War were the 1949 Geneva Conventions, monitoring of which was spearheaded by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).13 The Conventions established protections for civilians and broadened existing provisions concerning prisoners, the sick, and wounded soldiers. Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions also included a stipulation that belligerents in a ‘non-​international armed conflict’ must treat non-​combatants and prisoners humanely.14 But the codification of international law did not necessarily translate into stronger enforcement measures. The ICRC could not force states to comply with the Geneva Conventions, but instead had to negotiate with belligerents for access to war victims and permission to provide humanitarian assistance.15 Furthermore, colonial powers insisted that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to colonial conflicts. Britain treated these wars as internal security matters and refused to ratify the Conventions until 1957. Rather than debating the finer points of what constituted a ‘non-​international armed conflict’, ICRC delegates emphasized their neutrality and dedication to upholding humanitarian standards such as the humane treatment of prisoners. The ICRC kept its reports confidential, sharing them only with the government concerned. Despite this ‘rule of silence’, ICRC leaders insisted that the organization was not blind to abuse: ICRC President Léopold Boissier defended the organization’s stance, noting that whenever ICRC delegates ‘observe a breach of the Geneva Conventions or acts contrary to morality or law they protest to the authorities and demand that such acts be stopped’.16 The United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) appealed to emerging human rights norms but was also legally unenforceable. The UDHR described fundamental rights and freedoms applicable to all human beings and defined human rights in three broad categories: the integrity of the human being, political and civil liberties, and social and economic rights. Decolonization profoundly affected how the UN dealt with self-​determination and human rights. As former colonies gained independence, the composition of the UN shifted and bodies such as the UN General Assembly grew increasingly anticolonial in orientation. By 1960, this trend led to the UN Declaration on the Granting of 13 

See Boyd Van Dijk’s chapter in this volume. Andreopoulos, ‘The Age of National Liberation Movements’, in Michael Howard, George Andreopoulos, and Mark Shulman (eds.), The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 191–​213; Geoffrey Best, War and Law since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); and Boyd van Dijk, ‘Human Rights in War: On the Entangled Foundations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions’, The American Journal of International Law, 112/​4 (2018), 553–​582. 15  See Raphaëlle Branche’s chapter in this volume. 16  Léopold Boissier, ‘The Silence of the International Committee of the Red Cross’, International Review of the Red Cross (April 1968), 179. 14 George

Sinning Quietly   237 Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which recognized self-​determination as a kind of ‘first right’. Separate from the UN, activist groups such as Amnesty International, established in 1961, mobilized public opinion against human rights abuses and lobbied governments to uphold human rights standards.17 Resting on collective social and cultural understandings of acceptable or expected behaviour, these growing norms contributed to an increasingly inhospitable international environment for imperial powers such as Britain.18 Although international human rights agreements remained largely non-​binding, one exception to this trend was the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). In response to Nazi atrocities and the emerging Cold War, anti-​communist European statesmen and lawyers believed that an enforceable agreement protecting fundamental rights within western Europe would help prevent the re-​emergence of totalitarianism. For Britain’s Labour government, participation in a pan-​European human rights agreement could promote closer European security cooperation. The idea gained additional domestic support from Conservatives who sympathized with staunch anti-​communists in the Labour government. In 1951, Britain signed the ECHR, which became the first binding agreement in European human rights law. Its measures applied only to state signatories, and only these member states could formally complain against the conduct of another member. In 1953, the British government extended the provisions of the ECHR beyond the United Kingdom to forty-​two dependent territories including Cyprus—​a decision that would inadvertently leave Britain legally vulnerable during the Cyprus Emergency.19 British officials were sensitive to legal and human rights criticisms because they thought of themselves as representative of a ‘civilized’ culture that respected law and rights. They also believed that this respect for law and rights entitled Britain to its rightful role as a colonial power and endowed it with a prestigious reputation. Such attitudes justified the use of any means necessary to preserve colonial rule and created incentives to keep human rights abuses secret. Officials knew that repressive practices contradicted Britain’s stated values—​ in 1949, the Colonial Secretary complained that human rights issues could easily become a ‘source of embarrassment’.20 Implicitly, ‘embarrassment’ occurred in public view; mistakes, atrocities, or hypocritical actions that remained hidden could not cause controversy and therefore would not tarnish Britain’s cherished reputation. Legal cases and political debates that publicized state abuses worried officials because, as one scholar notes, such proceedings were ‘always unambiguously newsworthy’.21 For officials who feared public embarrassment, ‘newsworthy’ was dangerous. While the desire to prevent embarrassment kept colonial

17  Tom

Buchanan, ‘Amnesty International in Crisis, 1966–​7’, Twentieth Century British History, 15/​3 (2004), 267–​289. 18  Mark Bradley, ‘“The First Right”: The Carter Administration, Indonesia, and the Transnational Human Rights Politics of the 1970s’, in Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock (eds.), The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 19 Marco Duranti, ‘Curbing Labour’s Totalitarian Temptation: European Human Rights Law and British Postwar Politics’, Humanity 3/​3 (2012), 361–​383; and A.W.B. Simpson, ‘Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Legacy of British Colonialism and the European Convention on Human Rights’, Loyola Law Review, 41/​4 (1996), 629–​7 11. 20  TNA DO 35/​3776, Creech-​Jones Circular 25102/​2/​49, 28 March 1949. 21  Erik Linstrum, ‘Facts About Atrocity: Reporting Colonial Violence in Postwar Britain’, History Workshop Journal 84 (2017), 121.

238   Brian Drohan officials attuned to public criticism, it also meant that they would go to great lengths to hide transgressions.

Kenya Some British officials opposed government attempts to manipulate law and rights to suit counter-​insurgency imperatives. During Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, internal opposition came primarily from lawyers and MPs, but some members of the security forces and rehabilitation programme also challenged colonial counter-​ insurgency methods. These dissenters remained a distinct minority, but their efforts precipitated a pattern of denial, delay, and evasion from senior government officials—​a pattern that would be repeated in other colonies such as Cyprus and Aden. Despite the government’s complicity in using the law as a tool of repression and abuse, these practices engendered internal resistance from some colonial officials as well as a cadre of opposition parliamentarians. John Whyatt, the Kenya attorney-​general up to 1955, worked to preserve a modicum of individual rights protections. He objected when Baring decided to permit district officers to authorize a suspect’s detention because district officers were civil servant administrators, not members of the judiciary. He also tried to preserve suspects’ legal rights and the due process of law. But Whyatt’s efforts to work within the system proved ephemeral. When he was reassigned as Singapore’s chief justice in 1955, his replacement in Kenya, Eric Griffith-​Jones, proved perfectly happy to support the government’s brutal methods.22 Although Whyatt tried to limit the severity of emergency laws, other colonial officers dissented in more open ways. In February 1954, Arthur Young was appointed head of the Kenya police on the advice of a parliamentary delegation that had visited the colony and recommended police reform to reduce allegations of abuse. He brought a wealth of experience to his new post, having previously served as the City of London’s police commissioner. Young embraced his reformist role by seeking to reorganize the police as a professional independent force with less day-​to-​day interference from the colonial government. He also reported numerous abuses to Kenya’s governor, Evelyn Baring. But Baring ignored these reports and resisted Young’s reorganization effort because it would have reduced the administration’s control over police investigations. In December 1954, after less than a year in post, Young resigned in disgust, including with his resignation letter a six-​page report outlining numerous cases of police atrocities, which he described as ‘the main reason for my departure from Kenya’.23 Although prohibited by the Official Secrets Act from publicizing his misgivings, Young’s resignation still aroused scrutiny from Labour MPs.24 22  David

M. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 98. 23  Rhodes House, Mss. Afr. S. 486, Sir Arthur Young Papers, box 5, file 3, 100–​107, letter from Young to Baring, 28 December 1954, quoted in Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 283, n. 26. Elkins’ book was published in Britain as Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005). 24  In a letter to Governor Evelyn Baring, Young detailed his reasons for resigning the post. The fact that he had remained in the position for less than a year raised suspicions among Labour MPs, especially

Sinning Quietly   239 In the UK, the Labour Party opposition initially supported the war effort, but Young’s resignation and the death in police custody of Mau Mau suspect Kamau Kichina led Labour to denounce what they saw as Conservative mismanagement. Labour MPs Fenner Brockway, Leslie Hale, and Barbara Castle proved particularly dogged in their quest for answers. In 1954, Brockway played a leading role in founding the Movement for Colonial Freedom, which promoted self-​determination and the rights of colonial subjects. Regarding Kenya, Brockway denounced settler racism and advocated policies that would alleviate the conflict’s underlying causes. Detention and interrogation abuses, however, remained the most pressing issue. A detainee letter-​writing campaign ensured that torture allegations reached Parliament and forced colonial officials onto the defensive. From 1952–​1955, MPs asked thirty-​one parliamentary questions about the Mau Mau conflict—​twenty-​five concerned detention.25 More allegations emerged in May 1956, when the former colonial rehabilitation officer Eileen Fletcher published a three-​part report in the Quaker magazine Peace News. Fletcher came to Kenya intent on rehabilitating Mau Mau detainees, but departed after witnessing poor living conditions, sexual abuse of female detainees, forced labour within the camps, and other deplorable circumstances. During the summer and fall of 1956, Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-​Boyd weathered multiple barrages of questions from opposition MPs but side-​ stepped the worst allegations by claiming that Fletcher’s charges were based ‘on hearsay, on partisan opinion and personal prejudice’.26 Other dissenters followed, such as Philip Meldon, who served as a temporary Kenya police reserve officer and rehabilitation officer in the detention system. Upon hearing of Meldon’s accusations, Baring informed Lennox-​Boyd that he was ‘collecting all possible further information which may be of use in discrediting him’.27 When unable to prevent public accusations, Baring adopted what would become a standard tactic—​undermining the accuser’s credibility. Press coverage, too, helped officials deflect allegations. Much reporting on the conflict was sensationalist, emphasizing racist notions of African barbarity. The press also often divided politically, with conservative papers lauding military exploits and vilifying left-​leaning outlets’ concern with humanitarian issues. Some organizations such as the BBC stuck rigidly to a strict sense of objectivity that colonial officials could manipulate by creating doubt as to the truth of atrocity allegations. BBC editors and journalists who limited their reports to only news with a clear, verifiable basis implicitly played into the colonial government’s efforts to hide evidence of atrocities.28 Kenya officials were also able to cover up allegations because they provided their own oversight. Beginning in January 1954, Kenya Chief Secretary Richard Turnbull chaired the Chief Secretary’s Complaints Co-​ ordinating Committee, which functioned as a

when the Colonial Office’s press release suggested that the police had not been operating in an independent, impartial manner. See Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 276–​279. 25 Huw

Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-​Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 49; Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 205–​210 and 282–​284. 26  Hansard HC Deb 31 October 1956 vol. 558 c1419. 27  TNA CO 822/​1237/​1 Baring to Colonial Secretary, 31 December 1956; quoted in Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 294. 28  Linstrum, ‘Facts About Atrocity’, 109–​123.

240   Brian Drohan gatekeeper that vetted allegations made against colonial officials.29 The colonial government determined whether to investigate detainee allegations and was responsible for conducting those inquiries. In effect, ‘the very people who were in charge’, Barbara Castle observed, ‘were the ones who sat in judgment’ and their response was ‘to cover up, always cover up’.30 Such obfuscation provided the first layer of defence against scrutiny. Other forms of evasion were more direct, as colonial officials manipulated the movements of and information available to MPs who visited Kenya. Brockway and Hale visited Kenya in 1953, but officials prevented them from meeting with Africans on several occasions. When Castle visited in 1955, intelligence officers monitored her movements as she met with lawyers representing Mau Mau suspects and Arthur Young’s former deputy, who confirmed the veracity of Young’s allegations. When a motion over whether to authorize an independent inquiry into Kenya’s detention system went before Parliament in February 1959, MPs voted along party lines, with the Conservatives defeating the motion. Opposition MPs’ efforts forced the government onto the defensive only to reinforce partisan divisions—​until the Hola camp scandal erupted.31 The March 1959 Hola detention camp scandal was the government’s greatest challenge. Although initial reports suggested that eleven detainees died from drinking contaminated water, the truth soon emerged that they had been beaten to death—​a revelation that caused an outcry in the press and Parliament. In London, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan refused calls for an independent inquiry and launched a limited internal investigation designed to improve future camp administration policies—​not holding officials accountable for the detainees’ deaths.32 Developments in another colony—​Nyasaland (now Malawi)—​ exacerbated the problem. A state of emergency declared in March 1959 led to mass arrests and detention without trial. Parliament initiated an inquiry led by Lord Devlin, who concluded that the colonial government had turned Nyasaland into a ‘police state . . . where it is unwise to express any but the most restrained criticism of government policy’.33 The government now faced public pressure over two simultaneous colonial scandals. The most damaging criticism came from Parliament, but this time not only from the opposition. Right-​wing MP Enoch Powell insisted that the colonies were ‘relics of a bygone system’ characterized by immorality and brutality. Powell’s critique reflected the changing attitude among some Conservatives that Kenya was not worth the trouble and that the colonial administration’s prison-​state was indefensible. Although the Conservatives proved unwilling to authorize an independent inquiry and no official faced charges for what happened, the Hola scandal’s political effects proved, in historian David Anderson’s words, ‘the decisive 29  David

M. Anderson and Juliane Weis, ‘The Prosecution of Rape in Wartime: Evidence from the Mau Mau Rebellion, Kenya 1952–​60’, Law & History Review 36/​2 (2018): 267–​294; see TNA FCO 141/​6567 and 6568 Kenya: Mau Mau unrest—​Complaints Co-​ordinating Committee. 30  Rhodes House, Mss. Brit. Emp. S. 527/​528, End of Empire, Kenya, vol. 1, Barbara Castle, interview, 115. Quoted in Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 213. 31  Fenner Brockway, African Journeys (London: Victor Gollancz, 1955) and Barbara Castle, Fighting All the Way (London: Macmillan, 1993), 263–​273. 32 Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 344–​353 and Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 128–​132. 33  A.W.B. Simpson, ‘The Devlin Commission (1959): Colonialism, Emergencies, and the Rule of Law’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 22 (2002), 17–​52.

Sinning Quietly   241 event in Kenya’s path to independence’. British policy soon shifted towards negotiation with Kenyan nationalists. Independence followed on 1 June 1963.34 Although the loss of support from within the Conservative Party after the Hola scandal ultimately forced the government to change policy, colonial officials successfully negated internal opposition by denying allegations, attacking the credibility of accusers, and manipulating the evidence available to Parliament. The Hola scandal’s effects were limited, too, by the timing—​by 1959 Mau Mau was largely defeated and the main counter-​insurgency emphasis shifted to closing the detention camps. Colonial officials also blunted the impact of local advocacy efforts and international scrutiny, but these issues would have greater impact in Cyprus.

Cyprus In Cyprus, internal opposition and media publicity proved crucial, as they were in Kenya, but the Cyprus experience is particularly noteworthy because of local and international actors who mobilized law and human rights as a form of public pressure. Greek Cypriot lawyers challenged colonial legislation while Greece, as a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, sought to formally sanction Britain for violating the ECHR. These efforts placed Britain under unprecedented international scrutiny. Led by the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (known by its Greek acronym EOKA), the Greek Cypriot insurgency began in April 1955 over the pursuit of enosis (union with Greece). The minority Turkish Cypriot population either supported British rule or sought to partition Cyprus along ethnic lines. The Republic of Turkey supported Turkish Cypriots just as Greek Cypriots received aid from Greece. With the declaration of a state of emergency in November 1955, Cyprus Governor Sir John Harding used emergency legislation to clear ‘obstacles’ to the counter-​insurgency effort. Consequently, security forces operated with extensive powers, interrogators frequently used torture, and the impulse to protect the colonial state above all other priorities undermined other forms of legal checks and balances. Greek Cypriots reacted to repressive legislation and torture by defending EOKA suspects in court and publicizing British brutalities. Greek Cypriots were able to mount an effective legal resistance because, unlike in Kenya, a well-​organized, pro-​enosis local legal elite existed in Cyprus. With no racist ‘colour bar’ preventing Cypriots from pursuing higher education, many middle-​and upper-​class Cypriots earned academic credentials in the UK. By the 1950s, several Cypriot lawyers had been admitted to London’s Inns of Court, and Cyprus had its own professional legal association—​the Cyprus Bar Council, which Greek Cypriots quickly transformed into an advocacy group on behalf of EOKA suspects. The Cyprus Bar Council played a vital role in limiting government power. By lobbying colonial officials, the Bar Council negotiated an August 1956 agreement with the government to ensure that detainees had regular access to legal counsel. In court, Bar Council lawyers did everything they could to obtain a favourable verdict. Sometimes this required innovative 34 Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 326.

242   Brian Drohan legal arguments; on other occasions it involved convincing judges that a defendant’s testimony was provided under duress. These efforts frequently involved vigorous cross-​ examination of government witnesses to such an extent that in one case, a soldier being cross-​examined blurted out in frustration ‘who’s the bloody prisoner here?’35 Lawyers also appealed convictions to the Cyprus Court of Appeals and, when necessary, to the Privy Council in London. By October 1956, Greek Cypriot lawyers had succeeded in reducing sentences or overturning convictions in fifty-​two cases.36 These efforts effectively extended the counter-​insurgency battlefield to the courts. Beyond the courts, a vibrant local press publicized British brutality. Greek-​and Turkish-​ language newspapers largely played to audiences in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey. The English-​language press, however, influenced public opinion on a broader scale by reaching audiences in the United States, at the United Nations, and throughout Britain’s empire. Likewise, many Opposition MPs who clamoured for inquiries in Kenya also backed investigations into Greek Cypriot allegations. The political disaster of the 1956 Suez Crisis compounded these criticisms and led to Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s resignation. In December 1956, with the Conservative government still reeling, twenty-​seven Labour and Liberal MPs increased the pressure by condemning the emergency laws in Cyprus. The turmoil did not subside until spring 1957, when new Prime Minister Harold Macmillan released the deported Archbishop Makarios and began negotiations to end the conflict.37 Greece’s international support for the Greek Cypriot cause also brought human rights pressure to bear on Britain. Greece first tried to debate the issue of Cyprus’ self-​ determination at the UN in 1954 but failed to have it inscribed on the UN General Assembly agenda. Subsequent efforts failed to produce a UN call for self-​determination but succeeded in obtaining a weaker resolution calling on all parties to negotiate a peaceful settlement. Having made little progress at the UN, Greece tried another option—​the ECHR.38 Greece’s applications to the European Commission of Human Rights, the Strasbourg-​ based body that adjudicated the European Convention on Human Rights, threatened Britain’s counter-​insurgency campaign in new ways. The Greek application of May 1956 marked the first time that an ECHR member had charged another with violating the ECHR. Britain responded by challenging the scope and admissibility of the application, which led Greece to limit the scope to determining whether an emergency that ‘threatened the life of the nation’ existed and whether that situation justified the emergency legislation enacted in Cyprus. The European Commission then appointed a sub-​commission to oversee the case.39 The situation was unprecedented. Britain now had to publicly defend its actions under a legally binding international agreement. Greece’s second application, filed in July 1957, concerned allegations of torture in forty-​ nine cases. Greece originally included these charges in the first application but removed

35 

TNA FCO 141/​4588 Lockley to Acting Attorney General, 4 July 1956. French, Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-​Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–​1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 100. 37 Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights, 37–​41. 38  Suha Bӧlükbaşı, ‘The Cyprus Dispute and the United Nations: Peaceful Non-​Settlement between 1954 and 1996’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 30/​3 (1998), 413–​414 and Robert Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 290–​293. 39 Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 929–​941. 36  David

Sinning Quietly   243 them in response to British complaints over the first application’s broad scope. Whereas the first application addressed the general circumstances of the emergency, the second application concerned specific violations of Article 3 of the ECHR, which prohibited torture and ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’. Supporting evidence came from the Cyprus Bar Council, which formed human rights committees to identify allegations and collect testimony. Ultimately, this second application posed a greater danger to the Cyprus government because it threatened to expose the inner workings of the interrogation apparatus. In some ways, British responses to legal challenges and human rights advocacy over Cyprus conformed to patterns seen in Kenya, but Greece’s ECHR applications forced British officials to adapt to new pressures. In response to the Cyprus Bar Council’s courtroom advocacy, colonial officials characteristically changed the ‘rules of the game’. In November 1956, Harding enacted a public officers’ protection regulation that prohibited an individual from filing charges against a government official without the attorney-​general’s permission. In effect, this law turned the attorney-​general into a barrier shielding Special Branch interrogators—​who were most frequently implicated in torture allegations—​from prosecution.40 When atrocities could not be denied, such as in the 1956 court martial of two army officers who lied about having beaten two detainees, colonial officials treated the situation as an isolated case of two ‘bad apples’ who went too far.41 Preventing negative press was as important in Cyprus as in Kenya. When Times of Cyprus editor Charles Foley continued his frequent attacks on the Cyprus government, officials prosecuted him for violating censorship laws.42 In at least one case, officials resorted to bribery. Cyprus Administrative Secretary A.F.J. Reddaway wrote to influential journalist Nancy Crawshaw suggesting that she would receive compensation in the form of ‘whatever you considered appropriate’ if she would encourage her journalist colleagues to publish more positive stories.43 Others, such as Director of Operations Major-​General Sir Kenneth Darling, manipulated the press, informing the War Office that ‘I am deliberately cultivating the Press and using them as a vehicle (although they do not know this)’.44 Likewise, in the face of a robust and sophisticated EOKA propaganda campaign, colonial officials seized on false or exaggerated claims, amplified them, and portrayed them as representative of all EOKA allegations. Government counter-​propaganda included publication of a white paper that labelled the allegations ‘a deliberate and organized conspiracy’ and the establishment of a Special Investigation Group (SIG) to document and deny false allegations while also bolstering the security forces’ flagging morale, which suffered under the barrage of atrocity allegations.45 Such counter-​propaganda efforts demonstrated the government’s commitment to shielding the security forces from scrutiny and fostered doubt about the veracity of EOKA allegations.

40 

TNA FCO 141/​4320 Governor, Cyprus to Colonial Office, 30 January 1957.

41 French, Fighting EOKA, 204–​205. 42  Jonathan

Stubbs, ‘Making Headlines in a State of Emergency: The Case of the Times of Cyprus, 1955–​1960’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45/​1 (2017), 70–​92. 43  Nancy Crawshaw Papers 1/​8 Reddaway to Crawshaw, 4 March 1957. 44  Darling Papers 5, Darling to Stockwell, 5 November 1958. 45  TNA CO 926/​880 ‘Allegations of Brutality’ white paper, June 1957 and Huw Bennett, ‘“Words are Cheaper than Bullets”: Britain’s Psychological Warfare in the Middle East, 1945–​60’, Intelligence and National Security 34/​7 (2019), 934–​937.

244   Brian Drohan By documenting atrocity allegations, SIG functioned as a local manifestation of Britain’s broader international strategy for withstanding Greece’s human rights onslaught. Foreign Office legal adviser Sir Francis Vallat explained this strategy as ‘gentle co-​operation’ combined with ‘the gradual whittling away of the sting’ of the Greek allegations.46 This approach involved slowly giving way on issues that the Greek government found objectionable while continuing to challenge the scope, relevance, and validity of the allegations. The strategy paid off from the beginning by convincing Greece to separate specific torture allegations from the broader questions at the heart of Greece’s first application. This move marked Britain’s first ‘whittle’ against the ‘sting’ of Greece’s applications. During a series of hearings from late 1956 to autumn 1957, Britain challenged the admissibility of Greece’s application, asserted that EOKA violence justified the imposition of emergency laws, and defended the decision to deport Makarios while giving ground on legislation deemed less necessary for the counter-​insurgency effort, such as juvenile whipping and collective punishment laws, which were revoked in December 1956. In April 1957, Harding limited the death penalty in firearms cases solely to individuals intending to cause injury. By slowly repealing some laws, Britain bought time to make progress in the military campaign while demonstrating its moderation and willingness to compromise. Throughout the proceedings, the sub-​commission urged both sides to negotiate an amicable settlement, but in September 1957, with no settlement forthcoming, the sub-​commission decided to hold an on-​ground investigation in Cyprus. After conferring with senior advisors, the Colonial Secretary and Cabinet agreed that refusing to permit the investigation was not an option—​ legally, it would constitute a breach of the ECHR and would imply that Britain was guilty. In January 1958, the sub-​commission arrived in Cyprus. Although the investigation heightened officials’ anxieties, the sub-​commission’s findings favoured Britain. After completing the investigation, the sub-​commission delivered its findings to the European Commission of Human Rights, which issued a report in September 1958. The report included three major findings. First, in a vote of seven in favour and four against, the Commission members determined that they would not pronounce judgement on emergency laws that the Cyprus government had already eliminated, such as collective punishment, whipping, and some deportation orders. Next, the report addressed whether the Commission had the authority—​‘competence’, in legal language—​to rule on whether a public emergency ‘threatening the life of the nation’ existed. The Commission unanimously agreed that it was indeed competent to judge the case. Finally, the Commission determined that an emergency did exist in Cyprus and the emergency laws still in effect were justified.47 On the surface the Commission’s findings seemed like a British victory, but the implications were more complex. The first finding demonstrated that Britain’s ‘whittling away the sting’ approach proved effective. The Commission did not comment on laws that the Cyprus government had already revoked, so the repeal of some of the most controversial laws prior to the investigation helped Britain deflect one aspect of the Greek allegations. The third finding seemed to vindicate the continuation of emergency laws in Cyprus. But the second finding was most significant in the long term. The judgement that an international human rights body had the authority to rule on whether a state could justifiably impose a

46 

TNA CO 936/​297 Vallat to McPetrie, 21 December 1956.

47 Simpson, Human Rights and the End of Empire, 929–​1018.

Sinning Quietly   245 state of emergency and restrict citizens’ human rights marked an important step toward holding human rights violators legally accountable. Despite Britain’s apparent victory, the prospect of dealing with another investigation under the second application fostered a siege mentality within the Cyprus government. When the Foreign Office sent a representative to gather evidence in support of the British case, several security officials initially refused to be interviewed out of ‘the fear that they may individually be brought before an international tribunal’.48 British lawyers were equally anxious when the sub-​commission appointed to review the second Greek application accepted thirteen of the forty-​nine torture cases for further investigation. Legal adviser Vallat lamented that ‘we are now faced with the prospect of being called upon to fight the thirteen cases and to produce witnesses’.49 Formal proceedings involving witnesses and oral arguments likely would have invited more intense public scrutiny than Greece’s first application. But Britain did not have to deal with a second sub-​commission investigation in Cyprus or produce witnesses to contest the second Greek application; negotiations between the British, Greek, and Turkish governments produced a political settlement that ended the war. As part of the settlement, Britain and Greece agreed to jointly request that the European Commission terminate the second Greek application before arriving at a judgement—​a provision that suggests British officials were anxious about the outcome of the proceedings. The strategy of gradually drawing out the ECHR legal process and limiting the ‘sting’ of the Greek applications served Britain well by delaying scrutiny over torture allegations and creating time to negotiate a political settlement. Local advocacy and international pressure on the Cyprus government exceeded anything British officials experienced in Kenya. Even so, British officials won the judgement in Greece’s first ECHR application, succeeded in manipulating the law to their advantage, and side-​stepped the question of torture. But the fact that Britain had to answer the charges demonstrated how international agreements forced a degree of accountability on states that they had not had to deal with previously.

Aden During the 1963–​1967 Aden conflict, the ICRC and Amnesty International forced the British government to order an inquiry into the security forces’ detention and interrogation practices. Officials in Aden responded according to the usual British pattern of denial and cooperative manipulation. Although the inquiry led to reform, colonial officials undermined key oversight mechanisms in an effort to sideline the ICRC. Meanwhile, a crisis within the organization ensured that Amnesty International no longer posed a threat to counter-​insurgency efforts. Aden High Commissioner Sir Kennedy Trevaskis’s 1963 emergency declaration targeted left-​wing anticolonial nationalist groups such as the People’s Socialist Party (PSP) and the Aden Trades Union Congress (ATUC). The crackdown soon drew criticism. As opposition

48  49 

TNA FO 371/​136400 Sinclair to Higham, 19 March 1958. TNA LO 2/​503 Vallat to Hylton-​Foster, 22 January 1959.

246   Brian Drohan MPs questioned whether Trevaskis’s detention orders had violated detainees’ civil liberties, ATUC complained that detainees were being tortured. Both the British Red Cross Society and Peter Benenson, cofounder of Amnesty International, lobbied the Colonial Office to permit ICRC inspections of Aden prisons. Predictably, Trevaskis opposed ICRC intervention, but his subsequent actions drew continued ICRC attention. After rejecting the ICRC’s request, Trevaskis launched his own internal inquiry led by the chief justice, which quickly determined that torture was not occurring. Meanwhile, Britain’s 1964 scorched-​earth campaign in the Radfan region created thousands of refugees and heightened ICRC interest in providing humanitarian assistance for refugees as well as detainees. Many detainees, the Aden High Commission knew, were held in sub-​standard prisons. By December 1964, the ICRC had received additional reports of torture and poor prison conditions. Forcing the issue, ICRC delegate André Rochat gained permission to enter Aden on the pretence of a private fundraising trip, which British officials could not prohibit without raising suspicion. During this ostensible fundraising visit, Rochat broadened the agenda by discussing refugee needs and prison conditions. Although British officials grumbled about the visit, they had already succeeded in delaying ICRC involvement for nearly nine months since the ICRC’s first inspection request. In early 1965, British views shifted as Aden officials spied an opportunity to manipulate the ICRC presence to their advantage. Continued obstruction of ICRC efforts would imply that torture allegations were true, whereas allowing ICRC inspections would draw positive press coverage. Furthermore, the ICRC’s rule of silence meant that its reports would not be made public. These considerations motivated one official’s February 1965 recommendation to the new high commissioner, Sir Richard Turnbull, that the ICRC request should be ‘turned aside rather than turned down’.50 Meanwhile, the Radfan campaign had ended, and a newly constructed modern detention facility had recently opened. The end of the Radfan campaign meant that conditions there were beginning to return to normal, while the new prison would solve the problem of poor prison conditions, thus assuaging officials’ concerns over the two issues that ICRC delegates were most likely to criticize. The timing was fortunate for the Aden High Commission as well because Labour’s victory in the October 1964 UK election meant that lobbyists like Benenson, who was well-​connected within Labour circles, would receive a more sympathetic hearing from the new government. In November 1965, the colonial secretary instructed Turnbull to formally invite an ICRC delegation.51 The government needed to counter torture allegations—​ICRC inspections provided the answer. While ICRC inspections burnished Britain’s public image, they quickly caused problems in private. Rochat conducted two inspections during 1965 but was only permitted to visit the facilities and speak with British officials. He was prohibited from interviewing detainees. By controlling who he spoke with, colonial authorities restricted the information available to the ICRC. In March 1966, the High Commission allowed Rochat to interview detainees in the presence of several British officials. Fifteen detainees complained of torture during interrogation. Rochat believed about half of the complaints were credible. He later interviewed five more detainees and found additional evidence of abuse. Rochat informed ICRC headquarters that during interrogation, about 25% of detainees were ‘slapped around’ in what

50  51 

India Office Records, R/​20/​D/​62 McCarthy to Turnbull, 18 February 1965. TNA CO 1055/​261 Greenwood to Turnbull, 25 November 1965.

Sinning Quietly   247 he characterized as ‘minor’ abuses. But around 5% of detainees endured what Rochat considered ‘physical torture’ such as being stripped naked, punched, and kicked. As in Cyprus, torture served intelligence purposes: ‘the use of torture is applied to those who are likely to know a lot’, Rochat reported.52 During May 1966, Rochat found evidence of British attempts to conceal torture, noting that ‘many precautions are taken so that detainees cannot in any way prove that they have been maltreated’. As evidence mounted, Rochat concluded that ‘this problem is serious’.53 Rochat’s findings mirrored those of the Aden High Commission’s legal adviser, Hugh Hickling. Through his work on the Review Tribunal, which periodically reviewed detention cases and recommended to Turnbull whether a prisoner should remain detained or be released, Hickling found evidence of torture. In October 1965, he recommended that Turnbull order an inquiry. Word spread to London, which prompted three visits from the parliamentary undersecretary of state responsible for colonial matters. A subsequent police investigation into the Aden interrogation centre, where prisoners were questioned but not detained on a long-​term basis, found that torture allegations centred on a group of three army interrogators. In March 1966, Hickling sent the evidence to the director of Army Legal Services, who ruled that the allegations were unsubstantiated. Conveniently, all three men were reassigned from Aden by June 1966. None were punished. Between Turnbull’s evasions and the army’s denials, Hickling’s internal efforts stalled.54 Meanwhile, the ICRC tried to work with British authorities to stop torture. Rochat informed High Commission officials of what he found but said that he would delay submitting a negative report until he visited the interrogation centre, suggesting that if he visited later, he would hopefully ‘find nothing to worry him’. Turnbull saw this for what it was—​a ‘hint against recurrence’, as one official called it—​but did not intervene in the interrogation process. The internal police investigation and Hickling’s reports would stay private, as would the ICRC’s confidential reports.55 To Turnbull and most British officials, the truth of torture allegations mattered less than whether they became public knowledge. As the ICRC tried to coax British officials into cooperating, Amnesty International threatened to increase public pressure on the government. During the spring and summer of 1966, as Rochat visited prisons and tried to build rapport with Aden officials, Amnesty International representatives visited the colonial secretary and Foreign Office to demand more transparency over torture allegations. Amnesty insisted that the government either publish the ICRC reports or order an independent inquiry, only to be told that the ICRC’s presence was sufficient to ensure compliance with humanitarian standards and Britain had nothing to hide. Robert Swann, Amnesty’s general secretary, responded by informing the Foreign Office that Amnesty would conduct its own investigation by sending a fact-​finding mission to Aden. In addition to these private overtures, several Labour MPs who supported Amnesty launched a public campaign in Parliament, calling on the government to either support Amnesty’s investigation or place the ICRC reports in the Parliamentary Library for MPs to examine. 52 

ICRC B AG 225-​001-​004 Rochat Report No. 1, 22 March 1966. ICRC B AG 202-​001-​001 Rochat Report No. 2, 28 May 1966. 54  Hugh Hickling Papers 2, 114–​126 and CO 1055/​276 report by Lord Beswick, 30 November 1965. 55 Major-​ General Sir John Willoughby Papers 7.2, McCarthy to Turnbull, 24 March 1966 and McCarthy to Willoughby, 14 April 1966. 53 

248   Brian Drohan Criticism from backbench MPs offered a small taste of the public pressure Amnesty International was willing to exert. Headed by Selahuddin Rastgeldi, a medical doctor and Swedish citizen of Kurdish descent, Amnesty’s fact-​finding mission found abundant evidence that interrogators tortured prisoners. Rastgeldi’s report was forwarded to the British government with the implicit threat that Amnesty would make it public if Britain did nothing.56 Officials in Aden labelled the report ‘slanderous’ and responded by invoking the idea of military necessity—​interrogations were essential to counter-​insurgency operations and should not be subject to additional restraints.57 On 29 September, Foreign Secretary George Brown met with Swann and Benenson, who reiterated their call for a government inquiry. Brown remained noncommittal. Frustrated by this dilatoriness, Swann and Benenson spurred the government into action by announcing their intent to publish Rastgeldi’s findings. The Foreign Office found out one day later and immediately issued a press release declaring that the foreign secretary had ordered an inquiry. But Amnesty kept the pressure up by issuing press releases, holding a press conference that criticized the government’s ‘procrastination and vacillation’, condemning the government during a BBC television interview, and publicly releasing Rastgeldi’s findings. As the New York Times reported, ‘Britain has been embarrassed by the actions of a Swedish doctor’.58 Colonial officials responded by trying to regain control of the public narrative. In the press, officials tried to undermine Rastgeldi’s credibility. The Foreign Office declared that ‘none of the allegations made by Dr. Rastgeldi appears to be corroborated’. Off the record, officials intimated that Rastgeldi’s Kurdish background meant he ‘naturally’ supported the Arab cause.59 British officials also restricted the scope of the inquiry. The foreign secretary named Sir Roderic Bowen, a barrister and former Liberal MP, to lead the inquiry but limited his terms of reference to only suggesting improvements to interrogation and detention practices, not investigating past abuses. This decision would minimize the chance of public embarrassment and prevent any findings that could implicate colonial officials in the abuses. Completed in November 1966, the Bowen inquiry led to reforms that, initially, seemed to end the use of torture. Bowen commended the role of the Review Tribunal and the Committee of Inspection, which was responsible for monitoring detainee conditions at prisons. But Bowen criticized the lengthy periods of time that detainees were held without trial and the fact that the Committee of Inspection only had authority over prisons, not the interrogation centre where most torture allegations originated. Bowen saved his severest denunciations for Turnbull’s failure to investigate torture allegations ‘expeditiously and adequately’ and provided several recommendations for how to ‘enable the investigation of allegations to take place with greater promptitude and thoroughness’. London ordered 56 TNA PREM 13/​ 1294 Memorandum on the Torture of Civil Servants, n.d., and Managing Committee, Graduates’ Congress to Rastgeldi, 2 August 1966. 57 TNA PREM 13/​ 1294 Turnbull to Foreign Office, 25 September 1966; Turnbull to Deputy Undersecretary of State Allen, Foreign Office, 28 September 1966; TNA DEFE 11/​505 Le Fanu to Hull, 29 September 1966; and Cooper to Private Secretary to the Defence Secretary, 29 September 1966. 58  TNA WO 32/​ 20987 Baker memorandum on Aden, October 1966; Amnesty International Press Release, 17 October 1966; ‘Amnesty Discloses Aden Torture Allegations’, The Times, 19 October 1966; ‘Torture Charged to British in Aden’, New York Times, 20 October 1966; and ‘Amnesty Publish Text of Rastgeldi Allegations’, The Times, 20 December 1966. 59  ‘Allegations of Torture “Not Corroborated”’, The Guardian, 19 October 1966; Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights (Thrupp: Sutton Publishing, 2002), 107.

Sinning Quietly   249 implementation of the reforms, but the problem was that implementation remained in Turnbull’s hands, including responsibility for determining whether allegations should be investigated.60 Consequently, the reforms proved a hollow victory as the Aden High Commission quickly manipulated the situation to its advantage. With the public spotlight on Aden, Turnbull cooperated fully with ICRC inspections. In January 1967, Turnbull permitted ICRC delegate Rochat to visit the previously off-​limits interrogation centre. He also designated a High Commission official to liaise with Rochat, document complaints, and forward the case files to the Deputy High Commissioner, who would then decide how to respond to the allegations. Superficially, these actions seemed to embrace the need for reform and transparency, but they also embedded British officials in every level of the ICRC’s inspection process. British officials were able to monitor ICRC actions and quickly document their side of the story to nullify torture allegations. Meanwhile, the ICRC continued inspections as the glare of publicity faded. In February 1967, Rochat noted with optimism that ‘the situation is normalising little by little’.61 But his positivity did not last. In May, Rochat reported that ‘incontestably, the scandalous practices of some interrogators are starting over again’.62 As external scrutiny diminished, torture resumed. Neither the ICRC nor Amnesty International was able to prevent torture from recurring. The rule of silence kept the ICRC from doing much besides lobbying British officials privately. Officials in Aden countered ICRC complaints by insisting that that there was ‘clear evidence of bias on Rochat’s part’ and claiming that detainees faked their injuries to dupe Rochat into seeing evidence of torture where none existed. Amnesty International was also unable to affect the situation further due to a crisis within the organization. A combination of financial problems and disagreements within the leadership led Amnesty to simply declare victory for pressuring the government into ordering the Bowen inquiry, turning its attention to internal matters. Although anti-​torture activism would play a preeminent role in Amnesty’s future human rights campaigns, the organization’s involvement in Aden came to an end.63 Ultimately, the same patterns of evasion that had served colonial officials well in Kenya and Cyprus helped them stifle human rights activism in Aden.

Conclusion In Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden, British attempts to evade scrutiny followed a common pattern of denial, undermining accusers, and manipulating information while superficially appearing cooperative. In each conflict, Britain generally succeeded in deflecting allegations and preserving counter-​insurgency practices such as harsh emergency legislation and the illicit use of torture. This common pattern should not come as a surprise, considering how many of the same officials were involved in implementing these practices across multiple campaigns. Turnbull, for instance, served as Chief Secretary in Kenya before becoming 60 

TNA DEFE 13/​529 Bowen Report. ICRC B AG 225-​001-​002 Gaillard to Rochat, 13 January 1967. 62  ICRC B AG 225-​001-​005 Rochat Report No. 7, April–​May 1967. 63  Buchanan, ‘Amnesty International in Crisis’, 267–​289. 61 

250   Brian Drohan Aden High Commissioner. Major-​General Sir John Willoughby commanded a battalion in Cyprus before taking over as the senior army commander in Aden. Sir John Prendergast, a senior intelligence officer, led interrogation efforts in Kenya, Cyprus, and Aden. Britain’s brutal methods and the playbook for covering them up circulated from colony to colony, as key individuals did.64 Despite British success in evading legal claims and human rights activism during colonial campaigns, appeals to law and human rights grew increasingly influential and extensive. During the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ that began in 1969, British rule in Northern Ireland faced an avalanche of public pressure from a wide range of actors, including civil rights groups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and People’s Democracy; local activists like the Peace People; internal resistance from elected politicians in Britain and Northern Ireland; non-​governmental organizations including Amnesty International; and appeals to international law under the European Convention on Human Rights. Grassroots campaigns also coalesced around other issues: African American civil rights, the post-​ Vietnam War reframing of human rights in the United States to support anti-​communism abroad, the growing global opposition to apartheid in South Africa, as well as anti-​torture activism in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Greece, and elsewhere.65 Although British officials managed to deflect scrutiny and cover up abuses in Britain’s fading empire, human rights norms expanded nonetheless. Britain’s ability to hide abuses preserved a mythologized vision of British counter-​ insurgency as a ‘humane’ approach that rested on winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local population—​a myth that was fundamentally at odds with the historical record.66 This myth shaped how later generations of counter-​insurgents applied ‘lessons’ from British colonial campaigns during post-​9/​11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Only since the mid-​2000s, through oral histories, the release of newly discovered government documents, and court cases concerning the Kenya and Cyprus conflicts, have scholars and lawyers succeeded in dismantling the myths of British counter-​insurgency.67 While armed struggle against colonialism was a common form of resistance, appeals to law and human rights shaped the conduct of British counter-​insurgency campaigns in unexpected ways. Dissenting officials, insurgents, anticolonial lawyers, humanitarian groups, and human rights activists were motivated by different reasons, but their efforts expanded the counter-​insurgency battlefield beyond the traditional realm of bombs and bullets. Today, no 64  Caroline

Elkins, ‘Archives, Intelligence and Secrecy: The Cold War and the End of the British Empire’, in Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake (eds.), Decolonization and the Cold War: Negotiating Independence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 257–​284. 65  Brice Dickson, The European Convention on Human Rights and the Conflict in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Anna Konieczna and Rob Skinner (eds.), A Global History of Anti-​Apartheid: ‘Forward to Freedom’ in South Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Patrick William Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 66 Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), xi–​xii. 67  Ian Cobain, ‘Mau Mau Torture Case: Kenyans Win Ruling Against UK’, The Guardian, 5 October 2012; Ian Cobain, ‘Foreign Office Hoarding 1m Historic Files in Secret Archive’, The Guardian, 18 October 2013; and Samuel Osbourne, ‘UK Pays £1m Damages to Cyprus “Victims of Rape and Torture by British Colonial Forces”’, The Independent, 24 January 2019.

Sinning Quietly   251 conflict is entirely free from the scrutiny of international law and human rights mechanisms, even though many combatants continue to evade accountability for violating the laws of war and principles of humanity.

Select Bibliography Buchanan, Tom, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945–​ 1977 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Cobain, Ian, Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture (London: Portobello Books, 2013). Drohan, Brian, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). French, David, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency 1945–​1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Hadjiathanasiou, Maria, Propaganda and the Cyprus Revolt: Rebellion, Counter-​Insurgency and the Media, 1955–​59 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2020). Jensen, Steven L.B, The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Klose, Fabian, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Linstrum, Erik, Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). Moses, A. Dirk, Marco Duranti, and Roland Burke (eds.), Decolonization, Self-​Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Newbery, Samantha, Interrogation, Intelligence and Security: Controversial British Techniques (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). Simpson, A.W. Brian, Human Rights and the End of Empire: Britain and the Genesis of the European Convention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Chapter 13

Intern me nt, Im prisonme nt, Interro gati on, a nd Resista nc e i n L ow -​I ntensit y C onfl i c t Carceral Warfare and Republican Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland 1968–​c.1988 Tony Craig Insurgencies are in many ways conflicts determined by disagreement over the legitimacy of legal authority in a particular space. The mass arrest and long-​term imprisonment of those who reject a government’s legitimacy (and who instead violently attack it) understandably typify state responses to insurgencies since the Second World War and, in particular, those that can be considered (even loosely) imperial counter-​insurgencies. The ubiquity of detention, internment, interrogation, and imprisonment in these counter-​ insurgency situations is mirrored in the forms of group resistance enacted by captured insurgents and their supporters once detained. Although these are similar to forms of organization and resistance found among criminal gangs in prisons, the way in which insurgent prisoners represent themselves as part of a wider normative political struggle separates these detainees, at least subjectively, from organized criminal groups.1 One can see this in the ways in which detainees’ resistance both to interrogation and incarceration are justified, as well as in their determination to highlight the wider legitimacy of their political cause.

1 George

W. Knox, Gregg Etter, and Carter F. Smith, Gangs and Organized Crime (New York: Routledge, 2019), 141–​142.

Carceral Warfare   253 Prisoners of this type, who represent themselves not as innocent of their charges but, rather, as the politically organized consequence of an illegitimate state, are not easily explained by literatures focused on criminal carceral culture. For those who have studied political imprisonment, the field of prison studies, along with the concepts of Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben, ‘are little use in illuminating the specific experience of the political prisoner’.2 Far from prison being a site where inmates are isolated from society or where attempts are made by the institution to rehabilitate them, political prisoners have consistently demonstrated an ability not only to organize resistance, but to broadcast resistance externally and even to promote it through commemoration and remembering far into the future.3 It is, of course, logical—​and most would consider it legitimate—​not only for a state to defend itself against violent insurgents in an emergency, but also to neutralize, capture, or kill those that take up violence against them. Therefore, the detention of insurgent suspects has been a key feature of virtually all counter-​insurgency campaigns pursued by the British government and others since the South African War of the early 1900s. In Northern Ireland specifically, intelligence on IRA membership was used to intern without trial a critical number of republicans in 1939 and again in 1956. On both occasions, the Northern Ireland governments enacted their own Special Powers Act to do so, while also working in parallel with similar emergency legislation enacted in the Republic of Ireland. Together, these measures denied the insurgents a safe haven from which to maintain their organization. In Apartheid South Africa, a similarly targeted swoop on militants had, by the mid 1960s, successfully ‘decapitated’ the leadership of potentially violent insurgent groups.4 Imprisonment, even without trial, in these previous instances brought significant security benefits to the authorities involved, helping to isolate extremists and disrupt their operations. But the practice of political imprisonment is a double-​edged sword that has also been effectively used, from the Suffragettes to Al Qaeda, to draw attention to the discriminatory practices of the state. While prison sentences can temporarily isolate an individual, and even handicap an insurgent group, rarely do they extinguish totally the prisoners’ ability to sustain their campaign in a subsidiary manner. Nor does imprisonment deal with the underlying grievances that might have motivated the resort to violence in the first instance. Whether it is Gandhi or de Valera, Nkrumah or Ho Chi Minh, the imprisonment of public figures for political purposes can in fact have exactly the opposite effect of what is intended by both mutating oppositionists’ methods and strengthening public support for their behaviour, especially in the absence of reform during their incarceration. In carceral warfare prisoners can, of course, continue to resist either in groups or individually. Resistance may be violent, disobedient, or articulated through self-​expression,

2  Padraic

Kenney, Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 5. Also see Daniel Branch, ‘Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya, c.1930–​ 1952: Escaping the Carceral Archipelago’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38/​2 (2005), 242, and Jocelyn Alexander, ‘Nationalism and Self-​government in Rhodesian Detention: Gonakudzingwa, 1964–​1974’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37/​3 (September 2011), 551. 3  Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–​1940 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001), 1–​3. 4 Kevin O’Brien, ‘A Blunted Spear: The Failure of the African National Congress/​ South African Communist Party Revolutionary War Strategy 1961–​1990’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 14/​2 (2003), 35.

254   Tony Craig educational engagement, and academic achievement. In most cases, with the exception of escape, such resistance within prison requires a means of dissemination to the public outside the prison walls to elicit immediate results in encouraging the wider insurgency, although, with patience, it can have a long-​term effect. Conscious of this, state counter-​insurgents respond to public iterations of carceral resistance with their own defensive justifications of prisoner treatment, which can include reviews of procedures and inquiries into maltreatment and prison conditions. What emerges are conflicts, both rhetorical and physical, that can be as important as those that are occurring outside the prison walls. Carceral warfare thus confronts us with a paradox, marking an important component in attempts to delay, stall, and fragment an insurgency, as well as the means by which a conflict can be sustained almost indefinitely.

The State and Imprisonment in the Northern Ireland Troubles Northern Ireland itself was established in a counter-​insurgency and witnessed several resurgences of intercommunal violence between its majority Protestant (pro-​ British unionist) and minority Catholic (Irish nationalist) populations throughout its history.5 Aligned with the minority and opposed to the state, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was an insurgent group that consistently challenged and was in turn challenged by the state throughout its history. This familiarity with periodic violence meant that, from the state’s formation, Northern Ireland’s institutions and statutes incorporated structures familiar to counter-​insurgency situations as a matter of course. From its armed police force and exclusively Protestant police militia (the B-​Specials), to its draconian Special Powers Act (renewed annually since 1921), it can be argued that Northern Ireland, a province where armed crime was remarkably rare, was a seasoned counter-​insurgency state.6 That said, numerous factors came to a head in the late 1960s, bringing together Irish republicans, left-​wing activists, and moderate nationalist groups under a campaign for equality and civil rights that sought an end to discrimination against the minority population. Seeing the makings of a traditional IRA uprising, the Northern Ireland government responded from 1966 in a manner that appeared proportionate and legitimate to many of their supporters but callous and one-​sided to wider audiences in Britain, the Republic of Ireland, and around the world. The Westminster government looked on in dismay, anxious not to be drawn into the disorder, until, in August 1969, following three days and nights of street fighting between the police and nationalists, the British Army was called in to re-​establish order and provide security under the common law principle of aid to the civil power. The presence of the British Army was justification enough for the newly formed Provisional IRA (PIRA) to begin a guerrilla conflict targeting what they saw as the forces 5 

The Irish War of Independence, 1919–​1921. IRA-​led insurgencies had unsuccessfully fizzled out in 1921, 1939, 1940–​1942, and 1956–​1962. 6 Successive

Carceral Warfare   255 of imperialism, framing the conflict from its inception in terms of anti-​colonial struggle. For Britain, the situation was significantly more complicated, as Northern Ireland was a part of the United Kingdom rather than a colony or dependency, and British troops were (with some caveats) ostensibly providing aid to the civil power,7 rather than fighting a war.8 The conflict escalated from 1970, peaking in intensity in 1972 before gradually declining in severity and plateauing in the 1980s and 1990s. In total, the Troubles cost 3,532 lives. Between 1969 and 1998, around 20,000 Irish Republican paramilitaries were detained without trial or convicted and imprisoned in Northern Ireland. This represents around two thirds of the total number of paramilitaries (the remainder being from loyalist paramilitary groups) imprisoned during ‘The Troubles’. The imprisoned republicans included members of the PIRA, the Official IRA, and, later, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). The numbers involved were large in relation to Northern Ireland’s population, strikingly so in light of the province’s low level of criminality prior to the conflict.9 The British state therefore faced an acute shortage of locally available prison space and needed to build new high-​ security facilities (or adapt old ones) when violence erupted. In Northern Ireland, the period most readily identifiable with classic military counter-​ insurgency began with the introduction of internment without trial in August 1971, when internees were accommodated largely in communal camps. This regime ended in 1976 and was slowly replaced by government attempts to ‘normalize’ the conflict in order to deny republicans the ability to represent their experience as comparable either to that of PoWs in the Second World War or of more recent instances of late colonial internment. This normalization process was intensely resisted by the prisoners who faced losing the privileges their earlier ‘special category’ status had afforded them. What followed was an unanticipated five-​year prison war between 1976 and 1981 in which republican prisoners sought to regain their special category status. The conflict infamously culminated in the deaths of ten republican hunger strikers and twenty prison wardens. After the 1981 hunger strikes, an unspoken compromise emerged whereby paramilitary prisoners remained unofficially combatants and were therefore accorded special privileges, although officially they remained terrorist criminals and were excluded from public sight. This compromise, couched by state authorities in the pragmatic language of managerialism, arguably suited all sides in the conflict as the prison war was increasingly seen to have created an additional forum for conflict over which neither the state nor the actual PIRA leadership had full control.10 As a compromise solution, it nonetheless established a precedent for subsequent political engagement and similar pre-​ceasefire understandings, which were being surreptitiously explored between the state and the IRA outside the prisons along similar lines by the early 1990s.11 7  Discussions in London long before deployment meant that the British Army would always be under British rather than Northern Ireland government control. 8  Tony Craig, ‘From Countersubversion to Counter-​insurgency—​Comparing MI5’s Role in British Guiana, Aden and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Crisis’, Journal of Intelligence History, 14/​1 (2015), 51. 9 The prison population grew 400% in the first five years of the conflict. Michelle Butler, ‘Prisoners and Prison Life’, in Deirdre Healy et al. (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 341. 10 Kieran McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland: Resistance, Management and Release (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 264. 11 For example the ‘Derry Experiment’, discussed in Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London: Norton, 2002), 350–​374.

256   Tony Craig

Republican Prisoner Resistance in the Northern Ireland Troubles Although British troops were not deployed in Northern Ireland in response to either an active or envisioned Irish republican insurgency, their presence created the opportunity for Irish republicans to bait Crown security forces into a counter-​insurgency response. Aware from this earlier experience that wider public opposition to British rule in Northern Ireland could be built among the Catholic minority if a heavy-​handed security force response was implemented, IRA violence was designed to induce this outcome. IRA commanders expected a wave of new recruits as a result.12 Equally anticipated was the state’s incarceration of republicans in its attempt to suppress the growing insurgency.13 In expectation of such suppression, the wider republican movement planned to exploit any maltreatment of republican prisoners for political gain. This was first illustrated when news emerged that thirteen out of the hundreds of those interned without trial from August 1971 had been subjected to special interrogation under the ‘Five Techniques’ of hooding, prolonged standing with arms outstretched against a wall, subjection to white noise, sleep deprivation, and a bread and water diet.14 An international media firestorm of accusation and counter-​accusation ensued, which resulted in a 1978 judgment from the European Court of Human Rights that the techniques constituted ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ in contravention of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.15 However, while the PIRA’s strategy may have successfully predicted the initial state response to the conflict, over time the British authorities remained insistent that they were the neutral arbiters of a sectarian civil war for which they sought a fair political settlement. Such claims of fairness were belied, however, by instances in which the governing authorities overlooked security force transgressions of the norms and standards of simple law enforcement. Most recently, a 2021 Crown Court ruling judged that in the case of controversial shootings in Northern Ireland, ‘until late 1973, an understanding was in place between the RUC and the Army whereby the RUC did not arrest and question, or even take witness statements from, soldiers involved in shootings . . . This appalling practice was designed, at least in part, to protect soldiers from being prosecuted and in very large measure it succeeded’.16 In the treatment of those detained and interrogated, the republican movement, alongside international human rights organizations, continued to find evidence that challenged the British narrative but which was either ignored or shelved by the state. 12 

Ibid., 96. Irish republican rebellions followed by state suppression occurred sporadically, though were most notable in 1798, 1803, 1848, 1867, 1916, 1919, 1939, and 1956. 14 Forty-​ three hours of wall standing was reported in one case. Martin McCleery, Operation Demetrius and its Aftermath (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 63. 15  Anthony Craig, Crisis of Confidence: Anglo Irish relations in the early Troubles 1966–​74 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 135–​136. 16 Belfast Crown Court, ‘THE QUEEN v SOLDIER A and SOLDIER C: RULING ON ADMISSIBILITY OF EVIDENCE’, 30 April 2021, 3, https://​www.judi​ciar​yni.uk/​sites/​judici​ary/​files/​ decisi​ons/​The%20Qu​een%20v%20Sold​ier%20A%20and%20Sold​ier%20C.pdf. 13 

Carceral Warfare   257 Even after the abandonment of the ‘five techniques’ (or ‘Deep Interrogation’), internment without trial of paramilitary suspects was solely applied to Irish republicans until 1973. Indeed, by January 1972 around 900 Irish republican paramilitary suspects were interned in Northern Ireland. Internment under this scheme also had a political elasticity, the perceived advantages of which were deemed crucial by those in power in Northern Ireland between 1971 and internment’s eventual abandonment in 1975. Therefore, while internment’s overt objective was to end disorder by detaining the insurgents until their collective momentum was lost, the British sustained the policy until 1976 because they considered that the capture and release of suspects could be used to increase or reduce political pressure on various actors to their benefit. Political factors, rather than the quality of evidence, were therefore critical in determining whether or not an internee would be released.17 The influence of these political factors was not lost on the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD), which, as early as March 1972, admitted that a quarter of those held were not considered ‘hard core’ paramilitaries and that these internees (all being imprisoned without prospect of a trial) ‘could be progressively released if political considerations made this desirable and provided that the political initiative was not followed by a major setback’.18 If the British state was using detention without trial for political ends, so the republican movement exploited internment as an obvious injustice as widely as it could. An anti-​ internment campaign heightened support for republican prisoners—​and their cause—​ with rent and rates (local property tax) strikes, civil rights marches, songs, pamphlets, and posters in support of those imprisoned for ‘being Irish’19 in British ‘concentration camps’.20 The diverse means employed to propagandize a resistance struggle echoed similar practices within a number of late twentieth-​century social movements and insurgencies. Inspired by examples from prominent contemporary struggles such as the US Civil Rights movement and the ANC’s international campaign against apartheid, stories of the injustice of internment were widely disseminated to exemplify the deeper injustice of British rule in Ireland.21 Sally Merry has written that ‘Law was of course the handmaiden of colonialism, facilitating conquest and control, but it also retained a discourse of resistance in its emphasis on rights’.22 However bad internment was, this irony of the Troubles in Northern Ireland is equally 17  Tony Craig and Martin McCleery, ‘Political Bargaining Chips: Republican Internees in Northern Ireland 1972–​1975’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 31/​3 (2020), 655, and R.J. Spjut, ‘Internment and Detention without Trial in Northern Ireland 1971–​1975: Ministerial Policy and Practice’, The Modern Law Review, 49/​6 (1986), 731. 18  R.A. Curtis (MOD) to P.L Gregson (PM’s Office), ‘Northern Ireland: Internment’, 6 March 1972, DEFE/​24/​1215, NA. 19  ‘Not for them a judge or jury, Or indeed a crime at all, Being Irish means they’re guilty, So we’re guilty one and all’. Lyrics from Barleycorn, ‘Men behind the Wire’ (1971). This anti-​internment song spent six weeks at number one in the Irish pop charts from early January 1972 before being replaced by Paul McCartney’s ‘Give Ireland Back to the Irish’. Craig, Crisis of Confidence, 106. 20  CAIN, Examples of Anti-​Internment Posters, https://​cain.uls​ter.ac.uk/​ima​ges/​post​ers/​int​ernm​ent/​ index.html. 21 Numerous contemporary examples of published contemporary material are conserved by the University of Ulster’s Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) project, https://​cain.uls​ter.ac.uk/​eve​ nts/​int​ern/​sou​rce.htm. Including Seamus O Tuathail, They Came in the Morning: Internment, Monday August 09, 1971: Torture and Brutality in the North (Dublin: Sinn Féin (Official), 1972). 22  Sally Engle Merry, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Law’, in A. Sarat (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 575.

258   Tony Craig evident in numerous colonial contexts in which independence movements used loopholes and conducted their own ‘lawfare’ within the legal system to make visible the other freedoms they were being denied.23 Aspects of this global PR message developing in the 1970s represented a radical departure for many Irish Republicans, as well as for their largest support base in the United States, where the tone of the PIRA’s manifesto (a radical socialist republic), although in keeping with other anti-​colonial movements of the era, clashed with the beliefs of their, often conservative, benefactors among the Irish diaspora. Though not aligned with the Provisional IRA, Bernadette Devlin, a fellow republican socialist, found during her 1969 tour of the United States that ‘my people’ did not equate to the established norm of Irish republican support there. Devlin’s belief in an international (and anti-​colonial) progressivist programme (one similar to Sinn Féin’s policies) was opposed by many Catholic Irish Americans.24 For Devlin, ‘the Irish Americans who knew about English misrule and the Famine and [who] support the civil rights movement at home . . . looked and sounded to me like Orangemen [loyalists]. They said exactly the same things about blacks that the loyalists said about us at home’.25 Devlin eventually had her 1969 award of a key to the city of New York presented to a local group of Black Panthers.26 The traditional, conservative political base of Irish Republican support in the United States did not therefore respond en masse to the new leftist anti-​colonial political platform deployed from 1971, and arguably even Eamon de Valera’s efforts a half century earlier were more effective in raising money.27 However, a narrative emphasizing the injustice of internment without trial and containing graphic descriptions of torture would still register useful effect on this kind of audience. The five techniques were only a relatively small, officially sanctioned part of a prisoner-​ handling system employed in Northern Ireland that also contained informal cruelty and abuse similar in form, if not in severity, to that seen elsewhere in the post-​war British Empire. Crucial to this was the process by which a sense of dislocation was instilled in those picked up for internment that went far beyond that which would be experienced in normal police interrogation, and which occurred whether detainees were put through the ‘five techniques’ or not. Those detained often recount how they were first removed violently from their home to a local holding centre where they were put through a ‘harshing’ process (aggressive questioning often accompanied by beatings). Some detainees were next subjected to forced 23 Cyprus offers several comparisons with Northern Ireland in this regard. Brian Drohan, ‘ “A Litigious Island”: Law, Rights and Counter Insurgency during the Cyprus Emergency’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 99. 24  Provisional Sinn Féin, later known simply as Sinn Féin, was the political wing of the Provisional IRA established in 1970. 25 Gregory M. Maney, ‘Transnational Mobilization and Civil Rights in Northern Ireland’, Social Problems, 47/​2 (May, 2000), 169. 26 Matthew J. O’Brien, ‘Irish America, Race, and Bernadette Devlin’s 1969 American Tour’, New Hibernia Review, 14/​2 (2010), 97–​98. 27  Woodford and Smith estimate a US contribution to PIRA finances over the decade 1971–​1981 of around $3m. De Valera raised $5.1m in 1919–​1921. Isabel Woodford and M.L.R. Smith, ‘The Political Economy of the Provos: Inside the Finances of the Provisional IRA—​A Revision’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 41/​3 (2018), 213–​240, and Joe Humphreys, ‘Millionaire Helped Finance War of Independence’, The Irish Times, 23 May 2013. https://​www.iri​shti​mes.com/​cult​ure/​herit​age/​mill​iona​ire-​hel​ped-​fina​nce-​ war-​of-​indep​ende​nce-​1.1391​596.

Carceral Warfare   259 exercise that included an obstacle course, before a minority were transferred by helicopter to a different location, where interrogation proper began. In subsequent documents defending their actions, the MoD admitted to using the ‘five techniques’ in Kenya, Cyprus, Malaya, British Cameroon, Swaziland, Aden, and British Guiana.28 The Joint Services Interrogation Wing (JSIW) had honed this approach during these late colonial operations and was seemingly proud of its effectiveness and the ability of JSIW personnel to transfer the practice between theatres.29 In every case in which the ‘psychological attack’ of the five techniques was used, it was employed in conjunction with unofficial harshing techniques and regimes of abuse that varied only in the specifics of their violence and barbarity.30 In Aden, the Fort Morbut interrogation centre was investigated in 1965 after allegations emerged of both episodic and systematic physical abuse of prisoners.31 Six prisoners died during the Cyprus Emergency, where the torture of prisoners also occurred.32 In Kenya, thousands of suspects were not only interned, but subjected to severe physical (and often sexual) assault alongside extreme acts of inhuman and degrading treatment integral to a system of brutality known as the ‘dilution technique’.33 Many died as a result. In Northern Ireland, harshing included rough handling both during arrest and initial detention. The methods employed were in some respects like those used in Aden and Kenya (indicative of either previous experience or of those involved having more senior approval for their actions). For example, several Northern Ireland detainees recalled being blindfolded in a helicopter and flown to an alleged location at sea, before being pushed out, only to fall a few feet and land near to where they had taken off.34 Accounts of officially sanctioned formal interrogation methods were made more shocking because they were conflated with these unofficial methods of harshing and ill-​treatment, which were largely overlooked by the state. The abandonment of the five techniques did not signify the end of these more extensive, though unofficial methods of detainee maltreatment, which remained features of the regime of arrest and interrogation in Northern Ireland, as well as a component of how prisoner experience was communicated more widely.35

28 Samantha

Newbery, ‘Intelligence and Controversial British Interrogation Techniques: The Northern Ireland Case, 1971–​2’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, 20 (2009), 106. 29 Interrogations needed cooperation from local loyalists, normally local Police Special Branch officers who were often in short supply: Simon Robbins, ‘The British Counter-​Insurgency in Cyprus’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012), 720–​743 and Newbery, ‘Intelligence’, 107–​110. Though supply of local interrogators was not a problem in Northern Ireland, JSIW did advise caution. Tony Craig, ‘ “You Will Be Responsible to the GOC”. Stovepiping and the Problem of Divergent Intelligence Gathering Networks in Northern Ireland, 1969–​1975’, Intelligence and National Security, 33/​2 (2018), 211–​226, and Brigadier General-​Staff (Intelligence) JMH Lewis to Director of Intelligence, 6 August 1971, DEFE 24/​ 744, NA. 30  As described by the JIC in October 1971, Eunan O’Halpin, ‘ “A Poor Thing but Our Own”: The Joint Intelligence Committee and Ireland, 1965–​72’, Intelligence and National Security, 23/​5 (2008), 671. 31  Sophia Dingli and Caroline Kennedy, ‘The Aden Pivot? British Counter-​Insurgency after Aden’, Civil Wars, 16/​1 (2014), 92–​97. 32  Robbins, ‘Cyprus’, 731. 33  Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. (London: Pimlico, 2005), 319–​332. 34  John McGuffin, Internment (Tralee: Anvil Books, 1973), 115–​132. 35  Examples into the 1980s are documented in Peter Taylor, Beating the Terrorists? Interrogation in Omagh, Gough and Castlereagh (London: Penguin, 1980).

260   Tony Craig The hypocrisy apparent when such methods were compared with the British government’s self-​representation as a neutral arbiter in Northern Ireland was ridiculed by Irish republicans at the time. Truth recovery mechanisms have since revealed not only ‘a record of evasion, denial and dubious practice’, but ‘a maze managing what truth can and cannot be told’36 in regard to multiple detainee/​prisoner cases. Exposing this contradiction does not imply that their republican opponents somehow treated their enemies any more fairly, and it should also be noted that PIRA interrogation methods operated with little or no restraint. Those subjected to periods in PIRA custody were shown neither mercy nor remorse. Still, the duplicity of Britain’s approach to war in Ireland simply meant that Britain’s public reputation had further to fall.

The Prison War 1: Prison Protests and Interrogation in the Later 1970s Continuing violence in the later 1970s led to a reappraisal of British policy regarding terrorism offences in Northern Ireland as, more broadly, the government edged towards the application of so-​called ‘normalization’ policies designed to end the overt counter-​ insurgency approach and permit reductions in the British Army deployment. Although it did not originate there, the 1977 strategy document ‘The Way Ahead for Security Policy’ described a process of normalization that included a ‘criminalization’ element, which treated terrorism more precisely as a law and order issue whilst conspicuously avoiding allusions to imperial counter-​insurgencies.37 ‘The Way Ahead’ was backed by Secretary of State Roy Mason; police primacy would be upheld, and the judiciary strengthened to prosecute terrorism offences under criminal law, allowing internment to be ended, along with the ‘special category status’ previously granted to all detained paramilitaries.38 However, it was still recognized that particular security dilemmas applied in Northern Ireland and, whilst convictions were now required, extended periods of remand (pre-​trial detention) could be used alongside juryless ‘Diplock’ courts whose conviction rates were conveniently high.39 With imprisonment now a legal rather than a political matter, it was hoped the issue of political prisoners and their detainee status would fade from public consciousness. Unsurprisingly, the republican movement did not see these ‘normalization’ policies in the same light. It condemned the judicial changes as an ‘Ulsterization’ programme (rhetorically linking themselves to the term ‘Vietnamization’40); an inglorious attempt to turn their war for national liberation into a sectarian conflict for self-​interested domestic political 36  Mark

McGovern, ‘Inquiring into Collusion? Collusion, the State and the Management of Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland’, State Crime Journal, 2/​1 (2013), 24. 37  ‘Annex B: The Way Ahead for Security Policy’, 9 September 1977, CJ 4/​1656, NA. 38  Thomas Leahy, The Intelligence War Against the IRA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 123. 39  Brice Dickson, ‘The Administration of Justice in Northern Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 75/​297 (Spring, 1986), 61–​62. 40  Peter R. Neumann, ‘The Myth of Ulsterization in British Security Policy in Northern Ireland’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 26/​5 (2003), 365–​377.

Carceral Warfare   261 reasons.41 For this, the PIRA had its own solution: a readiness to fight a long war, which, like Vietnam, they hoped would end in victory after thirty years or more of armed struggle.42 The withdrawal of Special Category Status, along with ending internment—​a regime that had fundamentally acknowledged paramilitary prisoners as prisoners of war—​provoked fierce opposition among the prisoners themselves. This culminated in newly convicted men beginning ‘blanket protests’ (by refusing prison clothing and work). Now denied trial by jury, republican prisoners argued that they remained imprisoned under false pretences, with their confinement a result of their participation in a legitimate war. As such, they were entitled to the rights accruing to captured military personnel under international law, which could not be unilaterally withdrawn.43 Ironically, the strategy of being ‘on the blanket’ made the prisoners virtually invisible to the outside world; by protesting they sacrificed remission time, forfeited letter entitlements, and even lost their single mandatory weekly visit. The protest escalated in 1978 when prisoners, having alleged regular beatings and arbitrary harassment from prison wardens, refused to cooperate with the slopping-​out routine and began a ‘dirty protest’ in which ‘prisoners smeared their own excreta onto the walls of their cells’, partly to avoid assault and other abuse at the hands of wardens, and partly as a means to produce a new narrative likely to garner wider support for their claims to political status.44 That said, when compared with the later hunger strikes, it is doubtful that the 300 or more prisoners ‘on the blanket’ in 1978 achieved either of these goals.45 The republican dirty protest finds little corollary more widely where inhuman conditions were rather the consequence of neglect than the result of prisoner protests. The ANC in South Africa reached the opposite conclusion to the PIRA in Northern Ireland when it came to prison protest. Nelson Mandela’s attitude, for example, was summarized by Kenney: ‘The high civilisational barrier that divided regime from prisoners in apartheid South Africa afforded political prisoners a chance not only to differentiate themselves but also to best both the guards and the higher authorities’.46 ANC methods were at times even adopted by their guards. Warders, on one occasion, boycotted their own canteen to secure themselves better food and improved living conditions.47 More than this, political prisoners on Robben Island manipulated the racism of their guards. The prisoners’ self-​assurance and their capacity to work as an organized political unit within the most secure prison of its kind overseen by a government that dubbed them depraved terrorists made a mockery of the apartheid regime.48

41 David McKittrick and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles, Penguin, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 2001), 123. 42  Liam Clarke, Broadening the Battlefield: The H-​Blocks and the Rise of Sinn Féin (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan 1987), 56. 43  Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (London: Pan, 2003), 190. 44  Thomas Hennessey, Hunger Strike: Margaret Thatcher’s Battle with the IRA 1980–​1981 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2014), 20. 45  Ibid., 20–​22. 46  Padraic Kenney, Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 84. 47  Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (London: Abacus, 1995), 502. 48 Kenney, Dance in Chains, 84.

262   Tony Craig As discussed earlier, although in Northern Ireland formally approved enhanced interrogation methods were officially abandoned after the introduction of internment, unofficial methods of coercive interrogation continued. These became particularly prominent later in the 1970s. The Diplock court system meant that convictions could be assured with questionable evidence. Often, a signed confession and the testimony of a police officer were deemed sufficient. Therefore, ‘the most effective way of securing a conviction was to extract confessions from the accused’.49 Centralized interrogation centres at Castlereagh, Omagh, and Gough pioneered this more systematic approach to obtaining convictions, but evidence mounted of increased physical violence being used on suspects questioned there. Charges against republican suspects increased by 121% in 1976, but so, too, did complaints of assault during interview (up 113%). In total, the new system yielded charges against more than 2,000 suspects (virtually all of whom were placed on remand for around a year) between 1976 and 1979.50 Mason wanted results, and these arrests were crucial to attaining the high attrition rate that ‘The Way Ahead’ strategy document had required.51 Therefore, Mason, along with others in government, turned a blind eye to unsanctioned methods of gaining convictions so long as the security situation improved.52 Such was the case at least until an independent report from Amnesty International cornered the government into launching a Committee of Inquiry, whose findings led to an unexpected international backlash.53 As a result, the police were compelled to fit CCTV cameras in interrogation rooms, leading to sharp declines in confessions and convictions.54 This was not the first time that allegations by third party NGOs had stimulated policy change. Brian Drohan points out that it was in Northern Ireland that pressure from human rights activists became so powerful a feature of the conflict that it could not be evaded.55 And, whereas formerly it has been argued that an ‘Aden pivot’ existed with regard to Britain’s sensitivity to complaints about wrong-​doing in the 1960s,56 the mistreatment of Mau Mau suspects in Kenya in the 1950s, much like the Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar) Massacre of 1919 or reports of the maltreatment of Boer civilians in concentration camps, triggered public scandal (and government volte-​face) in earlier decades. Drohan argues that, rather than abandon brutal methods, British officials had instead simply ‘devised dynamic responses to shield these increasingly unpopular practices from public view’ through a process he describes as ‘co-​operative manipulation’.57 In Northern Ireland, for instance, while the five techniques were abandoned in 1971, harsh treatment off the books remained commonplace 49 

McKittrick and McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles, 124.

50 Taylor, Beating the Terrorists, 80–​81, and 339. 51 Leahy, The Intelligence War, 123. 52 Deaths

from Republican paramilitaries saw a 46% reduction when measured against the previous three years total deaths in the conflict. Sutton, Index of Deaths and Dermot P.J. Walsh, ‘Arrest and Interrogation: Northern Ireland 1981’, Journal of Law and Society, 9/​1 (Summer, 1982), 37–​38. 53  ‘The US Congress placed an embargo on 6,000 Rutger Magnum pistols due to be sent to the RUC’, in Taylor, Beating the Terrorists, 329. 54 H.G. Bennett QC, Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Police Interrogation Procedures in Northern Ireland CMND 7497 (London: HMSO, 1979) Recommendation #36, https://​cain.uls​ter.ac.uk/​ hmso/​benn​ett.htm#2. 55  Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 5. 56  Dingli and Kennedy, ‘The Aden Pivot’, 87. 57 Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights, 4.

Carceral Warfare   263 during arrest, transport, and interrogation. It was only through the use of new technology that interrogation processes were brought under tighter scrutiny, and the so-​called Castlereagh conveyor belt was shut down.58 CCTV cameras perhaps afforded both police interrogators and suspects a greater sense of security. Certainly, complaints of mistreatment in custody declined 90% in 1980, and the prosecution of terrorist offences became more rigorous, with greater emphasis placed on physical and forensic evidence.59

The Prison War 2: The Hunger Strikes Stories of the mistreatment of suspects during police questioning, as well as the maltreatment of those who protested their conditions once imprisoned, merged to form a new narrative of state brutality, which, by 1980, a newly reorganized Provisional Republican Movement was ready to exploit. The escalating prison conflict was assisted by the PIRA (and their re-​ emerging political wing Sinn Féin), which began to integrate the scant communications coming from those on the blanket protest into a new information campaign. On 10 October 1980, the 300 protesting ‘Blanket Men’ inside the newly built H-​Blocks of HMP Maze issued a statement through their Public Relations Officer. It ‘inaugurated one of the most dramatic and terrible episodes in modern Irish history’ by committing the prisoners to a mass hunger strike scheduled to begin on 27 October.60 The hunger strikers’ five demands called for the reinstatement of rights to their own clothing, the right to opt out of prison work, free association, rights to visits, parcels, and letters, and the restoration of remission lost because of the protest. Seven hunger strikers took part from October 1980, calling off their initial strike after fifty-​three days when the government proposed a settlement that seemed to meet most of their demands. However, when relatives bringing clothes were turned away from the prison and ‘prison-​issued civilian style clothes’ were instead delivered to the affected H-​Block prison wings, the protests restarted. On 1 March 1981, using a relay system that replaced those who died with new strikers, a second hunger strike began. Over the following seven months, ten men would die in an excruciating drama played out not only in the prisons, but across Northern Ireland and beyond. The strike only ended when families began to intervene, granting permission for prison staff to feed their unconscious sons and husbands and thereby forcing the strike to end.61 Though the hunger strikers’ sacrifice provided a compelling narrative, the strike itself would not have registered such an impact had its unfolding tragedy not been disseminated by the action of thousands outside the Maze prison. The strike captivated the world’s press after its leader, Bobby Sands, won a UK parliamentary by-​election in April 1981, and Pope John Paul II sent his private secretary to persuade the prisoners to back down. Even US President Ronald Reagan expressed his deep concern over the matter. The 100,000 mourners who attended Sands’ funeral following his death on 5 May heralded a summer of rioting and 58 Moloney, Secret History, 149.

59 Taylor, Beating the Terrorists, 337–​338. 60 English, Armed Struggle, 192.

61 Kenney, Dance in Chains, 229.

264   Tony Craig disorder in Northern Ireland that was paralleled by global protests outside British embassies and consulates from San Francisco to Tehran, and which included the burning in effigy of Margaret Thatcher on New York’s Fifth Avenue.62 The imagery of Christ-​like Blanket Men, sinister-​looking H-​Blocks, and martyred young hunger strikers added a graphic language not seen since the anti-​internment campaign in the 1970s. Murals depicting the prisoners began to supersede the earlier urban graffiti as a public messaging tool of an increasingly open and organized Sinn Féin, their powerful symbolism resonating within and beyond their communities of origin. TV journalists, prohibited by law from interviewing Sinn Féin representatives before the cameras, often filed their reports standing in front of these murals. By doing so, they ‘simultaneously spread the republican ideology and message that the British government had tried to contain’.63 The hunger strikers, like those interned from 1971, were immortalized in literature and poetry too; importantly, Sands was a prolific writer, and his works were smuggled from prison in ‘comms’ written on cigarette papers and wrapped in scraps of cling film. These writings included political slogans, stories, and popular songs that gave greater intellectual sustenance to protestors than the images alone could provide.64 Hunger Strike activism inspired supporters in the US, Europe, and further afield, providing Sinn Féin with a wider international platform than the PIRA’s terrorism afforded it and one that enabled a successful move beyond the Irish diaspora. Streets named after Sands appeared in several French cities and most notably in Tehran, on the street that housed Britain’s embassy. Though international support for the hunger strikes was far from guaranteed, progressive political activists from the Suffragettes to Gandhi had used fasts and hunger strikes as tools of their wider political campaigns and with greater frequency than Irish Republicans. Later justified as being part of the Irish precolonial brehon law tradition of shaming the accused,65 the reality was that, although this form of protest had featured in the earlier Irish revolutionary era, Irish Republican prisoners turned periodically to the hunger strike from 1972 onwards because it worked in individual cases.66 However, the British government’s counter-​argument, that these men were convicted terrorists, helped contain pro-​H-​Block appeal largely to left-​wing activists transnationally, despite the use of hunger strikes by Irish Republicans having narrower success in changing prisoner regimes.67 In Apartheid South 62 

New York Times, 3 May 1981, 4. Goalwin, ‘The Art of War: Instability, Insecurity, and Ideological Imagery in Northern Ireland’s Political Murals, 1979–​ 1998’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 26/​3 (2013), 199. 64  Notably Sands’ slogan, ‘Our revenge will be the laughter of our children’, and his song ‘Back Home in Derry’ (sung to the tune of Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk hit ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’. See https://​www.bobb​ysan​dstr​ust.com/​, where many of his writings are published. 65  George Sweeney, ‘Irish Hunger Strikes and the Cult of Self-​ Sacrifice’ Journal of Contemporary History, 28/​3 (1993), 421–​422. 66  Special Category Status had been afforded to internees and convicted prisoners alike as a result of the 1972 Hunger Strike, and in 1974 Dolours and Marian Price, following their conviction for the part they played in the Old Bailey bomb, went on hunger strike for the right to serve their sentences in Northern Ireland. The Price Sisters were force fed in HMP Brixton for 167 days of their 208-​day hunger strike before being transferred to Northern Ireland. 67  Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher expressed the logic of her view in various reiterations of the following lines: ‘There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence. We will not compromise on this. 63  Gregory

Carceral Warfare   265 Africa, Nelson Mandela noted in contrast the limited effect hunger strikes by members of uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) had on the state, adding that ‘I think they secretly enjoyed watching us go hungry’.68 Even so, in Mandela’s case solidarity outweighed his reservations, and ‘he participated in hunger strikes when outvoted by his comrades’.69 The irony of the 1981 republican hunger strike is that success rested on the potential of the strikers’ deaths to motivate sympathetic feelings among diverse constituencies beyond their own supporters. They could only win if they motivated others to pressurize the government into granting their demands. Hunger striking, therefore, is a tool that can only be effective in an open society—​a contention with which the hunger strikers would have taken issue, but of which they nevertheless took advantage. Occurring almost concurrently with the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, in South Africa the Free Mandela campaign began to emerge (Mandela being selected by Oliver Tambo70) to represent all ANC prisoners and to give the world a human face—​like Sands—​ on which to focus. The campaign replaced the direct action of previous anti-​apartheid campaigns and, through the image of Mandela, successfully mobilized a more mainstream anti-​apartheid cause than the ANC had previously managed to create. Posters, pamphlets, music, and film all played a part in this campaign, culminating in the Nelson Mandela: Freedom at 70 concert at London’s Wembley Stadium in 1988. During the campaign, Mandela was showered with international honours, and buildings, meeting halls, and streets were named in his honour, echoing the albeit narrower international reaction to Bobby Sands.71

The War on Wardens There is little doubt that violence was meted out to prisoners as a punishment for non-​ conformity, but statistics, memorials, and the occasional memoir demonstrate that prison staff remained highly vulnerable to retaliatory attack from paramilitaries outside Northern Ireland’s prisons.72 Between 1976 and 1980, twenty prison staff were murdered, including two governors.73 Though no figures list the total number of casualties or number of attacks on prison staff, the nature of these attacks, typically using ambushes, booby traps, and There will be no political status’. Speech in Belfast, 5 March 1981, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://​ www.marga​rett​hatc​her.org/​docum​ent/​104​589 68 Mandela, Long Walk, 503.

69 Kenney, Dance in Chains, 208.

70 Mandela, Long Walk, 602–​603. 71  Tal

Zalmanovich, ‘How Resistance Led to London’s Selous Street becoming Mandela Street’, The Conversation, 2 August 2018, https://​thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​how-​res​ista​nce-​led-​to-​lond​ons-​sel​ous-​str​ eet-​becom​ing-​mand​ela-​str​eet-​100​770, and Forward to Freedom: The British Anti-​Apartheid Movement Archives, ‘Free Mandela Campaign’, https://​www.aama​rchi​ves.org/​campai​gns/​free-​mand​ela.html, accessed 14 December 2022. 72 Tom Murtagh, The Maze Prison: A Hidden Story of Chaos, Anarchy and Politics (Hampshire: Waterside Press, 2018), 22–​23. 73  Department of Justice (NI), NI Prison Service Roll of Honour, https://​www.just​ice-​ni.gov.uk/​artic​ les/​roll-​hon​our, accessed 14 December 2022; and Hennessey, Hunger Strike, 460.

266   Tony Craig letter bombs, meant that wives and families were often killed or seriously injured as well. Conscious of how this might appear, attacks on prison officers were suspended during the period of the hunger strikes.74 But, with ten officers killed in 1979 alone, the war on wardens left officers psychologically exposed, with some seeking retribution and others vulnerable to intimidation. The strain took its toll. Anecdotal accounts suggest high levels of mental illness and suicide among prison staff in Northern Ireland.75 Retaliatory action against prison staff is similarly difficult to uncover elsewhere, and only two recorded injuries to off-​ duty prison warders were recorded in the ANC’s submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of MK actions.76 It seems likely nonetheless that only in Northern Ireland did more prison staff than prisoners die, and the PIRA’s unique campaign of intimidatory murder (of which prison officers and governors were just one part) bears greater similarity to the Sicilian Mafia’s assassination of judges in the early 1990s than it does to anti-​imperial insurgencies elsewhere.77

An Uneasy Peace? In Northern Ireland, just days after the hunger strikes ended in October 1981, the British government granted many of the hunger strikers’ demands. They were allowed to wear their own clothing, 50% of their remission was reinstated, free association within each block of the prison was permitted, and the definition of prison work was to be reviewed. There was no victor in the hunger strike: prisoners and prison officers alike were left exhausted physically and mentally by the protests ongoing since 1976. Both sides paused to pick themselves up. Republican prisoners soon devised new ways to exploit the system from within, continuing their struggle by less costly means against a dejected prison management that could afford more generous concessions now the world’s attention had moved on. McEvoy has described the prison authorities’ revised attitude as a form of managerialism. Realizing that confrontation was ‘disruptive, expensive and inefficient’, it was deemed easier to compromise and resolve prisoners’ demands rather than go into conflict over them.78 The final issue of segregation was resolved by the IRA’s manipulation of the prison authorities’ new managerial approach: through a combination of intimidation, rumour, and violence, they persuaded loyalists to seek segregation for their own protection.79 The redefinition of what constituted prison work meant that the prison authorities’ desire to rehabilitate paramilitaries fell into abeyance. This opened up opportunities both for cooperative action among paramilitary groups (a policy blamed for the PIRA’s 1983 mass 74  Chris Ryder, Inside the Maze: The Untold Story of the Northern Ireland Prison Service, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 2001), 304. 75  Ibid., 192, 302–​303. 76  On 29 June 1988, an attack on a café in Pretoria’s Poynton Building frequented by SADF and prisons staff injured two prisons staff. Further submissions and responses by the ANC for the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, Appendix 4, MK List of Operations, 12 May 1997, http://​www.just​ice.gov.za/​ trc/​hrvtr​ans/​sub​mit/​anc2.htm#Appen​dix%204. 77  Nick Carter, Modern Italy in Historical Perspective (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 242. 78 McEvoy, Paramilitary Imprisonment, 252. 79 Clarke, Broadening the Battlefield, 202.

Carceral Warfare   267 breakout of thirty-​eight prisoners) as well as for individual introspection, often aided by the Open University’s distance learning courses.80 Using prison time to develop skills that will prove beneficial to the ongoing conflict once released is not unusual. Time spent in prison shaped the reputations and outlooks of many who led opposition to British rule, from Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera to Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. Zinoman writes that Vietnamese nationalists were even successful in their ‘subversive transmutation of the Indochinese prison system from a colonial institution, founded to quell political dissent and maintain law and order into a site that nurtured the growth of communism, nationalism and anticolonial resistance’.81 In a practical sense, too, leaders often emerged from incarceration claiming improved strategic understanding. Nelson Mandela, already a lawyer, famously devoured over fifty correspondence courses from four different universities, transforming the received narrative of South Africa’s prisoner experience and creating in the process the almost mythological image of ‘Robben Island University’. This experience is not unique. In Rhodesia’s Gonakudzingwa prison, ZAPU detainees organized their own activities and chose education in literacy, history, and song as a means of creating not better war fighters, but a miniature version of the society they hoped to achieve. Detainees there banned foul language, frowned upon professional fouls in the sports they played, and organized their own court system to resolve disputes.82 Whereas during the internment period the IRA had held classes in history, politics, and the Irish language, their self-​defined curriculum in the 1970s had also included practical lectures on military tactics and arms, along with regular drill. The ending of the prison protests and the ‘normalization’ of conditions meant that Irish republicans, along with loyalist prisoners, both men and women, in the 1980s were ironically more at liberty as individuals to select their own subjects to study. Though prison authorities might have regarded any form of educational attainment as rehabilitative, the popularity of secondary-​level qualifications, followed by the BA Social Science, switched the perception of these courses as being not prison-​led education, but prisoner-​led. Graduates of these programmes (interviewed for an Open University survey) regularly went on to further study once released. And, although a significant number built careers in politics, others worked in the arts, journalism, community work, education, and academia. Security issues restricted the curriculum that could be taught (chemistry sets were heavily monitored),83 and ‘some used [the OU] to build their revolutionary knowledge and organisational skills’.84 The diversity of outcomes suggests that the programme offered prisoners the opportunity to free themselves from paramilitary influence by requiring them to think about their own personal development as well. As with political leaderships in other national struggles, former prisoners became prominent figures in Sinn Féin both before and after the peace process gathered pace in the 1990s. The education those prisoners received, however, was equally useful in building their 80  Open

University, ‘Time to Think’, Open University Digital Archive, https://​www.open.ac.uk/​libr​ ary/​digi​tal-​arch​ive/​coll​ecti​ons/​coll​ect:ni/​page1, accessed 14 December 2022. 81 Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille, 4. 82  Jocelyn Alexander, ‘The Productivity of Political Imprisonment: Stories from Rhodesia’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47/​2 (2019), 308. 83  McDermott response in Open University, ‘Time to Think’. 84 Kenney, Dance in Chains, 259.

268   Tony Craig confidence to criticize their movement’s leaders and even to challenge the leadership’s role in aspects of their imprisonment.85 Whatever path republican prisoners chose—​and many were still severely damaged by their experience—​recidivism rates following the Good Friday agreement in 1998 (that largely ended the conflict) were remarkably low when compared with the prison population more generally.86

Conclusions Imprisonment and detention have been a vital part of all COIN strategies since the Second World War. Arguably, this was a trend set earlier in the British Empire because of the reputational damage arising from British actions during the South African War, at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and from official reprisal policies during the Irish War of Independence. In order to convince influential audiences both at home and among its allies, the British Empire needed to project the sense that it was somehow an impartial provider of law, order, and justice. Insurgent violence against British rule was, consequently, framed as illogical and criminal (rather than romantic and national minded); and therefore those who participated in these insurgencies were merely misinformed and, in time, might even come to see the error of their ways. Imprisonment of large numbers of insurgent suspects for extended periods was therefore necessary and could be beneficial both in terms of hampering an insurgency as well as meeting the demands of international (as well as British domestic) public opinion which would otherwise look down upon larger scale military methods. Unofficially, racism was important in characterizing the extent to which insurgents were seen as deserving of fairness or even of equality before the law. And, although the use of torture or even milder forms of brutal treatment declined in the British Empire due to the pressures of an interested media as well as from international human rights campaigners, by the time the PIRA emerged in the early months of 1970 a significant amount of unofficial callousness and othering within the system remained. This indifference to the abuse that detainees were subjected to contributed to failures to properly investigate allegations of excess on the part of the security forces in Northern Ireland, just as they had been elsewhere, particularly as the levels of violence from the insurgents increased.87 Britain’s late colonial insurgencies were often relatively brief affairs in comparison with Northern Ireland, where the imprisonment of paramilitaries/​insurgents/​terrorists evolved over more than two decades alongside the conflict. Like the conflict itself, by the 1990s imprisonment had become everyday; sinister but mundane, with little clear hope of victory for either side in sight. To an extent this was also the case in South Africa, where, 85 

Richard O’Rawe accused Sinn Fein’s leadership of lengthening the hunger strike for their own political benefit. Richard O’Rawe, Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-​Block Hunger Strike (Dublin: New Island, 2005). The scandal this caused is summarized in Malachi O’Doherty, Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life (London: Faber & Faber, 2017), 148–​166. 86  Clare D. Dwyer, ‘Risk, Politics and the “Scientification” of Political Judgement: Prisoner Release and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland’, The British Journal of Criminology, 47/​5 (2007), 795. 87  Belfast Crown Court, ‘THE QUEEN v SOLDIER A and SOLDIER C’.

Carceral Warfare   269 paradoxically, having defeated the insurgents of MK, the state gradually came to realize that MK’s defeat did not mean apartheid’s victory and began negotiations with Mandela whilst he was still in prison. The use of the legal and penal systems is therefore carefully considered by both sides in an insurgency. Both successful states and successful insurgent groups often interpret the purposes of imprisonment to shape both local and global perceptions of it. And, just as with the ongoing conflict outside the prison, insurgent groups and states both have power to adjust strategies in terms of prisoner treatment or prison resistance in order to meet wider goals. This makes imprisonment and prisoner treatment an important aspect of an insurgency and counter-​insurgency from a strategic level and is evidenced more widely in the concerted global campaign to free Nelson Mandela long after the ‘real’ counter-​insurgency there had been won. In Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin had successfully used the imagery, testimony, popular music, and literature of PIRA prisoners to develop a coordinated public narrative of ill-​ treatment. Although ultimately self-​sustaining among Irish Republicans, following the climactic events of the early 1980s, emphasis on the prison war arguably achieved diminishing returns in inspiring wider support. This was because of successful state attempts to isolate the prison issue in Northern Ireland by emphasizing IRA violence outside of the prison context (although this has meant that an equally important component, the IRA’s war against prison officers, has largely since been ignored). However, since there is no benefit to the state in remembering its role in the prison war, official discourse has been muted, meaning that the only sustained narrative that remains is that of the imprisoned. These factors demonstrate how imprisonment and resistance to it need to be considered in terms of their practical rhetorical consequences in any given insurgency. The effects of imprisonment and resistance to it are often less tangible than the consequences of physical conflict, but this is not always the case. The conflicts that take place within a prison during an insurgency are no less purposeful, no less impactful, and no less the result of conscious effort—​in both planning and in remembrance—​than any other kind of war.

Acknowledgements With thanks to Rachel Caroline Kowalski as well as the editors for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

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270   Tony Craig Belfast Crown Court, ‘THE QUEEN v SOLDIER A and SOLDIER C: RULING ON ADMISSIBILITY OF EVIDENCE’, 30 April 2021, https://​www.judi​ciar​yni.uk/​sites/​judici​ ary/​files/​decisi​ons/​The%20Qu​een%20v%20Sold​ier%20A%20and%20Sold​ier%20C.pdf. Bennett, H.G., QC. Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Police Interrogation Procedures in Northern Ireland, CMND 7497 (London: HMSO, 1979). The Bobby Sands Trust, ‘Writings’, accessed 14 December 2022, https://​www.bobb​ysan​dstr​ ust.com/​. Brady, Aaron, ‘Robben Island University’, Transition, 116, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela 1918–​ 2013 (2014), 106–​119. Branch, Daniel, ‘Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya, c.1930–​1952: Escaping the Carceral Archipelago’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 38/​2 (2005), 239–​265. Carter, Nick, Modern Italy in Historical Perspective (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Clarke, Liam, Broadening the Battlefield: The H-​Blocks and the Rise of Sinn Féin (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987). Cobain, Ian, The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation (London: Portobello, 2016). Craig, Anthony, Crisis of Confidence: Anglo Irish Relations in the Early Troubles 1966–​74 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010). Craig, Tony, ‘From Countersubversion to Counter-​insurgency—​Comparing MI5’s Role in British Guiana, Aden and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Crisis’, Journal of Intelligence History,14/​1 (2015), 38–​53. Craig, Tony, ‘You Will Be Responsible to the GOC”. Stovepiping and the Problem of Divergent Intelligence Gathering Networks in Northern Ireland, 1969–​1975’, Intelligence and National Security, 33/​2 (2018), 211–​226. Craig, Tony, and Martin McCleery, ‘Political Bargaining Chips: Republican Internees in Northern Ireland 1972–​1975’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 31/​3 (2020), 639–​660. Dickson, Brice, ‘The Administration of Justice in Northern Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 75/​297 (Spring, 1986), 56–​66. Dingli, Sophia, and Caroline Kennedy, ‘The Aden Pivot? British Counter-​Insurgency after Aden’, Civil Wars, 16/​1 (2014), 86–​104. Dixon, Paul, ‘ “Hearts and Minds”? British Counter-​Insurgency from Malaya to Iraq’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​3 (2009), 353–​381. Drohan, Brian, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018). Dwyer, Clare D., ‘Risk, Politics and the “Scientification” of Political Judgement: Prisoner Release and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland’, The British Journal of Criminology, 47/​5 (2007), 779–​797. Elkins, Caroline, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Pimlico, 2005). English, Richard, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (London: Pan, 2003). Forward to Freedom: The British Anti-​ Apartheid Movement Archives, ‘Free Mandela Campaign’, https://​www.aama​rchi​ves.org/​campai​gns/​free-​mand​ela.html, accessed 14 December, 2022. Goalwin, Gregory, ‘The Art of War: Instability, Insecurity, and Ideological Imagery in Northern Ireland’s Political Murals, 1979–​1998’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 26/​3 (2013), 189–​215. Healy, Deirdre, Claire Hamilton, Yvonne Daly, and Michelle Butler (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Irish Criminology (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016).

Carceral Warfare   271 Hennessey, Thomas, Hunger Strike: Margaret Thatcher’s Battle with the IRA 1980–​ 1981 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2014). Hennessey, Thomas, The Evolution of the Troubles 1970–​ 72 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007). Humphreys, Joe, ‘Millionaire Helped Finance War of Independence’, Irish Times, 23 May 2013, https://​www.iri​shti​mes.com/​cult​ure/​herit​age/​mill​iona​ire-​hel​ped-​fina​nce-​war-​of-​indep​ ende​nce-​1.1391​596. Department of Justice (NI), NI Prison Service Roll of Honour, https://​www.just​ice-​ni.gov.uk/​ artic​les/​roll-​hon​our, accessed 14 December 2022. Kenney, Padraic, Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Knox, George W., Gregg Etter, and Carter F. Smith, Gangs and Organized Crime (New York: Routledge, 2019). Leahy, Thomas, The Intelligence War Against the IRA (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Mandela, Nelson, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (London: Abacus, 1995). Maney, Gregory M., ‘Transnational Mobilization and Civil Rights in Northern Ireland’, Social Problems, 47/​2 (May, 2000), 153–​179. McCleery, Martin, Operation Demetrius and its Aftermath (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). McEvoy, Kieran, Paramilitary Imprisonment in Northern Ireland: Resistance, Management and Release (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). McGovern, Mark, ‘Inquiring into Collusion? Collusion, the State and the Management of Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland’, State Crime Journal, 2/​1 (2013), 4–​29. McGuffin, John, Internment (Tralee: Anvil Books, 1973). McKittrick, David, and David McVea, Making Sense of the Troubles, revised ed. (London: Penguin, 2001). Moloney, Ed, A Secret History of the IRA (London: Penguin, 2002). Murtagh, Tom, The Maze Prison: A Hidden Story of Chaos, Anarchy and Politics (Hampshire: Waterside Press, 2018). Neumann, Peter R., ‘The Myth of Ulsterization in British Security Policy in Northern Ireland’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 26/​5 (2003), 365–​377. Newbery, Samantha, ‘Intelligence and Controversial British Interrogation Techniques: The Northern Ireland Case, 1971–​2’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, 20 (2009), 103–​119. O’Brien, Kevin, ‘A Blunted Spear: The Failure of the African National Congress/​South African Communist Party revolutionary war strategy 1961–​1990’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 14/​2 (2003), 27–​70. O’Brien, Matthew J., ‘Irish America, Race, and Bernadette Devlin’s 1969 American Tour’, New Hibernia Review, 14/​2 (2010), 84–​101. O’Doherty, Malachi, Gerry Adams: An Unauthorised Life (London: Faber & Faber, 2017). O’Halpin, Eunan, ‘ “A Poor Thing but Our Own”: The Joint Intelligence Committee and Ireland, 1965–​72’, Intelligence and National Security, 23/​5 (2008), 658–​680. Open University, ‘Time to Think’, Open University Digital Archive, https://​www.open.ac.uk/​ libr​ary/​digi​tal-​arch​ive/​coll​ecti​ons/​coll​ect:ni/​page1, accessed 14 December 2022. O’Rawe, Richard, Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-​Block Hunger Strike (Dublin: New Island, 2005).

272   Tony Craig O Tuathail, Seamus, They Came in the Morning: Internment, Monday August 09, 1971: Torture and Brutality in the North (Dublin: Sinn Féin [Official] 1972). Purtill, Corinne, ‘Booze and Anguish Haunt Northern Ireland’s Retired Terrorists. Some Regret not Putting Ballots First’, PRI.org, 15 July 2015, https://​www.pri.org/​stor​ies/​2015-​07-​ 15/​booze-​and-​angu​ish-​haunt-​north​ern-​irela​nds-​reti​red-​ter​rori​sts-​some-​reg​ret-​not. Robbins, Simon, ‘The British Counter-​insurgency in Cyprus’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​ 4–​5 (2012), 720–​743. Ryder, Chris, Inside the Maze: The Untold Story of the Northern Ireland Prison Service, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 2001). Sarat, A. (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). Schaffer, Gavin and Saima Nasar, ‘The White Essential Subject: Race, Ethnicity, and the Irish in Post-​war Britain’, Contemporary British History, 32/​2 (2018), 209–​230. Sinclair, Georgina, ‘The “Irish” Policeman and the Empire: Influencing the Policing of the British Empire—​Commonwealth’, Irish Historical Studies, 36/​142 (2008), 173–​187. Smith, Helena, ‘UK to Pay £1m to Greek Cypriots over Claims of Human Rights Abuses’, The Guardian, 23 January 2019, https://​www.theg​uard​ian.com/​world/​2019/​jan/​23/​brit​ain-​ to-​pay-​group-​of-​greek-​cypri​ots-​1m-​after-​cla​ims-​of-​human-​rig​hts-​abuse, accessed 14 December 2022. Spjut, R. J., ‘Internment and Detention without Trial in Northern Ireland 1971–​1975: Ministerial Policy and Practice’, The Modern Law Review, 49/​6 (1986), 712–​740. Sutton, Malcolm, Index of Deaths. https://​cain.uls​ter.ac.uk/​sut​ton/​tab​les/​index.html. Sweeney, George, ‘Irish Hunger Strikes and the Cult of Self-​Sacrifice’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28/​3 (1993), 421–​37. Taylor, Peter, Beating the Terrorists? Interrogation in Omagh, Gough and Castlereagh (London: Penguin Special, 1980). Taylor, Peter, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein (London: Bloomsbury, 1998). Thomas, Martin, and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SA), ‘Further Submissions and Responses by the ANC for the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, 12 MAY 1997’, Department of Justice and Constitutional Development: Republic of South Africa, http://​www.just​ice.gov.za/​trc/​hrvtr​ ans/​sub​mit/​anc2.htm. Walsh, Dermot P.J., ‘Arrest and Interrogation: Northern Ireland 1981’, Journal of Law and Society, 9/​1 (Summer, 1982), 37–​62. Wheeler, Brian, ‘Nelson Mandela Death: UK Streets Named Mandela’, BBC News, 7 December 2013, https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​magaz​ine-​20663​509. Woodford, Isabel, and M.L.R. Smith, ‘The Political Economy of the Provos: Inside the Finances of the Provisional IRA—​A Revision’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 41/​3 (2018), 213–​240. Zalmanovich, Tal, ‘How Resistance Led to London’s Selous Street becoming Mandela Street’, The Conversation, 2 August 2018, https://​thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​how-​res​ista​nce-​led-​to-​lond​ ons-​sel​ous-​str​eet-​becom​ing-​mand​ela-​str​eet-​100​770. Zinoman, Peter, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam 1862–​1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

A F F I L IAT ION S Motivation and Mobilization

Chapter 14

The Pl ac e of Revolu tionary V i ol e nc e in India, 19 05–​1 94 7 From Aberrant Nationalisms to the Nationalist Mainstream Gajendra Singh In 1956, some forty years after his life as a revolutionary trying to sow armed revolution against British rule in India during the First World War, Darisi Chenchiah began to write and explain who he and his comrades were: We were ready to believe in anything since we were ready to die, if necessary, in the cause of [the] liberation of India from foreign rule. With this readiness to die, we got superhuman strength and dared to do even the impossible. We were not afraid of failures which we considered as stepping stones to future success. We were filled with enthusiasm and happiness with the noble ideal of killing the modern rakshasas and demons [the British]. We were Abhimanyus. We were content with that kind of reasoning. We were filled with intense hatred against foreign rule and wanted to liberate India at any cost.1

Chenchiah’s superhumans who ‘dared to do the impossible’2 encompassed three generations of revolutionary nationalists who were written out of the nationalist mainstream, overlapped but were yet distinct from the communistic and fascistic movements that emerged in interwar India, and caused moments of extremely violent insurgencies and extreme colonialist repression. ‘We were Abhimanyus’ was an apposite refrain to Chenchiah’s main narrative.3 It was a classical allusion to the ancient epic the Mahabharata, in which, on the thirteenth day of the grand battle, the youthful Abhimanyu stemmed a breach in the lines, caused such despair that his enemies relied upon underhand tactics to kill him, and by 1 Darisi

Chenchiah, ‘The Ghadar Party: Reminiscences’, Heritage Bulletin of the History Sub-​ Committee of the Desh Bhagat Yadgar Committee, 3 (1996). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

276   Gajendra Singh his sacrifice convinced his father Arjuna and the Pandavas to throw off any scruples and abandon their adherence to the rules of war.4 Revolutionaries were to be redeemed and valorized because they were willing to sacrifice all for a hopeless cause. The virtuous death overrode mistakes in programme or method; as the ideal and not a byproduct of organization, mobilization, and suppression. But Chenchiah’s allusion was born of frustration: that his and his comrades’ sacrifice had been displaced and inadequately recognized in the post-​ colony which followed independence. This chapter will not be a hagiography of men (largely men) of violence in histories of South Asian anti-​colonialisms. That is not its intent. It will be an attempt to resituate them within the nationalist mainstream and discuss the poetics of memorialization and forgetting in the historical record. The displacement of revolutionary violence from conventional narratives of the independence movement, or, more accurately, movements, in colonial India, has three causes. The first is a consequence of focusing upon the Indian National Congress as the agent of change in the first half of the twentieth century, and the related figure and phenomenon of Gandhi and Gandhism as a cypher for discussing how Congress operated as a mass movement. The ordering principle in the historical scholarship from the 1950s has been to treat South Asian anti-​colonialisms as an exception from those operating elsewhere in the world; with absolute state violences being contrasted with ideals of Gandhian non-​violence. Where political violence is acknowledged, it remains a reaction to Gandhian political thought or explained as the failure of Gandhism.5 It becomes devoid of its own consciousnesses, logics, antecedents, and legacies. For those scholars who wish to rewrite the histories of revolutionary violence into the nationalist mainstream, there has been a tendency to focus upon the most literate, articulate, and photogenic apostles of violence.6 The work which consequently relies upon the intellectual output of a revolutionary intelligentsia comes to be relegated to fields of intellectual or political history and becomes a poor cousin to the great social histories which have dominated the field for the past forty years. That is not to say these intellectual histories cannot be worthy studies, but they are fewer in number and receive less attention when the great innovations have come from those exploring the margins of the historical record, 4 Cf. The Mahabharata of Krishna-​ Dwaipayana Vyasa. Book 7: Drona Parva, trans. Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Calcutta: Bharata Press, 1883–​1896). 5  This does not just include the litany of very sympathetic biographies of Gandhi that have emerged since Dinanath Gopal Tendulkar’s eight-​volume biography of Gandhi in 1951, but even very recent texts which try to adopt a position sympathetic to revolutionary anti-​colonialisms. For instance, Talat Ahmed’s Mohandas Gandhi: Experiments in Civil Disobedience: ‘As this book has aimed to show, Gandhi’s “experiments in civil disobedience” therefore need to be examined critically and in their concrete context. Gandhi was not the first to interweave a range of religious texts, nor will he be the last. Indian intellectuals of the interwar period were indeed drawn to Gandhi, particularly during the Non-​ Cooperation Movement. But many were frustrated by Gandhian non-​violence and thus gravitated towards more radical politics in the 1930s’. D.G. Tendulkar, Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Vols 1–​8 (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1951) and Talat Ahmed, Mohandas Gandhi: Experiments in Civil Disobedience (London: Pluto Press, 2019). 6  Cf. Maia Ramnath, From Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst, 2015); Durbha Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–​ 1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Revolutionary Violence in India, 1905–1947    277 archival fragments, and writing of and with the ‘small voice of history’.7 Finally, the global turn in history-​writing over the past twenty years has further privileged voices entexted in English (or French and German), even while claiming to be an antidote to the perceived parochialisms of regional or area studies.8 It has explicitly become a way to return to white male agencies in the writing of imperial history (John Darwin in particular).9 For those with a more sophisticated bent, the work is dependent on what is easily readable online and in metropolitan archives and present in easily decipherable lingua franca (not just English but predominantly so). It forgoes the expertise that was once prized by area studies specialists of language, register, and locality. In Tim Harper’s Underground Asia, for instance, his ‘global revolutionaries’ are often the least underground, and those that were violent actors are unwritten and unreachable.10 This chapter will look to destabilize these axes of violence/​non-​ violence, intellectual/​social, and local/​global. It will look to synthesize each as mutually constitutive and contest that they were ever mutually exclusive. The chapter will begin with the one possible exception to the argument that violent revolutionary nationalisms have been eclipsed or marginalized. The period from 1928–​1934 created revolutionary martyrs, iconographies, and slogans which continue to have resonance in a South Asian present in which Gandhian nationalisms are largely absent. The chapter will then turn to that which preceded and followed this period—​from 1905 to the end of the First World War and from 1942 and the advent of ‘Quit India’. 7  The long genealogy, reach, and influence of subalternism on South Asian history writing. The evolution of subalternism from beginning to its afterlives can be best seen in the work of Ranajit Guha. Ranajit Guha, The Small Voice of History: Collected Essays, edited and with an introduction by Partha Chatterjee (Ranikhet, Uttarakhand: Permanent Black, 2009). 8  ‘It used to be the case until very recently, let’s say ten years ago, that if you did not do national historiography, you had to tell other people why you were not doing national historiography. I would like to say the boot is now on the other foot. We now have to ask the national historians: why are you doing US history without the history of the hemisphere, the American empire, America’s relations with the wider world, the history of American emigration, the transnational circulation of ideas, whatever it may be? I think it is time for us to put the national historians on the defensive, to justify their choice of particular local, regional or national frameworks. I am putting that a little aggressively, but I also hope that it might be productive for those who work on smaller units, to justify to themselves why it is they choose them—​ apart from the inertia of the historical profession, that it has always been the case that one would take a town, a region, or a nation-​state as a focus of historical study. We need to be more reflexive about exactly why we choose those things, rather than succumb to the path-​dependency of historiographical activity’. Martine von Ittersum and Jaap Jacobs, ‘Are We All Global Historians Now? An Interview with David Armitage’, Itinerario, 36 (2012), 16. 9  John Darwin’s Unfinished Empire begins with an explicit attack on what he perceives as postcolonial history, new imperial history, and all cultural history: ‘some historians of empire still feel obliged to proclaim their moral revulsion against it, in case writing about empire might be thought to endorse it. Others like to convey the impression that writing against empire is an act of great courage: as if its agents lie in wait to exact their revenge or an enraged “imperialist” public will inflict martyrdom on them. They are harmless, if rather amusing, conceits’. John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2012). For a fuller critique of Darwin’s oeuvre, see Bill Schwarz, ‘An Unsentimental Education: John Darwin’s Empire’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 43/​1 (2015), 124–​144. 10  Take, for instance, the Ghadar Movement, which is referred to throughout Harper’s work, but the actual act of insurrection and its main protagonists are squeezed into just over a page. Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2020), 254–​255.

278   Gajendra Singh

Stained with Sacrifice: The ‘Revolutionary Turn’ in the Writing of Revolution, 1928–​1934 The 2006 film Rang de Basanti, lit. ‘Dye with the Colour of Sacrifice’, spurred a new interest in histories of anticolonial revolutionary violence in India. It focused upon a group of largely male, largely middle-​ class Delhi-​ based students suddenly confronted with an earnest English journalist, Sue McKinley, who is keen to make a documentary about the characters that littered the journal of her grandfather, an officer in the Indian Police charged with interrogating a group of revolutionaries in a 1930s Lahore gaol: ‘Sometimes in my dreams I can still see them making that long, last walk. They never faltered, they never so much as broke their stride. But above all others, I remember his eyes, how they looked at me: clear, defiant, never wavering’.11 The Delhi-​based students who McKinley recruits to play those revolutionaries do so first as a joke, because they belong to a MTV generation for whom Gandhian ascetism, Nehruvian promise, and Hindutvatvi extremisms are meaningless: ‘Corruption is in our fucking DNA; this country has no future’.12 But as they begin to inhabit these roles, they are literally consumed by the personas they adopt. Amir Khan’s Daljit ‘DJ’ Singh plans revolutionary murders in his present as he is moved by the example of Chandrasekhar Azad; Siddharth’s Karan Singania/​Bhagat Singh murders his own father without remorse because of his role in corrupt arms procurement; Kunal Kapoor’s Aslam Khan/​Ashfaqullah Khan and Atul Kulkarni’s Lakshman Pandey/​Ramprasad Bismil overcome communal animosity because of the brotherhood forged by revolutionary violence. These fragments of the past are reimagined as exemplars for a generation for whom the Indian nation has failed, without irony and complication. As DJ/​Chandrasekhar Azad voices at the very start of the film: Abbhi jis ka khoon na khawla, khoon nahin woh pani hain, jo desh ke kam na aayen woh bekar jawani hain. (The blood that does not boil even at this, even now, that blood is not blood but watery cowardice, that youth which is of no use to the nation is not youth but sheer waste.)13

The film remains one of the largest grossing Bollywood films of all time (₹279 crores adjusted for inflation14). Its significance here is that it has spurred not only a popular interest in South Asia and among a South Asian diaspora of the revolutionary violences of the 1930s, but a scholarly interest in the revolutionaries of that era. The historical scholarship that has emerged over the past ten years has conformed to a romantic-​cum-​scholarly sensibility of what a revolutionary ought to be and ought to do. An easy triptych can be fashioned of violent revolutionary actors between 1928 and 1934 of righteous cause, suffering under the repression of the colonial state and then martyrdom. Durba Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–​1947 draws attention to a certain kind of revolutionary with whom we can easily identify and 11 Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra (dir.), Rang de Basanti (Mumbai: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra Pictures, 2006). 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14  ₹97 crores at the time.

Revolutionary Violence in India, 1905–1947    279 whose rationale we can easily decipher.15 ‘Gentlemanly terrorists’ is a literal translation of bhadralok dacoity—​of a Bengali encaste and enclassed elite that came to be engaged in revolutionary crimes in colonial India. We are as witnesses of this past, unconsciously or otherwise, in sympathy with the subjects of Ghosh’s work because we can easily imagine ourselves engaged in that literary production and understand the steps that led to the violences which followed. Surya Sen’s Indian Republican Army literally conforms to what a revolution ought to look like by replicating in the Chittagong Armoury Raid of 18 April 1930 (Good Friday) the template of Irish revolution as retold in Dan Breen’s account of the Easter Rising in My Fight for Irish Freedom.16 The contestation of historical narrative in the creation of revolutionary memoirs to challenge official versions of events is something to which historians are naturally drawn—​in Ghosh’s case beginning with Bhupendra Kumar Dutta’s series of articles after being released from prison in 1920.17 Conclusions which draw attention to the enduring lattice of colonialist state repression in the post-​colony, of laws ‘re-​enacted and resurrected’, has immediate currency in an age of new democratic authoritarianisms and wars on terror.18 Satwinder Singh Juss begins his work where Durba Ghosh ends; it is the ‘legal heresies’ of the British colonial state which are the subject of his study.19 Juss focuses upon the prosecution of a different organization, the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army in Lahore from 1929 to 1931; the same figures of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar, Shivaram Rajguru et al., who appear in Rang de Basanti and who were based in north and northwestern India (largely Punjab but also United Provinces and Delhi). His story is not interested in what precipitated the moment of revolution, or even what revolutionary violence constituted, but instead travels the well-​trodden path of describing the unjust treatment which that generation of revolutionaries received—​the suspension of normal jurisprudence with the use of the ‘conspiracy case’, the denial of treatment as political prisoners, deaths due to forced feeding of hunger strikers, and the secret mutilation and disposing of bodies to prevent sites of cremation being used as a places of revolutionary pilgrimage. The reason why the violent revolutionaries of the late 1920s and early 1930s have assumed such scholarly importance is because of the martyrdoms and martyrologies that accompanied this phase of revolutionary activism. Literary and artistic hagiographies and iconographies accompanied the marches to the scaffold and the shoot-​outs with the police. It left behind an ephemera and detrita which are relatively easy to access and pick through and can create the false impression that this was a unique period. It is indeed the proliferation of the revolutionary imagery of the time (and often self-​curated imagery) that forms the crux of Kama Maclean’s argument about revolutionary violence having a mass sensibility, even though the activisms were restricted to small groups of individuals.20 The recent ‘revolutionary turn’ in the scholarship of South Asian history has been a welcome intervention, and often methodologically innovative (and not just because I have

15 Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists. 16 

Dan Breen, My Fight for Irish Freedom (Dublin, Anvil Books, 1991 [1924]).

17 Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, chap. 2. 18 Ghosh, Gentlemanly Terrorists, 252.

19 Satwinder Singh Juss, The Execution of Bhagat Singh: Legal Heresies of the Raj (Stroud, Glos., Amberley Publishing, 2020). 20 Maclean, A Revolutionary History.

280   Gajendra Singh been bracketed as part of that turn).21 It does, however, require greater contextualization into processes and with moments that do not fit the template of 1928–​1934. It was not just peoples who can be constructed as radical heroes for our time that narrated their revolutionary experiences, but also those with whom we might struggle to identify. The revolutionary narrative harked to the political traditions of both left and right, and was a form and register occupied by both heroes and villains—​those that we can construct as heroes for our present and those whom we would rather eschew. For instance, the intellectual progenitor of Hindutvatvi fascism, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, was also a revolutionary who communicated his thoughts through the register of the revolutionary experience (My Transportation for Life, originally published in Marathi in 1927 and then translated to English in 1949 and Hindi in 1966).22 The law and jurisprudence of dealing with revolutionary emergencies did not begin in 1929 but had a longer and older genealogy. It began in 1914 in terms of the legal artifice of the ‘conspiracy case’, and 1818 if one considers indefinite detention without trial (ordinances from 1914 that were enshrined and expanded upon in the Defence of India Act of 1915 and the Bengal Regulation III of 1818—​‘A Regulation for the Confinement of State Prisoners’). There were, finally, revolutionaries of other periods who were less literate, articulate, and photogenic than those such as Bhagat Singh, who adorn Kama Maclean’s otherwise brilliant study. Ways and means must be found of reading and seeing revolutionaries who could leave behind very little literary production or artistic portrayal. An attempt will be made in the rest of this piece to do just that, by analysing waves of revolutionary violence in South Asia which preceded and followed that of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

‘Pagri Sambhal Jatta!’ (‘Oh peasant, take care of thy turban!’): The Metamorphoses of Revolutionary Conspiracies from Metropolitan Elites to Migrant Labourers, 1905–​1918 1905 is the year in which the later nuances and complexities of the Indian independence movement were founded. From that year, opposition emerged within the Indian National Congress to the ‘moderate’ position of couching demand in myths of British liberty and hopes of winning support from British Liberals or the Labour movement. These ideas could be tested and actioned with the advent of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal; a movement which began in order to resist the administrative division of the Province of Bengal for purely political purposes, and which metamorphosed, after July 1905, into the mass boycott and burning of foreign (British) goods. The growing dissatisfaction with the line that separated illegitimate from legitimate activity in Swadeshi, violence from non-​violence, created a demand for even more radical action. It spurred the growth of revolutionary societies in Bengal and the

21 Andrew

Amstutz et al., ‘New Histories of Political Violence and Revolutionary Terrorism in Modern South Asia’, South Asian History and Culture, 10/​3 (2019), 340–​360. 22  Veer (Vinayak Damodar) Savarkar, My Transportation for Life (Bombay: Sadbhakti Prakashan, 1949).

Revolutionary Violence in India, 1905–1947    281 Bombay Presidency23 and the advocacy of the spectacle of revolutionary violence as a means of initiating political change (most notably the assassination of Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, aide-​de-​camp to the Secretary of State for India, in London on 1 July 190924 and the near escape of Lord Hardinge, Viceroy of India, during the Delhi Durbar of 23 December 1912). The period laid the foundation of a later litany of revolutionary martyrs. In rural Punjab this began in the context of rural agitation from 1907, after two epidemics which led to two million deaths in the province and legislation subverting previous rights of tenure and restricting access to irrigation projects. The movement gave Punjabis a revolutionary rhetoric and symbology, and, through the arrests and transportation of Sardar Ajit Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai (the uncle of Bhagat Singh and one of the leaders of the ‘extremists’ within Congress), their own revolutionary martyrs.25 The wealth and social status of the men involved (largely men) enabled the very earliest of revolutionary movements to have an international dimension. As youthful revolutionaries became students or businessmen abroad, they met and attached themselves to older Indian emigrés that were themselves moving seamlessly through the radical movements of their time: Clan na Gael (Shyamji Khrisnavarma), British Suffragettes and the Stuttgart Conference of the Second International (Bhikaiji Rustom Cama and Sardar Singh Rahabhai Rana), the Industrial Workers of the World (Lala Har Dayal), and the US Civil Rights movement (Lala Lajpat Rai). During the First World War, the engine of revolutionary activity shifted from cosmopolitan elites in India to semi-​permanent communities of migrant labourers abroad—​ particularly the 15–​20,000 who had migrated to the Pacific Coast of North America

23  These

arose mainly in Bengal in Eastern India—​the Anushilan Samiti (Self-​Culture Association) in 1902 and then the Dhaka Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar (New Era) group from 1905–​1906—​but not exclusively so. Parallels can be found in Western India in the Bombay Presidency, where V.D. Savarkar helped to form the Mitra Mela (Band of Friends) in 1900 and Abhinava Bharat (Young India) in 1904. 24  ‘Just as the Germans have no right to occupy this country, so the English people have no right to occupy India, and it is perfectly justifiable on our part to kill the Englishman who is polluting our sacred land’. Statement of Madan Lal Dhingra, 19 July 1909. The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–​ 1913, http://​www.oldb​aile​yonl​ine.org/​bro​wse.jsp?id=​t19090​7 19-​55&div=​t19090​ 719-​55&terms=​Dhin​gra#highli​ght. 25  ‘Oh Peasant, take care of thy turban!

Your crops are ravaged by locusts, your garb is poor; Famine has taken its toll, your family mourn, Oh Turbaned One! Landlords have set themselves up as your leaders, In order to trap and exploit you, Oh Turbaned One! India is your Temple and you its acolyte. How long will you remain asleep? Prepare yourself to fight and to be further oppressed, Oh Turbaned One! Love your country, as Ranjha loved Heer. Walk with care, Oh Brave One, But shed all cowardice. Be united, and shout your defiance! Join hands and together put up a brave front. Oh Peasant, take care of thy turban! Translated version of ‘Pagri Sambhal Jatta!’ poem composed by Prabh Dyal to open the largest meeting of the 1907 Agitation in Lyallpur, Punjab on 22 March 1907. Numerous, competing versions now exist in folksong and memory (most recently by Rabbi Shergill). Translation is mine.

282   Gajendra Singh (California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia).26 The largest proportion of these came from Punjab in northwest India, were largely (although not exclusively) Sikh, and up to half to three-​quarters of the total were pensioned soldiers of the Indian Army. The reaction to the presence of Punjabi migrants in Canada and the United States of America (generally termed as ‘Hindus’, ‘Hindoos’, or ‘East Indians’ in the official racial and ethnic profiling of the day) was unambiguously hostile. Race riots, pogroms, and then official restrictions on migration littered the early political mobilizations of these migrant enclaves. Early organizations representing migrants in North America tried to appeal to the Imperial state for relief.27 With avenues of appeal closed, India was redeemed in the eyes of those that had left it as a space that could fulfill aspirations of wealth and social status denied to Indians abroad. The Hindustani Association of the Pacific Coast was formed in May 1913, uniting the various associations and organizations that littered Indian migrant enclaves in Canada and the USA. It established a printing press at the ‘Yugantar Ashram’ in San Francisco, and established a newspaper entitled ‘Ghadar’. The newspaper’s name, ‘Mutiny’, or ‘Rebellion’, accurately reflected the nature of its content: the desire to forcibly expel the British from India. An Urdu edition was established first on 1 November 1913 and a Gurmukhi (Punjabi) version from 9 December 1913. The versions of the same newspaper reflected the bifurcated nature of its leadership; divided between student intellectuals and the worlds of the Punjabi labourer. The former produced a series of articles and publications in the same register as earlier revolutionary societies in India, drawing inspiration from international events.28 The Gurmukhi content differed in tone, placing revolution within Sikh and Punjabi religious and literary tales of masculinity, martyrdom, and self-​sacrifice: You cowards are afraid of death. How can you think of becoming lions in battle? One hero should stand against one hundred and twenty-​five thousand. That is the order of the Guru. You sons of the Guru are Singhs, and there is much oppression. Where are your lion-​like traits? Oh ye brave Singhs, join together to gather up the dropped pearls. Why must all be lost? We will fight for India, we will kill and be killed. Cry loudly! Where is your tongue and heart?29 26  Official immigration figures tabulated as 5,351 admitted into Canada and 7,324 into the United States. The actual figure is likely to have been higher. S. Chandrasekhar, ‘Indian Immigration in America’, Far Eastern Survey, 13/​15 (26 July 1944), 138–​143. 27  Most notably when the Khalsa Diwan Society and the United India League sent a joint delegation to London and India in February 1913. The three-​man deputation was either ignored (in London), informed that nothing could be done (New Delhi), or threatened with arrest (Lahore). 28 ‘Oh Warriors! The opportunity that you have been searching for years has come, that is, the Trumpet of War has sounded; the war has started; you lie sleeping here. Do you know what is happening in the world? . . . War has started between Germany and England. Now is the chance for India’s freedom. This news is so important that I will give you a short narrative of it. The entire nations of Europe are divided into two parties. On one side is Germany, Italy and Austria [sic.], on the other side Russia, England and France. War has started between these two parties. All Britain’s land and naval forces will be occupied in fighting against Germany. Therefore, all the white troops in India will have to leave. This is the right time for you to start a war for freedom. You can very soon expel the British from India. Oh brethren, take your freedom now’. ‘The Trumpet of War: Commencement of the Great War’, Ghadar, 4 August 1914. 29 The last lines of Poem Three of Ghadar di Gunj, Echoes of Rebellion (San Francisco, 1914). Translation is mine.

Revolutionary Violence in India, 1905–1947    283 The Ghadar Party, as the Hindustani Association of the Pacific Coast soon came to be known, was an unlikely source of worry for the colonial state, even with the wide circulation of its publications30 and the opportunities provided by the outbreak of the First World War. There was no systematic planning to complement the romantic aspiration of returning to India to orchestrate an uprising of the type seen in the rebellions and mutinies of 1857:31 ‘What is our name? Revolt. What is our work? Rebellion. Where will the mutiny break out? In India. When? In a few years’.32 Ghadar was being monitored by British Intelligence from its inception,33 its early leaders were arrested and deported,34 and there was little enthusiasm or support for Ghadar among German diplomatic staff in the United States (despite later prosecutions).35 Plans of what to do upon arrival in India were only hurriedly sketched out a few weeks after the start of the First World War and only as migrant labourers-​turned-​ revolutionaries were already en route to India. The trigger for the return to India was a local incident—​the impasse as passengers aboard the S.S. Komagata Maru were refused entry into Vancouver between May and July 1914—​and the shootings and mass arrests that occurred when its passengers arrived back in Calcutta.36 Campaigns were organized to raise money and purchase food and necessities for the stranded passengers. The funds collected became

30  Ghadar’s

reach extended to networks of trans-​Pacific Punjabi migration (Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Manila, Batavia/​Jakarta, Bangkok, Malaya) and to Indian soldiers serving in France from October and November 1914. 31  For recent literature on the range and scope of the 1857 Uprising, see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Rethinking 1857 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2007); Sharmistha Gooptu and Boria Majumdar (eds.), Revisiting 1857: Myth, Memory, History (New Delhi: Roli, 2008); Crispin Bates et al. (eds.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, 5 volumes (New Delhi: Sage, 2013–​2014). 32  Ghadar, 1 November 1913. 33  Or more specifically agents of John Arnold Wallinger’s Indian Political Intelligence Office (IPI). 34  Bhai Bhagwan Singh was deported from Canada on 18 November 1913; Har Dayal, who ran the printing press in San Francisco and wrote the majority of Ghadar’s early Urdu material, was arrested by US authorities in April 1914 and forced to flee to Switzerland. Both cases of arrest and deportation were orchestrated by William Hopkinson, an Immigration translator/​inspector and agent for Wallinger’s IPI. 35 Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador in Washington from 1914 to 1916, dismissed Ghadar’s activities ‘as an absolute “wild-​goose chase” ’. Count Bernstorff, My Three Years in America (London: Skeffington & Son, 1920), 102. In the spring of 1915, the German Consulate in San Francisco did begin to work with the Ghadar Party headquarters in San Francisco, but only so that it could utilize its trans-​Pacific network in a failed scheme to funnel arms to Bengali revolutionaries (the Annie Larsen/​Maverick scheme). It has often been argued that the arms found aboard the Annie Larsen, and which were meant to be transferred aboard the Maverick, were intended for Punjab and Ghadari revolutionaries. This is incorrect. It is the result of deliberate misinformation spread by the Indian Political Intelligence Office to secure the conviction of men associated with Ghadar in San Francisco in 1917–​1918. This is clear from both Indian and British sources. See M.N. Roy (Narendranath Bhattacharya), M.N. Roy’s Memoirs, introduction by G.D. Parikh (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1964), and East India (Sedition Committee, 1918). 36  The S.S. Komagata Maru was a steamer carrying 376 Indian passengers and charted to circumvent stringent Canadian immigration requirements (that migrants must come to Canada by a continuous voyage from their native land). It arrived in Vancouver on 23 May 1914 but was prevented entry, and its passengers fought off attempts to board and arrest ‘ringleaders’ among them. The would-​be migrants aboard the Komagata Maru were finally forced to journey to Kolkata at the end of July 1914 (after threats that it would be fired upon by the HMCS Rainbow), and, upon arrival on 26 September 1914, were fired upon by British authorities after being accused of possessing arms and resisting arrest (twenty passengers were killed, and over 100 were arrested).

284   Gajendra Singh the means to buy passage back to India, after individuals heard of what had befallen the Komagata Maru’s passengers in India and rumours circulated of the discontent it had caused in Punjab.37 From 29 August 1914, up to 5,000 returned migrants filtered through into rural Punjab.38 Some of those that originally intended to go to India were diverted into trying to win over South Asians they met in ports of call across East and South East Asia;39 others were arrested in Calcutta or had lost interest in the cause by the time of their return. Those that made it were disjointed and disorganized, often only meeting each other by accident, and even then unsure of what action to take or even if there was a larger plan. Ghadar devolved into unconnected low-​scale violences—​reflecting the interests of the small bands involved. Some tried to raid government magazines in the hope that they could gain access to rifles rather than pistols or the swords and axes that littered rural Punjab; others tried to loot divisional and sub-​divisional treasuries, in an attempt to liberate the monies their families had paid in tax; and yet more settled for singling out local moneylenders and village headmen for public beatings and executions. More concerted action was taken after members of Ghadar reached out to members of Jugantar in hiding in Benares,40 one of the pre-​war Bengali secret societies, in order to gain access to more arms and home-​made explosives. A date was fixed—​21 February 1915—​upon which members of Ghadar were to attack Lahore Fort in the middle of the city (Lahore being the administrative capital of Punjab province); ‘Bombs were prepared, arms got together, flags prepared, a declaration of war drawn up, instruments for destroying railways and telegraph wires collected and everything was put hastily in train for the general rising on the 21st February’.41 Efforts were made to secure support from serving soldiers by former comrades or relatives (some members of Ghadar even re-​enlisted into the army for that purpose). The 23rd Cavalry at the Lahore Cantonment at Mian Mir and the 26th Punjabis at Ferozepur promised to defect en masse; soldiers in the 128th Pioneers, 12th Cavalry at Meerut, and 9th Bhopal Infantry in Benares promised that they would do something if other battalions and squadrons defected. It was decided that the liberation of Lahore was to be the signal for a general rising by soldiers who had already committed themselves to the cause, and an inspiring example for the majority of soldiers and civilians in India who would be caught unaware. ‘The idea’, the Lieutenant-​Governor of Punjab later wrote, ‘was 37 

Examples can be found among the papers collected by John White Preston, The US Attorney for the Northern District California, in his attempt to prosecute members of the Ghadar Conspiracy . RG 118, Records of the Office of the U.S. Attorney, Northern District of California, Neutrality Case Files, 1913–​1920 (National Archives at San Francisco: San Bruno, California). 38  According to the Rowlatt Committee, 331 persons were interned in Calcutta as part of the hastily passed Ingress into India Ordinance, on 5 September 1914, and a further 2,576 had their movements restricted to their villages of origin in Punjab. That left an estimated 5,000 who were not intercepted. East India (Sedition Committee, 1918). 39  They won over recruits in Manila, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Some efforts were also made to propagandize among serving soldiers. The only successes members of Ghadar had among soldiers were Sikhs of the Malay States Guides and the 130th Baluchis in Rangoon. The mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry in Singapore in February 1915 was unconnected to Ghadar. For more on the Mutiny of the 5th Light Infantry, see Sho Kuwajima, The Mutiny in Singapore: War, Anti-​War and the War for India’s Independence (New Delhi: Rainbow Publishers, 2006) and Gajendra Singh, The Testimonies of Indian Soldiers and the Two World Wars: Between Self and Sepoy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 40  Specifically Rash Behari Bose and Sachindranath Sanyal. 41  Lahore Conspiracy Case: Judgement.

Revolutionary Violence in India, 1905–1947    285 not fantastic, for it had penetrated as far down as Bengal and was known to the disaffected elements in Dacca’.42 The promised rising never occurred. A police spy, Kirpal Singh, managed to infiltrate the circle of Lahore conspirators, and police raids were launched on Ghadar enclaves in Punjab and elsewhere in India from 19 February 1915. The movement continued spasmodically for another several months: men who threatened to give King’s evidence were killed, a last-​ditch attempt was made at a rising involving the 12th Cavalry at Meerut in mid-​March, a poorly implemented plan was launched to create a Ghadar training camp on the Siam-​ Burma border. And, even after it was clear that there was no hope for a war-​time rebellion in India, the Ghadar press in San Francisco continued printing its material. By the end of the First World War, however, the use of mass arrests, internment, and trials/​tribunals ensured that the Ghadar Party had effectively been quashed.43 A total of 274 individuals were tried in India, Burma, and the United States, forty-​six were hanged, sixty-​nine awarded transportation for life (rarely better than a death sentence),44 and 106 awarded lesser terms ranging from fourteen years’ transportation to shorter terms of imprisonment.45 Some evaded arrest altogether and drifted into movements unassociated with Ghadar—​especially the Indian Independence Committee in Berlin and German-​funded pan-​Islamist movements in Afghanistan46—​but these remained small, elite, diasporic groupings unable to penetrate into India or make much impact until the end of the First World War. Those that remained in the United States were plagued by a factional struggle between student intellectuals and Punjabi labourers—​the latter accused of impropriety, the former (not unreasonably) of embezzling funds. And yet, in spite of its failures and limitations, Ghadar remains important. The very attempts to suppress Ghadar and limit its appeal created a template of how revolutionary rhetoric and mobilization could occur—​as mimetic discourses that incorporated contradictory currents of thought and across spaces that were at once profoundly global and rooted in specific localities. It became both an inspiration and a warning for the ‘gentlemanly terrorists’ that emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Their likenesses and rhetoric were appropriated as progenitors of revolutionary activism, even while their deeds were held up as a warning of the failures that could occur if revolution escaped beyond the ambit of small cells of revolutionary elites.

42 O’Dwyer, India as I Knew It, 200. 43 

A total of twenty-​two trials of Ghadaris or relating to Ghadar took place in Punjab, Burma, and the United States of America. 44  Transported convicts were shipped to a penal colony in the Andaman Islands. The death rate—​an average of 37.65% of convicts died per year between 1910 and 1919—​made the penal colony a traumatic place of bereavement and loss. Report of the Indian Jails Committee, 1919–​1920 (1921). House of Commons Parliamentary Papers. 45  Two hundred and seventy-​ four (Indian) individuals were tried in the various cases. A further twenty German diplomatic staff or German-​Americans were tried in the United States. Excluding the Benares Conspiracy Case, thirty-​six were acquitted; seventeen were acquitted but discharged from Government service (the Police or Army); two turned approvers; two were killed during the course of trials; ten absconded and escaped punishment; forty-​six were hanged; sixty-​nine awarded transportation for life; and 106 were awarded sentences ranging from fourteen years’ transportation to sixty days’ imprisonment (the sentences in the United States were far lighter in comparison to those in British India). 46  Cf. K.H. Ansari, ‘Pan-​Islam and the Making of the Early Indian Muslim Socialists’, Modern Asian Studies, 20/​3 (1986), and Ramnath, Haj to Utopia.

286   Gajendra Singh

Quit India: Revolutionary Insurgency at the Margins of the Historical Record In the late summer of 1942, Victor Hope, the 2nd Marquess Linlithgow and Viceroy of India, privately confessed that the Quit India movement, which had begun a few weeks before, was ‘by far the most serious rebellion [in the Empire] since that of 1857’.47 It was about to get worse. In the months and years that followed, communications with large parts of the Indian interior broke down, rebel armies assembled and fought against two army groups of the Indian Army deputed on counter-​insurgency operations, parallel governments were established in areas where the colonial state had to retreat, and the movement bled into large-​scale military revolts and communist insurgencies from 1945 which made the continuation of imperial rule in India an impossibility. And yet, despite the scale and importance of Quit India, it remains underexplored as a historical subject. It is partly so because of official intent. Linlithgow went on to explain that Quit India was so serious that it necessitated an active suppression of its scale and size: ‘the gravity and extent of which we have so far concealed from the world for reasons of military security’.48 The internal reports into the disturbances by Sir George Tottenham and Thomas Douglas Wickenden impressed that naïve Indian masses had been duped into revolt49 or laid the blame upon the leadership of the Indian National Congress.50 Even Wickenden’s lengthy report into Congress complicity, however, was forced to conclude that his assertions could not withstand any legal test.51 As for those leaders of Congress, they were as bemused and confused as to how Quit India had become so severe and so violent. For Jawaharlal Nehru, Quit India was an orgy of ‘suppressed emotions’ breaking loose and caused by all ‘conscious feeling’ being ‘deadened by poverty and misery’: ‘the arrests and frequent firings . . . roused the people to anger and to the only course that an enraged mob can follow . . . they were too excited and angry to remain quiescent . . . it was essentially a spontaneous mass-​upheaval’.52 This final section will explore the 47 Viceroy

Lord Linlithgow, Telegram to Churchill, 31 August 1942; Nicholas Mansergh (ed.), India: The Transfer of Power, 1942–​ 47, Vol. 2: ‘Quit India’, 30th April–​ 21st September 1942 (London: H.M.S.O., 1971), 853. 48 Ibid. 49 ‘It is significant that the entire phraseology of Mr. Gandhi’s writings in connection with the movement is of a type associated in the ordinary man’s mind with violence . . . The ordinary man to whom these writings were addressed was surely not to be blamed if he understood them as exhorting him to take up whatever arms lay handy and fight his British rulers’. G.R.F. Tottenham, Additional Secretary to the Govt. of India, Home Dept., 13 February 1943, ‘Congress Responsibility for the Disturbances’; H.N. Mitra (ed.), The Indian Annual Register, July–​December 1942 (New Delhi: Gian Press, 1990). 50  P.N. Chopra (ed.), Historic Judgement on Quit India Movement: Justice Willenden’s Report (New Delhi: Konark, 1989). 51  ‘Most of the material would be utterly inadmissible if legal proceeding[s]‌were in contemplation and it would appear out of place therefore to attempt any legal appreciation of the evidence—​whether it is sufficient to establish the existence of a conspiracy to overthrow the existing Government. For that purpose the evidence would reduce to little more than Gandhi’s writings, speeches which could be proved, a few letters, and possibly statements of persons who might conceivably stand as approvers’. Ibid., 254–​255. 52  Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (London: Meridian Books, 1946), pp. 415–​419.

Revolutionary Violence in India, 1905–1947    287 size and scale of Quit India, as well as the revolutionary consciousnesses that were present therein. There are synthetic accounts of Quit India which offer useful but, for the purposes of this piece, limited explanations of structural cause for the violence and the effects of rumour and innuendo. We learn from Indivar Kamtekar’s work, for instance, of the effects of war production and profiteering which swelled the profits of an Indian industrial and landowning elite at the expense of the majority, and also of rumours of impending imperial collapse following the rapid Japanese advance through Southeast Asia from December 1941.53 It is by focusing upon province, district, and locality, however, that specific logics of violence can be divined. In Bihar protests had begun in the provincial capital of Patna on 8 August 1942, without any Congress involvement due to the preventative mass arrests which immediately followed the passing of the Quit India resolution by the All-​India Congress Committee in Bombay. On 11 August, a crowd of 10,000 marched to the Patna Secretariat only to be fired on by the police, with seven students being killed and several others wounded. What followed was not a riot but the systematic dismantling of governmental infrastructure. Communications were cut, post offices and divisional treasuries began to be looted across rural Bihar, and organized raids commenced on police thanas and gaols to intimidate the police and release prisoners. Reports of junior colonial officials in rural Bihar quickly began to describe scenes of systematic insurgency rather than simple protest: A big mob came to Rupnagar from the direction of Barauni Junc.; they first burnt Rupnagar refugee camp huts and went to the Rupnagar Railway station; they removed some records from the railway station and burnt them; they went to the workshop godown and removed some tools from the place; from there they went to Baya Bridge and tried to do some damage to the bridge but they again returned to the railway station and looted the property from the wagons of the goods train which was standing on that station.54

In Midnapur in Bengal, the emergency of famine conditions created different revolutionary outcomes. For nearly two years between September 1942 and the summer of 1944, the Kanthi Swaraj Panchayat (Kanthi Self-​Rule Council) and Tamralipta Jatiya Sarkar (Tamralipta National Government) introduced cooperative farming, barter economies, offices to regulate land transfers, and extra funding for health and schools.55 In Satara district of the Bombay Presidency, the Satara Patri Sarkar (Satara Government of Foot-​Whipping) created its own system of dispensing revolutionary justice, organized self-​help groups to carry out constructive work, and even issued uniforms for its rebel army right through to 1946. In response to Congress appeals to cease armed operations, Nana Patil, one of the Satara leaders, replied ‘the advice you gave us . . . to throw out the English according to his own understanding, was what we followed. We fought the English through the guerrilla methods 53 

Indivar Kamtekar, ‘A Different War Dance: State and Class in India, 1939–​1945’; Past & Present, 176 (Aug. 2002), pp. 187–​22; Indivar Kamtekar, ‘The Shiver of 1942’; Studies in History, 18/​1 (2002). 54  Reports of the subdivisional officer of Begusarai; Stephen Hennigham, ‘Quit India in Bihar and the Eastern United Provinces: The Dual Revolt’; Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), Appendix: ‘Report on Civil Disobedience Movement’. 55  Hitesranjan Sanyal, ‘The Quit India Movement in Medinipur District’, in Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta, A.P. Bagchi, 1988); Bidyut Chakrabarty, Local Politics and Indian Nationalism: Midnapur, 1919–​1944 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997).

288   Gajendra Singh of Shivaji Maharaj’.56 The line between violence and non-​violence had become completely porous, with Gandhi’s 1942 slogan of ‘Karo ye Maro!’ (‘Do or Die!’) becoming instead ‘Karo aur Maaro’ (‘Do and Kill’). It is difficult to write more of Quit India, because it is difficult to know more. Provincial state archives contain episodic fragments of official reportage of ‘incidents’ and ‘outrages’, which allowed for Stephen Henningham to write of his ‘dual revolt’ in eastern UP and Bihar.57 Quit India in Midnapur is discoverable because of the disclosure of secret police archives in Bengal by post-​independence communist governments claiming ownership of moments of revolutionary violence whether they were communistic or not.58 A.B. Shinde was only able to write what he did of Satara by accessing files in the State Intelligence Bureau in Mumbai which are normally closed to researchers (Bart Moore-​Gilbert later repeated the trick by playing up his family’s connections to the colonial Indian Police).59 These fragmented shards allow for the writing of specific localities but are not numerous enough to write of India as a whole. There has never been a systematic attempt to gather these fragments when the resources and will were there—​such as through the Indian Council of Historical Research’s part-​funded and now part-​aborted official documentary history of the period.60 Even if these fragments were collated, it would allow for an analysis of the crisis of the colonial state from 1942, but not the multiple revolutionary consciousnesses that made the violence possible. The revolutionary is largely absent from these accounts and traduced to the mob, the riot, and emeute. They can only be approached by placing Quit India in the context of older revolutionary traditions—​of the early 1930s and the 1910s. The story of Quit India, and of violent revolutionary insurrection more generally, becomes a story of ghosts and partial presences—​of the dead and the disappeared who only now survive in the demonologies of the state and later attempts at reclamation by the political left and in occasional works of history.

Conclusion: Towards a Poetics of Ugliness This chapter promised to destabilize axes of violence and non-​violence, intellectual history and social history, and ideas of the local and the global when considering revolutionary violence in South Asian history. To do so requires first to resist the temptation of the redemptive or hagiographic narrative; the prosopopoeia of summoning the dead to an act of speech and then forcing speech in a register suitable to our audience. Even the most noble of causes employed and recruited through bodily violences with which we would, and should, struggle to fathom and identify: of torture, sexual violence, and bodily mutilation. It also requires us

56 A.B. Shinde, The Parallel Government of Satara: A Phase of the Quit India Movement, (New Delhi: Allied, 1990). 57  Hennigham, ‘Quit India in Bihar and the Eastern United Provinces: The Dual Revolt’. 58 Cf. P.N. Chopra (ed.), Quit India Movement: British Secret Documents, Vol. 1, (New Delhi: Interprint, 1986). 59 Shinde, The Parallel Government of Satara; Bart Moore-​ Gilbert, The Setting Sun: A Memoir of Empire and Family Secrets (London: Verso, 2014). 60 The Towards Freedom project and volumes of collected documents.

Revolutionary Violence in India, 1905–1947    289 to peer beyond the demonologies of the state which tend to privilege revolutionary thought rather than violent praxes, and obscure agency and consciousness in the Global South through those cyphers that reduce insurrection to natural phenomena—​‘they break out like thunder storms, heave like earthquakes, spread like wildfires, infect like epidemics’.61 This double act of disavowal allows us to consider revolutionaries who were not photogenic or literary apostles, who could sometimes stumble into revolutionary conspiracies by accident rather than by design, and who were later treated as traitors by one side and insane by the other—​men such as Jodh Singh, who I have written about elsewhere.62 It also allows us to make sense of another side of the story of revolutionary violence which the form and format of this piece does not and has not allowed for (more because I struggle to write with brevity than any fault of the format itself). The trajectories of revolutionary violence in India did not just lead to the nobilities of mass insurrection in Quit India (or what might be more easily stylized as a noble cause); they also led to the reverse. Those provinces of Punjab and Bengal that have featured so heavily in this piece were also those which suffered most with communal violence, paramilitary mobilization, and genocide in the 1940s. The revolutionary cause was not the antonym of the communal; one was the dark twin of the other. Paramilitary killings in Punjab in 1947 mirrored techniques used in revolutionary causes and involved individuals that could seamlessly move between causes of both left and right. The moral economy of revolutionary violence in early twentieth-​century India was not marginal to the nationalist mainstream, but by the 1940s was the main expression of politics through South Asia. Take, for instance, Gehal Singh of Chhajjalvaddi village in Amritsar district, who, because he was a communist speaking out against the killing of Muslims, could be reported, abducted, and ritually killed with the complicity of individuals who later dominated domestic politics in post-​colonial Indian Punjab and became advocates of non-​ violent protest:63 A colonial operator Sir Cyril Radcliffe had drawn a dividing line to dismember the body of Punjab. A new country called Pakistan—​the land of the pure—​purportedly on the basis of the religion of Islam came into being. Migration of population[s]‌on the largest scale in known human history was taking place and the Muslims and Sikhs were slaughtering each other. A full-​fledged civil war was on. In the total madness, there were some sane voices around. The Punjabi communists of Sikh, Hindu and Muslim backgrounds were actively involved in peace committees trying to save the lives of innocent people. Comrade Gehal Singh was one of them. Instigated by some Sikh leaders of Akal Sea who were behind the butchering of Muslims in the district of Amritsar, Gehal Singh was abducted in a jeep one evening while he was cycling back home. He was tortured in Burj Phoola Singh. His hair was cut and body was hacked into pieces and later it was said to have been thrown in the burning furnaces in the langar community kitchen of the Golden Temple. That was the end of a great humanitarian—​a gurmukh—​ true Sikh. The known culprits were never brought to justice.64

61  Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-​Insurgency’, Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 195–​196. 62  Gajendra Singh, ‘Jodh Singh, the Ghadar Movement and the Anti-​Colonial Deviant in the Anglo-​ American Imagination’, Past & Present, 245/​1 (November 2019), 187–​219. 63  Particularly Darshan Singh Pheruman. 64  Amarjit Chandan, ‘Gehal Singh: A Martyr of the Supreme Cause’, Surakh Rekha (October 1983).

290   Gajendra Singh To understand the place of revolutionary violence in South Asia—​its moral economy—​ requires us to destabilize those axes of violence/​non-​violence, intellectual/​social, and local/​ global, which has been done here in looking at three periods of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the 1910s, and the 1940s. But it also requires us to appreciate violence as praxis and act and not just ideal, in order to see it in its ugliness.

Select Bibliography Chakrabarty, Bidyut, Local Politics and Indian Nationalism: Midnapur, 1919–​ 1944 (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997). Ghosh, Durbha, Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–​ 1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Harper, Tim, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2020). Kamtekar, Indivar, ‘A Different War Dance: State and Class in India, 1939–​1945’, Past & Present, 176 (August 2002), 187–​122. Kamtekar, Indivar, ‘The Shiver of 1942’, Studies in History, 18/​1 (2002). Singh, Juss Satwinder, The Execution of Bhagat Singh: Legal Heresies of the Raj (Stroud, Glos.: Amberley Publishing, 2020). Maclean, Kama, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (London: Hurst, 2015). Pandey, Gyanendra (ed.), The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta: A.P. Bagchi, 1988). Ramnath, Maia, From Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Raza, Ali, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Shinde, A.B., The Parallel Government of Satara: A Phase of the Quit India Movement (New Delhi: Allied, 1990). Singh, Gajendra, ‘Jodh Singh, the Ghadar Movement and the Anti-​Colonial Deviant in the Anglo-​American Imagination’, Past & Present, 245/​1 (November 2019), 187–​219.

Chapter 15

T he Afrikaner Re be l l i on 191 4 –​1 9 15 Internal Conflict and the Counter-​Insurgency Campaign

Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag The reasons for the outbreak of the Afrikaner rebellion or gewapende protes (armed protest) of 1914–​1915 are as sundry as they are varied.1 For many Afrikaners the rebellion was a defining moment in the development of a vigorous nationalism, which unequivocally rejected reconciliation between the two white settler communities—​English and Dutch—​ and the attempts that were being made to construct a new national identity or ‘South Africanism’ within the Union of South Africa.2 Their rallying cry was ‘South Africa first’. Articulated by the Free State politician, former Boer War general, and founder of the National Party, J.B.M. Hertzog, its main objective was to champion Afrikaner interests and promote Afrikaner culture. For the takhaars or backveld Boers who made up the majority of the rank-​and-​file in the rebel commandos, the rebellion symbolized an attempt to preserve a way of life threatened by the modernizing forces of capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization; forces being eagerly embraced by a younger, reform-​driven, and commercially savvy generation of Afrikaner leaders personified by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. Most of the 11,681 rebels were concentrated in the impoverished areas of the southwestern Transvaal and northeastern Orange Free State (OFS), which when mapped provides a fascinating insight into the geography of dissent (see Figure 15.1).3 The rebellion, for them, was an opportunity to defend traditional values, preserving the old patriarchal order epitomized by the commando system above all. Hence, the origins of rebel discontent lie largely in what

1 

Albert Grundlingh, ‘Die Rebellie van 1914: ‘n historiografiese verkenning’, Kleio, 11 (1979), 18–​30. Dubow, ‘Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten and the Rise of “South Africanism”, 1902–​10’, History Workshop Journal, 43/​1 (1997), 53–​85; John Lambert, ‘South African British? Or Dominion South Africans? The Evolution of an Identity in the 1910s and 1920s’, South African Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 197–​220. 3  South African National Defence Force (SANDF), Documentation Centre, Provost Marshal’s records (PMK), box 108, file PM 920, Innocence Commission, 1915. 2  Saul

292    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag

154

KEY 7119 Natal Transvaal Cape Province Total

10

10 21

18

18 10

277

19

1

210

11

171

17 7

18 7

63

11

153 218 586

3 4

675 1 678 326 460 182 554 625 819 906 169 127

309

49

4

1 46 1 2

1 1

Magisterial boundaries Provincial boundaries

424

1015

216 181

2

240

5

4 2998 590 10711

1

1

Witwatersrand: Johannesburg 23 Boksburg 3 Germiston 1

Map 15.1  The geography of dissent: rebel numbers according to South African magisterial districts. Source: South African Department of Defence Archives, Provost Marshal correspondence files (PMK), box 108, file PM 920, Innocence Commission.

Stathis Kalyvas terms the interface between the political and private domains where, in the South African case, the networks of kinship and the politics of post-​Anglo-​Boer War poverty were entwined.4 Economic pressures had undermined the white poor or bywoners. Unable to secure credit, including material aid from the state, they were disillusioned, bitter, and volatile.5 Their discontent aggravated by four years of severe drought, this marginalized and increasingly destitute group within Afrikaner society saw nothing to lose by taking up arms.6 It was within this increasingly polarized white settler society that the Afrikaner rebellion unfolded. The traditional interpretation, first espoused in the 1940s as part of a triumphalist master narrative,7 is that Afrikaner nationalists, disenchanted with a dominion government that no longer reflected their interests, saw the outbreak of war in Europe as an 4 Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars’, Perspectives on Politics, 1/​3 (2003), 475. 5  J. Bottomley, ‘The Orange Free State and the Rebellion of 1914: The Influence of Industrialisation, Poverty and Poor Whiteism’, in R. Morrell (ed.), White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–​1940 (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1992), 29–​39; S. Swart, ‘“Desperate Men”: The 1914 Rebellion and the Politics of Poverty’, South African Historical Journal, 42 (2000), 161–​175. 6  British Library (BL), Viscount Sydney Buxton papers, Add MS 87063, ‘Report on the Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–​15’, fol 140; National Archives and Record Services of South Africa (NARSSA), Pretoria, J. S. Gubbins papers, A1134, Gubbins to his sister Bertha, 6 November 1914. 7  G.D. Scholtz, Die Rebellie 1914–​15 (Johannesburg: Voorktrekkerpers, 1942).

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    293 opportunity to sever the repressive imperial connection.8 While memories of the past and the desire to restore the old order of things under the republican flag may have galvanized rank-​and-​file support, motivations among rebel leaders appear more personal—​related to wealth, prestige, personality clashes, and power. As Kalyvas argues, civil wars are not binary struggles. Rather, they mark the convergence of seemingly ambiguous processes that promote joint action between ‘local motives and supralocal imperatives’. These processes, he suggests, lend civil wars ‘their particular and often puzzling character, straddling the divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual’. The South African rebellion reflects these complex forces at work, local and regional divergences often eclipsing ideological ones.9 These cleavages within an evolving Afrikaner nation highlighted the competing dynamisms within a white, ethnically fractured, predominantly rural settler society already competing with a rival British settler community for political and economic mastery. Equally significant in the context of this insurgency is to identify the impetuses of the loyal Afrikaners in supporting General Botha in what amounted to an Afrikaner civil war.10 What strategies were forged by Pretoria to ensure that this loyalty was maintained after the rebellion was quashed? Central to this thinking were the forms and severity of punishment meted out to the rebels, especially the leaders. One note of caution. To say that this conflict was exclusively a ‘white man’s war’ would be inaccurate. Africans within the vicinity of military operations suffered material losses and occasional acts of violence as both rebel and government forces commandeered food, horses, and labour. With few exceptions, the overwhelming message from the majority African population, who had no recourse to constitutional machinery, was compliance with Botha’s government. This stood in stark contrast to the avowed disloyalty of elements within Afrikanderdom itself.11 Historians are only now beginning to explore the reconciliation strategies initiated by the fledgling Union government.12 What is clear is that the form and severity of punishment of rebels became highly politicized during and immediately after the rebellion. Leniency was deemed politically essential in both Pretoria and London as Botha sought to conciliate his fellow Afrikaners, avoiding the creation of martyrs to the nationalist cause. In the end, only one rebel was executed: Jopie Fourie, who had not resigned his commission from the Union Defence Force (UDF) before joining the rebels. Found guilty of treason by a general field court martial, he was shot on 21 December 1914 by a firing party composed of twelve men: four from the South African Police, four from the South African Mounted Rifles, and four from an undisclosed Active Citizen Force (ACF) regiment. Apart from the ringleaders, most rebels were released from imprisonment by late 1915. New research, however,

8  T.R.H. Davenport, ‘The South African Rebellion, 1914’, English Historical Review, 78/​106 (1963), 73–​ 94; S.B. Spies, ‘The Outbreak of the First World War and the Botha Government’, South African Historical Journal, 1 (1969), 47–​57. 9  Kalyvas, ‘Ontology of “Political Violence” ’, 475–​494. 10  Kent Fedorowich, ‘Sleeping with the Lion? The Loyal Afrikaner and the South African Rebellion of 1914–​15’, South African Historical Journal, 49 (2003), 71–​95. 11 Albert Grundlingh, Fighting Their Own War: South African Blacks and the First World War (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1987), 21–​7. 12 Albert Grundlingh and Sandra Swart, Radelose Rebellie? Dinamika van die 1914–​ 1915 Afrikannerrebellie (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2009); Bill Nasson, WWI and the People of South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2014), chap 5.

294    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag illuminates more complex circumstances, as Botha and his ministers worked to reconcile a section of the Afrikaner community left behind by developments within their country.

Poverty and the Politics of Protest, 1899–​1914 Ever since 1815, the loyalty of South Africa—​the weakest link in the imperial chain—​sparked serious anxieties in London. The reconstruction of war-​torn South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century and, more significantly, the creation of the Union in 1910, were important benchmarks in the British political strategy to preserve the imperial connection in this volatile and faction-​ridden dominion. The architect of Britain’s reconstruction policy, Sir Alfred Milner, high commissioner for South Africa and governor of the Cape and Transvaal between 1897 and 1905, insisted that a policy of ‘Anglicization’ was key to a new and vigorous British South Africa. His chief fear was Afrikaner nationalism, which he regarded as the most destabilizing force in southern Africa. To foster white racial harmony, Afrikaners would be encouraged to participate in the new industrial order while British immigrants had to be attracted and settled in rural areas to dilute Afrikaner dominance. These policies failed spectacularly. Instead of reconciling the two white settler communities, Milner’s initiatives stoked the fires of a renewed republicanism in the first decade after the Treaty of Vereeniging (1902).13 The South African War also left an indelible mark on a deeply divided Afrikaner community. Not all burghers enlisted with the republican forces to fight the British. Many evaded the call to arms, in part to safeguard their farms and families. Self-​interest also drove many Boers to surrender during the conflict’s first phase. Despite early Boer successes in the last three months of 1899, Britain’s military pressure eventually took its toll. In late February 1900, the British finally broke through the Natal front. From the Cape, Field Marshal Lord Roberts, commander of the British forces, launched his assault on the OFS in early March, its object being to capture Bloemfontein. This was achieved unopposed on 13 March 1900 with demoralizing effect on the Free State commandos. Roberts followed up this success when he crossed into the Transvaal in mid-​May. Johannesburg fell quickly on 31 May, followed five days later by the surrender of Pretoria. As with their Free State brethren, many Transvaalers, despondent, quietly drifted back to their farms. Hundreds more surrendered. Albert Grundlingh, in his ground-​breaking analysis of Boer collaboration during the South African War, has estimated that between March and July 1900, a total of 12,000 Free State and 14,000 Transvaal burghers surrendered their arms to the British—​roughly 22% and 26% respectively of the total number of men liable for military service.14 The onset of the guerrilla phase in September 1900 revitalized hope within Afrikaner ranks. As a result, some of these surrendered burghers returned to their commandos, including some who had taken a neutrality oath promising not to take up arms against the British for the duration of the war. Nonetheless, the damage to the Afrikaner community 13 

Donald Denoon, A Grand Illusion. The Failure of Imperial Policy in the Transvaal Colony during the Period of Reconstruction 1900–​1905 (Longman: London, 1973). 14  Albert Grundlingh, The Dynamics of Treason: Boer Collaboration in the South African War of 1899–​ 1902 (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2006), 38–​41.

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    295 was done. Many other surrendered burghers, dubbed ‘joiners’ or hensoppers (literally hands-​uppers), enlisted with the British, serving primarily as scouts, guides, and intelligence operatives. In June 1901, levels of military help provided by surrendered burghers were rising; and for senior officers such as Lord Kitchener this burgher corps—​named National Scouts in the Transvaal and Volunteers in the renamed Orange River Colony—​became more than a military instrument. They would be the wedge that drove discord deeper within the Afrikaner community, a crucial political weapon in a divide and rule policy designed to ensure that this settler community remained fragmented.15 The war also catalysed change in the Afrikaner leadership. By September 1900, military defeats swept away some of the ‘old guard’, including General P.A. Cronjé at Paardeberg in February 1900, and Transvaal president, Paul Kruger, who fled into exile in June. As several South African historians have argued, a younger, more innovative generation of leaders emerged during the war’s guerrilla phase, an admixture of progressive farmers and educated professionals:16 men, like Louis Botha, who had eagerly embraced growing market opportunities provided by railway expansion and its linkage to the Witwatersrand gold fields prior to 1899.17 Even within this new Afrikaner elite, though, intense, often bitter personal and regional rivalries persisted, evident, for instance, in animosities between the Botha–​Smuts nexus whose power base was the Transvaal, and generals Christiaan de Wet and Hertzog who were Free Staters. Added to this was the cult of personality. Botha, De Wet, and another prominent Boer general, C.F. Beyers, were all charismatic leaders able to cultivate connections with their supporters by building on their battlefield exploits against the British. These networks of loyalty, based on ties of family and kinship, ran deep. But they were also points of contestation, fuelling factionalism among elements of this new Afrikaner leadership. Rivalry among the new elites and the pressures it put on Afrikaner communities can best be illustrated by looking at the work of integration, and the creation of the UDF as a ‘middle ground’,18 a task that fell to Jan Smuts as defence minister two years after the Union of South Africa was created in 1910. Smuts believed that the UDF was pivotal to building a broad national spirit and relied on a small group of carefully selected advisers, some of whom were his former enemies.19 Formed from 1 July 1912, the UDF combined men from the Cape colonial forces, the Transvaal volunteers, the Natal militia, the resurrected Boer commandos in the Transvaal and the Orange River colonies, and several colonial police forces, plus a cohort of British advisers and instructors. Many of these men had fought against each other in the South African War. They were drawn from three, competing military traditions, were tied politically to the four new provinces of the Union, and spoke two languages: Dutch and 15 

Ibid., 370–​371. Pretorius, Life on Commando During the Anglo-​ Boer War 1899–​ 1902 (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1999), 252–​265; Ian van der Waag, ‘Boer Generalship and the Politics of Command’, War in History, 12/​1 (2005), 15–​43. 17 P. Lewsen (ed.), Selections from the Correspondence of John X. Merriman 1899–​ 1905 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 1966), 352. 18 The term ‘middle ground’—​ as a place of exaggerated harmony and shared understanding—​is borrowed from Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–​1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ix–​xi. 19  Smuts to M.T. Steyn, former president of the OFS, 20 January 1911, in A.H. Marais (ed.), Politieke Briewe, vol. 2 1911–​1912 (Cape Town and Johannesburg: Vir die Instituut vir Eietydse Geskiedenis, 1973), 7. 16 Fransjohan

296    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag English. Although the larger questions of structure, efficiency, and military culture were balanced to a remarkable degree with the competing sectarian interests during the initial stages of the UDF’s formation, there were strong political undercurrents in the Union prior to the outbreak of the First World War, which exacerbated the factionalism within the Afrikaner community. This shaped the dynamics of the rebellion. In other words, the ‘middle ground’ desired by Smuts and others risked becoming a contested ideational space of ‘adversarial cooperation’ between groups and individuals jockeying for influence.

Planning for Rebellion The Afrikaner rebellion unfolded in three distinct phases. The first began with early indications of unrest in the Lichtenburg district of the western Transvaal soon after the outbreak of war in Europe in early August. It ended with the accidental shooting of General J.H. de la Rey on 15 September 1914 as he and Beyers were en route to raise the rebel standard at Potchefstroom. De la Rey, who had a substantial following, is a tragic figure. Sincere, he was respected by all sides. Deneys Reitz, a Botha stalwart, is possibly correct in surmising that De la Rey’s consent, if given, had come through other men—​including the prophet Siener van Rensburg—​‘playing on his religious beliefs’.20 The Maritz Rebellion, coinciding with the defeat of a South African column at Sandfontein on 26 September 1914, marked a second phase, while the rebellion led by Beyers, De Wet, and J.C.G. Kemp in the Transvaal and OFS, to conjoin with Manie Maritz, constituted a third phase. These steps culminated in Maritz’s invasion of the Cape at the head of a force that included German troops, the concurrent revolt in the northern and western Transvaal, and De Wet’s operations in the northern OFS. The possibility of a ‘Boer Rebellion’, postulated by British officials after 1902, became less of a concern after the concession of self-​government to the Transvaal and Orange River Colony in 1907 and 1908 respectively, but Smuts knew there were problems. Language had become the new frontline—​many of the military instructors were British and most drills and directives were given in English. Headlines such as ‘No Dutch, No Drill’, in a leading Afrikaans newspaper De Volkstem, undermined cohesion and fostered distrust. Smuts increasingly confronted rank insubordination and was surprised at the regularity with which he had to cajole Union officers to abide by the policies and conventions of the new defence force, including the language issue and the dress regulations. Yet, until at least mid-​ September 1914, neither Smuts nor Botha expected things to erupt so dramatically. Both were cautious men. They knew the ‘Boer mind’ and their penchant for armed protest, and recognized that, in creating a new ‘white’ South Africa, there would necessarily be opposition. Conversely, as Smuts confided to a leading Cape politician, J.X. Merriman, in September 1913, the government had to ensure ‘that the work of union [was] not endangered by a reactionary provincial spirit, which seem[ed] also to be growing’.21 The threat was clearly 20 

Deneys Reitz, Trekking On (Edinburgh: Emslie, 2012), 17. to Merriman, 4 September 1913, W.K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel (eds.), Selections from the Smuts Papers, vol. 3 June 1910–​November 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 130–​131. 21  Smuts

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    297 recognized and corroborated by news Smuts received from various sources, including an anxious former comrade-​in-​arms, Deneys Reitz, in the northern Orange Free State. Indeed, a reasonably effective network of magistrates, police, native affairs officials, stationmasters, and telegraphers were already providing a relatively comprehensive intelligence picture by mid-​September 1914. While the first official report on the rebellion, drawn up in 1915, states that ‘the members of the Government were . . . in happy ignorance of the blow about to fall upon them’,22 we know that the commander of the Pretoria CID, Lieutenant-​Colonel H.F. Trew, had been monitoring the rebel leadership, including De la Rey’s and Beyer’s movements when they both arrived by train in the capital on 14 September 1914.23 Smuts was not a man to leave matters to chance. It was the scale of the rebellion, rather than its outbreak, which surprised the government. In all, there were 10,711 rebels within the Union in addition to the 970 of Maritz’s force, bringing the total to 11,681. Those in the Union showed a marked geographic variation: 66.4% in the OFS, 27.8% in the Transvaal, 5.5% in the Cape Province, and the remaining 0.3% in Natal. The rebel leadership included the so-​called icons (De la Rey, Beyers, De Wet, Maritz) as well as the other ‘diehards’ at Vereeniging (A.J. Bester, Kemp, J.F. Naudé, C.A. van Niekerk). The overwhelming majority were farmers. Yet, what worried the constitutionalists most was the defection of at least 208 UDF officers. They came from seven of the Union’s thirteen military districts, including 69.2% from military district 10, Kroonstad, in the Orange Free State.24 Their defection—​which illustrates the geographic specificities of dissent—​ highlighted the fragility of the union, the inherent weaknesses of the UDF, and the manifest failure of Botha’s nation-​building programme. Planning for the rebellion started years earlier. Several Boer officers, including Maritz, had close ties with the German community in neighbouring South West Africa. They campaigned together during the German-​Herero War (1904–​1907), they had a common adversary in Great Britain, and Maritz at least had discussed the possibilities of effecting political change in the Union with the German military and colonial staffs in Windhoek.25 Moreover, Beyers, who was Maritz’s brother-​in-​law, had visited Germany in 1912, meeting the Kaiser and, more importantly, conferring with various members of the German Imperial Staff. And then, at Beyers’s insistence, Maritz was appointed to the command of military district 13, which bordered German South West Africa, giving Maritz the time and space to conduct discussions across the Orange River. By late August 1914, following Botha’s conference of commandants, the German commander in South West Africa, Joachim von Heydebreck, was in possession of the Union’s plans for the forthcoming operations against the colony. The Germans no doubt fomented dissent and provided material and operational support, but much more would be required.

22 

UG 10–​’15, Report. Outbreak of the Rebellion. Policy of the Government with Regard to its Suppression (1915), 15. 23  H.F. Trew, Botha Treks (London: Blackie and Son, 1936), 5 and 20. 24  SANDF, Documentation Centre, Adjutant General’s papers, AG 14, box 32, file AG14 WO1, ‘Lyste van Rebelle’ (1914); ibid., PMK, box 105, file PM2/​1883. 25  UG 42–​’16. Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Causes of and Circumstances Relating to the Recent Rebellion in South Africa. Minutes of Evidence. (1916), testimony of Lieutenant-​Colonel B. D. Bouwer, UDF officer, 37–​41; J.C.G. Kemp, Die Pad van die Veroweraar (Cape Town: Nasionale Pers, 1942), 107–​108.

298    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag Raising a rebellion was one thing. Conducting irregular warfare to achieve the political change the rebels sought was quite another. ‘Historically’, James D. Kiras reminds us, ‘the balance sheet favours those who fight against terrorist and insurgent groups’.26 In the initial stages of an insurgency, rebels are usually weaker than the government forces. In order to succeed, they need to remain concealed, wear down the government, and coerce it to make political concessions. In this form of conflict, the political and social dimensions are more significant than military engagement. The rebel leadership would have to accomplish several things in order to achieve their purpose. They would have to attract substantial internal and international support. Significant backing among the Afrikaner population might be garnered through cultural appeals to history and the predikants of the Dutch Reformed Church. But it would be more difficult to reduce the government’s military, financial, and institutional advantages. Two things were essential to rebel success: external material and moral support, and large-​scale defections by Union officers. For the moment, using emotive, value-​laden language, the rebels fought on fronts that were religious, social, cultural, and economic. Matters came to a head in August 1914, far quicker than thoughtful rebels might have hoped. Once the armed rebellion started, and the advantages in terms of timing and space had been lost, all would rest on the legitimacy the movement had gained and on the internal and external support it might get. Events moved quickly. Afrikaner nationalists questioned the legitimacy of the Union government’s war plans. Meetings were held, attended by armed men in relatively large numbers. Evidence that Germans had been inciting feeling in these circles, and had promised support, reached the government. Increased activity on the German side of the border was reported, and a Vrijkorps of some 300 burghers was established in German South West Africa, comprising renegade South Africans led by Andries de Wet, a cousin of General Christiaan de Wet. The conspirators certainly made a political impact. They mobilized Afrikaner national consciousness, used past grievances, and, from the pulpit of key Dutch Reformed Churches, made strong emotional appeals. Nor should we ignore the visions of the self-​styled prophet from the western Transvaal, Nikolaas van Rensburg, which added a messianic dimension to the rebellion. Without over-​estimating the influence of this farmer’s brand of white millenarianism, there is no doubt that he struck a chord in poverty-​stricken rural Afrikanerdom.27 But much more was needed. The rebel commandos were weak, lacking modern weapons. They were disorganized and poorly led. External assistance was, in the event, minimal. Commandos might sustain the threat of violence against selected civilian and political targets to provoke a draconian governmental response that might, in turn, galvanize popular sympathy. Conversely, acts of violence made it easier for government forces to locate, quarantine, and destroy the rebel pockets.

26 

James D. Kiras, ‘Irregular Warfare: Terrorism and Insurgency’, in J. Baylis, James J. Wirtz, and Colin S. Gray (eds.), Strategy in the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 173. 27  Albert Grundlingh, ‘Probing the Prophet: The Psychology and Politics of the Siener van Rensberg Phenomenon’, South African Historical Review, 34 (1996), 225–​239.

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    299

The Government’s Counter-​Insurgency Campaign Government defence planners, after 1902, had prepared for a possible ‘Boer Rebellion’. This they presumed would take the form of a general rising among the Dutch population, beginning with commando actions in remote locations.28 Rebel bands were expected to collect arms and ammunition, cut the railway lines in various places, establish communications with other rebel bands, and ‘stiffen the backs’ of the more cautious. Some Boers were thought likely to watch events unfold before committing themselves. ‘Theirs’, according to government strategists, ‘was not a question of loyalty but one of opportunity’.29 Smuts inherited these defence plans together with the lists of names the colonial strategists had kept of ‘dissident Boers’ and their numbers. These were carefully plotted on maps and supported the notion of a distinct geography of dissent, which reflected a particular pattern of localized opposition to Pretoria based on the overlapping vectors of white rural poverty, republican nostalgia, mounting political ostracism, and deep-​rooted rivalries among local Afrikaner elites. Prior to 1910, government strategy rested on several assumptions. Key in any emergency was the holding of a heartland that covered the intersections of the Transvaal, Orange River, and Natal colonies as well as the main railway connections between the Witwatersrand and the coast. Martial law would be declared at the first sign of an uprising. Colonial volunteer regiments would be mobilized to protect the main railway lines, and blockhouses that guarded the important bridges and railroad junctions would be reoccupied. Here the employees of the South African Railways and Harbours Administration (SAR&H) played critical roles: stationmasters knew their stretches of rail and its hinterland; they could monitor unusual activity; and they could store the materials needed to maintain the blockhouses in their districts. Harrismith, a key railway junction inside the OFS, would have to be held in sufficient strength. This was De Wet territory. Using this blueprint, Pretoria reacted quickly to the first signs of the rebellion in 1914. The invasion of German South West Africa was immediately halted, allowing the UDF to focus on the suppression of the impending insurgency. Martial law was proclaimed on 12 October, while most of the military sections, until then dispersed about the Union, were centralized at a new defence headquarters established in the old Artillery Barracks in Potgieter Street, Pretoria. This building complex, vacated recently by imperial troops, provided the Department of Defence with a central node from which to coordinate operations. Beyers’s resignation as commandant-​general of the ACF in mid-​September, and his later defection, created a leadership vacuum, which Louis Botha readily filled as the new commander-​in-​chief-​in-​field. Both sides recognized that the rebellion’s prospects hinged on Botha’s ability to galvanize government troops.30 The burghers of the Transvaal followed him personally. Former Boer general Coen Brits sent the following telegram in response to Botha’s request for support: ‘My men are ready; who do we fight—​the English or 28 SANDF,

Documentation Centre, Diverse Group, box 31, ‘Defence Scheme Boer Rising’, Natal Defence Scheme ‘A’, 1906. 29 Ibid. 30  Fedorowich, ‘Sleeping with the Lion?’, 81.

300    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag the Germans?’31 Such resolute allegiance reinforces the primacy of the cult of personality and the clientage networks that were critical on both sides. Botha’s presence in the field freed him of other matters and reassured him that if his officers and men were ordered to fire on those of their own race—​many of whom were relations, neighbours, or friends—​the order would be obeyed without hesitation. By undertaking personal command against the rebel forces, Botha demonstrated two underlying motivations. One was a bid for unity among his Afrikaner supporters, drawing on their sense of fealty and kinship. The other was a call for national unity: imploring all white South Africans to back their government in its hour of need. As Governor-​General Sydney Buxton informed London, Botha had stressed to him several times that he wanted to ‘carry this job through with his own people, and by his own personal influence’.32 It was equally important for the government, and the country, to show that the Union leadership had the political will, and the UDF the strength, to deal with such an internal emergency. For this reason, Botha insisted that the rebellion would be suppressed using South African forces only, and with Dutch-​speaking troops as far as possible. In this way he could stamp his own authority, curb Afrikaner disagreement, and limit any loss of political capital sure to occur were British intervention and the use of imperial force required.33 When the government forces entered the Free State town of Reitz, the inhabitants, many of them strongly pro-​rebel and believing that Botha was leading an imperial army from overseas, had expected to see British soldiers. An elderly woman is reputed to have rushed into the street, but, seeing only ordinary burghers, exclaimed: ‘But, where are the bloody English?’. To this a young government scout, Dutch-​speaking like her, retorted: ‘Old lady, we are the bloody English!’.34 For this reason, Free State commandos were also deployed against De Wet, rather than Transvaalers. This was part of the all-​important political dimension. The deployment of Afrikaner forces to suppress internal dissent of their coethnics without outside aid inculcated a greater sense of South African self-​reliance. Concomitantly, it enhanced the legitimacy of the new leadership epitomized by Botha and Smuts, confirming their modernizing vision of South Africa in contrast to the romantic, backward notions of the Afrikaner platteland. The outbreak of the Great War, followed soon after by the rebellion, divided the country, but also presented Smuts, now freed from having to placate Hertzog, Beyers, and the others who had rebelled, with the opportunity to reorganize the UDF along more modern lines. In Smuts and Roland Bourne, the secretary for defence, Botha had capable men to transform the defence department. These men exploited the many advantages the government held. As it turned out, the rebellion’s timing proved fortuitous. The rebel leadership did not strike in August, immediately after the departure of British garrison troops for the Western Front, but at the end of September, when the defence force was mobilizing for the campaign in

31 

Quoted in Reitz, Trekking On, 36. Library, Viscount Lewis Harcourt papers, dep. 471, fol. 60, Buxton to Harcourt, 1 November 1914. 33  London secretly offered Botha the 30,000 Australian and New Zealand troops which were en route to Europe. The offer was declined. Pretoria insisted that it could rely on its own resources, for if these imperial troops were deployed in suppressing the rebellion this would have heightened further the animosity between the two white communities, which the disaffected Boers would have readily exploited. 34 Reitz, Trekking On, 35. 32 Bodleian

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    301 German South West Africa. As chance would have it, the UDF’s deployments constrained the further spread of insurgency. Firstly, Brigadier-​General H.T. Lukin’s force, deployed along the Orange River, was well positioned to contain the German forces and constrain any rebel operations in the northern Cape. Secondly, the troops within the Union could effectively isolate the rebellion’s regional centres, preventing rebel leaders from coordinating their efforts. For this reason many South African parliamentarians, including Merriman, opposed allowing talks between rebel leaders, warning against the delays resulting from negotiation.35 The UDF’s district-​based organizational structure also helped identify pockets of rebel feeling. Sedition within the UDF was limited to specific military districts: districts 7 (Potchefstroom), 10 (Kroonstad), and 13 (Kimberley) contributed 89.4% of the 208 defence force officers that joined the rebels, while, predictably perhaps, no officers joined the rebel forces from the military districts centred on Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Pietermaritzburg, Durban, and Standerton. This facilitated identification of the rebel leadership and the isolating of their commandos. Even so, such measures did not prevent Kemp’s march with some 600 men from the Transvaal to German territory. Militarily, Botha also enjoyed the advantage of a central position, using the seat of government in Pretoria as his hub. From here he maximized the advantages conferred by control of the telegraph, the railway, and road networks. Working from Pretoria or sometimes from their armoured train, Botha and Smuts dispatched columns of troops against Beyers and Kemp in the north-​western Transvaal, against De Wet in the north-​eastern Free State, and to monitor Maritz, who had joined forces with the Germans. While government commanded this central position, it could prevent rebel concentration, making suppression easier. The defence force, at the same time, underwent a remarkable transformation. The apparent need for equity was set aside. Botha and Smuts drew around them men whom they knew and trusted, regardless of language, former force membership, or provincial background. A more business-​like organization was created at defence headquarters, including an intelligence section to gather, collate, and share information from sources as diverse as the South African Police (whose strength was augmented by the creation of some 11,514 special constables), the magistrates, and stationmasters, as well as from the department for native affairs, whose information might come directly from the farms of some of the rebels. The medical services, and the logistics and supply organization, underwent similar transformations. Improving bureaucracy and modern communications enabled the Union forces to mass troops in addition to large quantities of arms and provisions, while gaining mobility over the rebels.36 The government’s exclusive access to the railway network and automobiles was significant. Coordinated by Sir William Hoy, managing director of the SAR&H, rolling stock was massed at Pretoria’s two main stations. From there, mounted units with attached field artillery were despatched by armoured train to potential trouble spots within hours. Access to train transport permitted reinforcement and resupply of government forces, harassment of marauding rebel commandos, and lightning counterattacks against an unsuspecting enemy.37 Hoy’s staff worked unceasingly guarding key installations (the railway citizen force 35  Merriman to Smuts, 8 November 1914, in Hancock and Van der Poel (eds.), Smuts Papers, vol. 3, 209–​211. 36  Fedorowich, ‘Sleeping with the Lion?’, 82. 37  William Cullen Library, University of the Witwatersrand, A103, diary of Colonel J.J. Collyer, 18 October 1914–​-7​ December 1914.

302    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag component reached 8,200 all ranks), gathering intelligence, repairing damaged lines and bridges, and constructing new railway. Most impressive, perhaps, were the 142 miles of new line in the northern Cape laid between Prieska and Upington, completed under difficult conditions on 20 November 1914. Automobiles and motorcycles offered mobility beyond the rail network. Two motorcar sections were formed in early October. Some 110 vehicles were provided by the Transvaal Automobile Club, mounted with machineguns and manned by around 500 men of the 2nd Transvaal Scottish.38 The rail network and motorized transport, plus the improved supply they conferred, enabled government forces to outflank and outgun the rebels at each encounter. Reitz, hearing how Brits had used motor vehicles to corner De Wet, felt ‘almost sorry, for it spelt the end of our picturesque South African commando system’.39 Notwithstanding these changes, the landscape of the Anglo-​Boer War seemed to re-​emerge: armoured trains and blockhouses to protect important bridges and rail junctions returned; searchlights lit up the veld; and coaches and trucks disgorged mounted men at key stations and railheads. Unsurprisingly, government forces achieved rapid success. Casualties were light: 374 killed and wounded on the government side as opposed to 515 rebels killed or wounded.40 While the rebellion was poorly planned, poorly coordinated, and poorly led, ‘the collapse . . . came sooner than [even Botha] had ventured to think’. Smuts told the Unionist MP Sir Charles Crewe that, but for the escape of Kemp, it was also ‘quite complete’.41 Military success is complex. It demands good leadership, adequate material resources, and well-​trained and resilient troops, who, as a campaign progresses, gain experience and battle-​hardiness. This the government achieved speedily. However, victory also requires viable political objectives and outcomes. This would prove far more difficult.

The Political Dimension It was obvious near the end of October 1914 that government efforts to negotiate a political solution with the rebel leadership had failed. In the meantime, martial law was declared on 12 October, its provisions rigidly enforced by a fiercely loyal network of magistrates, district officers, and special justices of the peace. After some minor skirmishes with rebel forces, the government finally declared on 26 October that South Africa was in the grip of rebellion. The following day, the Union’s chief censor issued a series of press restrictions. Significantly, any coverage concerning the events of the war or the rebellion required Pretoria’s explicit approval.42

38 

Fedorowich, ‘Sleeping with the Lion?’, 83–​84. Trekking On, 36. See also Anon., The Union of South Africa and the Great War, 1914–​ 1918: Official History (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1924), 214. 40  Official History, 25. 41  Smuts to Crewe, 18 December 1914, in Hancock and Van der Poel (eds.), Smuts Papers, vol. 3, 209–​211. 42  W.K. Hancock, Smuts, vol. 1, The Sanguine Years 1870–​ 1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 377–​394; NARSSA, Dr G. S. Preller papers, A787, vol. 212, circular from J.H. Weaver, chief censor, 27 October 1914. 39 Reitz,

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    303 During the rebellion’s opening stages, the South African cabinet also deliberated the punishment to be meted out to the rebels. Richard Feetham, former member of Milner’s Kindergarten and the legal advisor to the South African high commissioner (1907–​1910 and 1912–​1923), thought the Union government might need to shoot a few ringleaders to end the sedition. He conceded, however, that the Union government would only do this if compelled to do so ‘as they don’t want to make martyrs’.43 Buxton assured Colonial Secretary Lewis Harcourt that Botha and Smuts were prepared, if necessary, to take a hard line with the rebels. ‘But it is quite possible that they may be persuaded into very lenient treatment’.44 He later informed London that an intriguing discussion had emerged within government ranks regarding the proclamation of an amnesty, the form and severity of judicial punishments, and the possibility of pardons. Some deemed leniency politically essential; certainly, Botha was eager to conciliate his fellow Afrikaners. So, too, was the mining magnate Sir Abe Bailey, who congratulated Smuts on this ‘Forgive and Forget’ approach.45 The declaration of an amnesty on 12 November was designed to accomplish several goals. First, it was calculated to sap rebel support by sowing internal division at the local level where private grievances within the rank-​and-​file had been manipulated by the rebel leadership for ‘national’ political ends. Second, the offer of a pardon, if the insurgents surrendered by 21 November, was intended to demonstrate government leniency and Pretoria’s willingness to redress local complaints, promulgating greater disunion between the rebel rank-​and-​file and its leadership. This carrot was accompanied by a threatening stick. Rebels were warned that they had to surrender to an appropriate official before they returned to their farms. Critically, all rifles and ammunition had to be forfeited or the amnesty would be withheld. Warnings would be sent to individuals who did not surrender their firearms, giving them a small window of opportunity to do so. All serviceable horses were to be surrendered as well.46 Minor leaders in the Cape Province were allowed to return to their homes but were warned that their part in the rebellion would be investigated. If they were found to have played a conspicuous role, the full benefit of the amnesty would be withheld. When the amnesty expired, resident magistrates, district officers, and the South African Police were instructed to ‘continue to let [the] rank and file who surrender to go home peaceably and quietly and await [the] decision of [the] Government in respect of them. All rebel officers or persons of prominence such as members of parliament or provincial councils or all who have taken [a]‌prominent part in [the] rebellion should however be kept under arrest until further orders’.47 In addition, all livestock on farms of the rebel commandants and prominent rebel officers still out in the field was to be confiscated ‘without payment or receipt and 43  Rhodes House Library, Oxford, MSS Afr s 1793, Sir Richard Feetham papers, 3/​ 2, fols. 88–​92, Feetham to his mother, 23 October 1915. 44  Bodleian, Harcourt papers, dep. 471, fols. 38–​40, Buxton’s secret notes, 28 October 1914. 45  Ibid., fols. 41–​45, Buxton’s secret notes, 29 October 1914; NARSSA, J.C. Smuts papers, A1, vol. 196, fol. 14, Bailey to Smuts, 12 December 1914. 46 Cullen Library, A103, ‘Rebellion 1914–​ 15: Notifications and Treatment of Rebels’, D15/​373, 18 November 1914. 47  NARSSA, Cape Archives Depot (KAB), Cape Magistrates Records, 1/​VBG 17/​3, file 547/​14/​1, Smuts to Robert J. Crozier, Resident Magistrate, Vryburg, 20 November 1914; Cullen Library, A103, ‘Rebellion 1914–​15: Notifications and Treatment of Rebels’, circular to all Resident Magistrates, Commanding Officers and South African Police officers, 22 November 1914.

304    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag applied to the use of our forces in the field’. In fact, during the early stages of the rebellion in late October, it was suggested that the farms of rebel leaders be commandeered.48 In the OFS, where fighting had been more intense and the political stakes much higher, Pretoria was determined to maximize its opportunities for reconciliation. In January 1915, with most of the rebels in custody or in the sanctuary of German South West Africa, the acting deputy police commissioner, George Beer, reminded his district officers to assist the authorities in securing peace in the province.49 The success of the government’s approach became evident when the total number of surrendered rebels as of 17 March 1915 totalled 4,825, of which 2,054 capitulated before the government amnesty expired on 21 November 1914.50 Buxton noted that the amnesty notice had the desired effect as a steady stream of rebels surrendered. He observed that many of those who took advantage of the amnesty were from a ‘better class of farmer’ who went ‘out’. Fearing the risk of losing their property, or being called upon to pay towards the cost of the revolt, it was this more affluent and educated class who surrendered during the amnesty period. However, the rebels in the OFS were of a different social constituency. As far as could be judged, ‘the bulk of the men who are with de Wet & Co are not substantial farmers, but bijwoners [sic], who really have nothing to lose, and for whom the threat of confiscation has no terror’.51 In January 1915 the South African cabinet discussed the political strategy to be pursued, now the rebellion had been crushed. The plan had four cornerstones: clemency for the rebel rank-​and-​file, special tribunals for the rebel leadership, possible disenfranchisement, and compensation to government loyalists. Although justice needed to be served, constant reference was made to how poor, ill-​educated, and under-​privileged the majority of the rebels were. By contrast, the rebel leadership, among whom were many high-​status political and religious figures, were held to have exploited their followers’ ignorance and prejudice. According to a judicial commission chaired by Judge J.H. Lange, ‘The result of this organized system of agitation and misrepresentation [was] that the ranks of the rebels were swelled by thousands of misguided people who appear to have had unbounded faith in their recognized leaders’.52 After much deliberation, it was decided that the rebel rank-​and-​file would be granted a general amnesty. Initially, it was proposed to disenfranchise the entire cohort—​over 10,000 men. Milner adopted this strategy against the Cape insurgents in 1900; but the Union government quickly realized that if they implemented disenfranchisement they exposed themselves to the ‘damaging taunt’ that they were copying Milner’s earlier schemes and rationale.53 For those 5,886 prisoners captured during the rebellion and now in gaol, it was 48  UG 10–​’15, Outbreak of the Rebellion, 49; Cullen Library, A103, ‘Rebellion 1914–​15: Notifications and Treatment of Rebels’, Bourne to Quartermaster-​General and Provost Marshal, 28 November 1914; Bodleian, Harcourt papers, dep. 471, fol. 49, Buxton’s secret notes, 30 October 1914. 49  NARSSA, Pretoria, South African Police files, confidential files, SAP 20, Conf6/​245/​14/​152, part 2, Beer to OFS District Commandants, 27 January 1915. 50  SANDF, Documentation Centre, PMK, box 130, PM 4899, Provost Marshal (Pretoria), to Provost Marshal (Cape Town), 17 March 1915. 51  BL, Buxton papers, Add MS 86950, Buxton’s secret notes, 30 November 1914. 52  UG 46–​’16. Report of the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into the Causes of and Circumstances Relating to the Recent Rebellion in South Africa. December 1916 (1916), 100. 53  Bodleian, Harcourt papers, dep. 471, fols. 275–​81, Buxton to Harcourt, 7 January 1915.

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    305 proposed that they be kept there until the end of the German South West campaign, thus bypassing the courts. It was the rebel leadership upon which the government focused its energies. Originally, it had been decided to confine criminal prosecution by a court created under the Riotous Assemblies Act to the half dozen or so ringleaders. This would alleviate the need for the Union parliament to enact a bill to establish a special court or tribunal to try them. Botha needed to show his loyal Dutch followers and the British community that those responsible for the revolt would face severe punishment. It was then proposed to ‘widen out the list’ of prominent rebels who were to be indicted and tried for treason. They would come from the influential and well-​to-​do rebels who, from their positions in Afrikaner society, exercised influence over the rank-​and-​file. This sifting not only included those high-​profile rebels already incarcerated, but also those who had surrendered and returned home, but could be rearrested and indicted. Those convicted of treason would be disenfranchised for life, deprived of all civil rights, and be disqualified from holding public office. There was even talk of deporting the ringleaders like De Wet; a tactic deployed by Milner, where 24,000 Boer prisoners were, until 1905, banished to Bermuda, Ceylon, India, and St. Helena.54 The list of ‘traitors’ would be selected by the loyal commandants, magistrates, and trustworthy Dutch MPs.55 Ultimately, deportation was not used, in part because it smacked of Milnerism. In the end, the list of rebel leaders to be tried for treason was expanded to 289: thirty-​five from the Cape, 105 from the Transvaal, and 149 from the OFS.56 Fines imposed on these men ranged from £20 to £2,000, totalling £34,000. Gaol sentences ranged from four months to seven years. The government’s targeting of key leaders like Generals Kemp (Transvaal) and De Wet (OFS), who received the heaviest fines and longest sentences, was clearly evident: a £1,000 fine and seven years’ incarceration without hard labour for Kemp; and a £2,000 fine and six years’ incarceration without hard labour for De Wet. Not surprisingly, it was the OFS rebel leadership that received the largest fines and longest sentences. Principal military leaders such as Assistant-​Commandant-​Generals Rocco de Villiers, Wessel J. Wessels, E.A. Conroy, and N.W. Serfontein, who was also a member of the Union Assembly, received four to five years’ imprisonment. Pretoria’s resolve to isolate the rebel leadership from the rank-​ and-​file was also demonstrated when rebel commandants, field coronets, and several well-​ known religious leaders were also tried between June and October 1915.57 Clemency to the rebel rank-​and-​file, combined with the stiff resolve to punish the leadership, received a mixed reception from government loyalists. In January 1915, the pro-​ empire Transvaal Leader reported that magistrates had been informed to return stock commandeered from rebel farms during the rebellion. Local chambers of commerce complained meanwhile that the government had been slow to offer compensation to those supporters who had been looted and robbed, and their property destroyed. Why was it that the rebels were to be compensated first—​and effectively rewarded for their disloyalty—​when 54 

Wm. Matthew Kennedy, ‘The Imperialism of Internment: Boer Prisoners of War in India and Civic Reconstruction in Southern Africa, 1899–​1905’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 44/​3 (2016), 423–​447. 55  Bodleian, Harcourt papers, dep. 472, fols. 9–​15, Buxton to Harcourt, 19 January 1915. 56  S 2–​’16, The Senate. A Return of Persons tried before the Special Treason Court in the Transvaal, Orange Free State and Cape of Good Hope Provinces (1916), 2–​8. 57  Ibid.; SANDF, Documentation Centre, Diverse Group, box 1, ‘Rebellion: Treason Trials’ (1915).

306    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag government loyalists had to wait months?58 Although the government would appoint a rebellion losses commission in mid-​January 1915 to report on the damage sustained by its loyal inhabitants, as far as the Leader was concerned, Botha’s ‘Forgive and Forget’ policy stood for ‘Forgive the Rebels and Forget the Loyals’.59 Chaired by M.S. Evans, the losses commission sat for over a year. It would visit thirty-​ seven districts, hold hearings in sixty-​two communities, and take evidence from 3,450 claimants in the Transvaal, OFS, the Cape province, and Bechuanaland. Its largest task was in the OFS, where 2,225 claims were heard, or almost 78% of the caseload. A total of £72,324 in compensation was awarded.60 For Patrick Duncan, a leading jurist and Unionist politician (who would chair the second of three government enquiries into the rebellion), the government’s overarching leniency was sensible. Although some of his more assertive colleagues were baying for ‘more blood’, the government’s plan not to disenfranchise the rebels was the correct move. To disenfranchise them, Duncan argued, would foster ‘a class by themselves and strengthen the bonds of unity among them qua rebels’. He was also correct that Hertzog would attempt to manipulate their helplessness, claiming that they were being made ‘helots in their own country’.61 In an attempt to calm rising domestic tensions, martial law was withdrawn on 23 August 1915 except in the ports of Cape Town, Simon’s Town, Walvis Bay, and Durban. Wynburg was the only magistrates’ district not to have martial law rescinded.62 Botha’s South African Party (SAP) won the 1915 election but failed to obtain a clear working majority. Discouraged at the result, Botha threatened to resign from office, having faced bitter personal attacks and cries of Judas from sections of his own community. Reluctantly, and only after intense lobbying by close friends and colleagues, including Buxton, did he decide to stay on and see the war through. The political situation, although still unsettled, eased somewhat over subsequent months with the release in December 1915 of the first batch of 119 rebel leaders, including De Wet. Botha was crafty enough to realize that with minor leaders, whose sentences were nearing completion, the government could make a ‘virtue of necessity, and get credit for lenient treatment by letting them out at once’.63 But releasing De Wet, after only six months, on the promise that he would abstain from politics, was a calculated risk. It met with mixed success. Deneys Reitz, who had done so much to counter De Wet in the OFS under very trying circumstances, condemned his release as ‘a damned disgrace’. So angry was he that he told Smuts that he and his friends would resign en bloc from the SAP.64 Political temperatures continued to run high. Nonetheless, the early releases marked the beginning of a limited political armistice. Clemency remained key throughout 1916, as the emancipation of the remaining rebel leaders continued to occupy the Union government. However, Pretoria stood firm against Hertzog’s push for a general amnesty and the release of the remainder. By March 1916, all but 58 

Transvaal Leader, 12 January 1915. Sunday Times (Johannesburg), 24 January 1915; Transvaal Leader, 12 January 1915. 60  UG 40–​’16, Report of the Rebellion Losses Commission (1916). 61  Deborah Lavin (ed.), Friendship and Union: The South African Letters of Patrick Duncan and Maud Selborne 1907–​1943 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2010), 253 and 256. 62  NARSSA, KAB, 1/​AXA 7/​4, file 5307/​14, circular, n.d. 63  Parliamentary Archive (PA), J.C.C. Davidson papers, DAV 28/​63, Buxton to Andrew Bonar Law, colonial secretary, 9 December 1915. 64  Reitz to Smuts, 11 December 1915, Hancock and Van de Poel (eds.), Smuts Papers, vol. 3, 327–​328. 59 

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    307 the top fifty leaders had been released from prison.65 By July, only twenty-​two remained in captivity. Even they would have been freed had it not been for the threat of a second rebellion. The few remaining diehards, nineteen in total, were eventually released in late November 1916. The SAP and Unionist newspapers decided to remain silent on the release of the last cohort, which included the big five: Kemp and J.J. Pienaar (Transvaal) and Serfontein, Rocco de Villiers, and Wessel Wessels (OFS). By contrast, the leading Nationalist newspaper in the Cape, De Burger, was headlined ‘At Last’.66

Conclusion What suppositions can be drawn from the nature and dynamic of the South African rebellion, or, more aptly, civil war? How does this early twentieth-​century conflict fit with the majority of the essays in this volume that are engaged with post-​1945 conflicts? And does this conflict offer new avenues of research about how civil wars originate and develop? At one level, this civil war can be seen as a manifestation of nationalist ambitions within an increasingly restless settler community to overthrow the state, which the rebels argued had turned its back on its people. Afrikaner society, already fragmented on geographic, economic, and religious lines, had grown increasingly polarized since the South African War. Even before the conflict, the bywoner had become an encumbrance. His status and his tenure became more precarious, as the war of 1899–​1902 provided the opportunity for many landlords to refuse to resume patronage for those proud but poor whites who had left the land to serve with the commandos. Unsurprisingly, many opted out of the war, offered their services to the invading British, but faced vilification within their own communities as traitors. Destitute and disillusioned, they had nothing to fight for, and it is not surprising that many became hensoppers. The drift of landless bywoners to the towns and cities of an increasingly urban and industrial South Africa continued apace after 1902. By 1914, poverty was a primary factor in augmenting rebel numbers when Beyers and De Wet raised the republican standard. In other words, it was the transformation of South Africa’s rural base from a subsistence to a more commercially and market-​orientated economy which, as Patrick Duncan argued, was the essence of the rebel agitation. Change was ‘trampling’ the marginalized within Afrikaner society. ‘It is economic not political subordination but they [the Afrikaners] think they can resist it by political revolution—​so far as they are conscious of it at all’.67 As this was also a struggle over the future direction of the Afrikaner nation, one must not forget the personal rivalries and animosities within the Afrikaner leadership. Botha’s powerbase in the Transvaal ran deep, unlike Beyers, whose roots there were shallow. Botha had the added advantage of the high esteem he enjoyed among his own community throughout the country. His charisma, political experience, kinship networks, and reputation as a military commander were distinctive, setting him apart from most rebel leaders.

65 

S 2–​’16, Return of Persons, 2–​8. PA, Davidson papers, DAV 29/​132, Buxton’s secret notes, 29 November 1916. 67  Lavin (ed.), Friendship and Union, 274. 66 

308    Kent Fedorowich and Ian van der Waag Even his rival, De Wet, who was equally capable and charismatic but politically obtuse, possessed a narrower clientage network that was largely confined to the OFS. The South African civil war, like many studies in this volume, was multilayered and multifaceted. It was also defined by a distinct geography of dissent. However, three broad but interconnected themes stand out: the larger, historical grievances felt by dissident Afrikaners against Britain and the imperial connection; the national political struggle within the Afrikaner community symbolized between Botha, the conciliator, and Hertzog, the ardent nationalist; and the contest within each district for local control, which combined elements of intense rivalry, family feuding, and competing systems of patronage. This multidimensional aspect was reflected when Reitz was asked by an Irish neighbour whether the rebellion was a war between the British and the Dutch, or between Botha and Hertzog, or between himself and a local adversary and strongman David van Coller. ‘I told him it was a mixture of all three . . . ’68 Buxton was correct in saying that after the rebellion it would be the ballot box and not the rifle and bandolier that would decide the future of white South Africa. From a military viewpoint, Botha and his loyal Afrikaners defeated the rebels comprehensively. Yet, Hertzog had not rebelled, or at least had avoided being implicated, and he remained on the political scene to provide a parliamentary counterweight. The Hertzogites would argue that the government had overreacted, applying excessive state violence. In this sense, the setbacks suffered by Beyers, De Wet, and Maritz were tactical, military defeats. In the larger struggle Hertzog would triumph and win a strategic, political victory. There were now new grievances, new martyrs, and, with the help of the South African Labour Party, Hertzog would triumph at the polls in the 1924 general election, ushering in a political revolution which saw the privileging of the poor white under the banner of a ‘civilized’ labour policy in an accelerated, state-​ sponsored programme of segregation.

Select Bibliography Bottomley, J., ‘The Orange Free State and the Rebellion of 1914: The Influence of Industrialisation, Poverty and Poor Whiteism’, in R. Morrell, ed., White but Poor: Essays on the History of Poor Whites in Southern Africa 1880–​1940 (Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1992), 29–​39. Davenport, T.R.H., ‘The South African Rebellion, 1914’, English Historical Review, 78/​106 (1963), 73–​94. Denoon, Donald, A Grand Illusion. The Failure of Imperial Policy in the Transvaal Colony during the Period of Reconstruction 1900–​1905 (London: Longman, 1973). Dubow, Saul, ‘Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten and the Rise of “South Africanism”, 1902–​10’, History Workshop Journal, 43/​1 (1997), 53–​85. Fedorowich, Kent, ‘Sleeping with the Lion? The Loyal Afrikaner and the South African Rebellion of 1914–​15’, South African Historical Journal, 49 (2003), 71–​95. Garcia, Antonio, and Evert Kleynhans, ‘Counterinsurgency in South Africa: the Afrikaner Rebellion, 1914–​1915’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 32/​1 (2021), 53–​79.

68 Reitz, Trekking On, 30.

The Afrikaner Rebellion 1914–1915    309 Grundlingh, Albert, ‘Die Rebellie van 1914: ‘n historiografiese verkenning’, Kleio, 11 (1979), 18–​30. Grundlingh, Albert, and Sandra Swart, Radelose Rebellie? Dinamika van die 1914–​ 1915 Afrikannerrebellie (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2009). Kalyvas, Stathis N., ‘The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars’, Perspectives on Politics, 1/​3 (2003), 475–​494. Kiras, James D., ‘Irregular Warfare: Terrorism and Insurgency’, in J. Baylis, James J. Wirtz, and Colin S. Gray (eds.), Strategy in the Contemporary World, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 173–​194. Lavin, Deborah (ed.), Friendship and Union: The South African Letters of Patrick Duncan and Maud Selborne 1907–​1943 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2010). Spies, S.B., ‘The Outbreak of the First World War and the Botha Government’, South African Historical Journal, 1 (1969), 47–​57. Swart, S. ‘“Desperate Men”: The 1914 Rebellion and the Politics of Poverty’, South African Historical Journal, 42 (2000), 161–​175. Van der Waag, Ian. ‘Boer Generalship and the Politics of Command’, War in History, 12/​1 (2005), 15–​43.

Chapter 16

Unwanted Fri e nd s

Loyalty and Citizenship in Britain’s Imperial Wars, 1899–​1960 Daniel Branch Introduction The theme of imperial loyalty within the historiography of the British Empire is commonly associated with studies of European settler societies. Even when viewed from the informal empire, ‘the Empire’s capacity to generate a sense of belonging’ among British settlers was compelling.1 Loyalty provided a mechanism to preserve connections to the metropole and underpin notions of whiteness. Moreover, it helped create networks between settlers and settlements otherwise divided by gender, ethnicity, and class.2 At moments of great crisis, such as in the world wars, the loyalty of British settlers overseas proved to be ‘a critical element in British world power’.3 In contrast, the loyalty of non-​British, non-​white imperial subjects has been far less frequently studied. When the attention of historians has turned to the broad area of the incorporation of non-​ British imperial subjects within imperial institutions, the language used to describe such behaviour shifts from loyalty to collaboration. For more than a generation, Ronald Robinson’s modestly titled ‘sketch for a theory of collaboration’ has influenced scholars working on this 1 

T. Harris, ‘British Informal Empire during the Great War: Welsh Identity and Loyalty in Argentina’, Itinerario, 38 (December 2014), 103–​117, 111. 2  J. Griffiths, The Branch Life of Empire: Imperial Loyalty Leagues in Antipodean Cities, c.1900–​1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); D. Lowry, ‘The Crown, Empire Loyalism and the Assimilation of non-​British White Subjects in the British World: An Argument Against “Ethnic Determinism”’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31 (June 2003), 96–​120; E. Riedi, ‘Women, Gender, and the Promotion of Empire: The Victoria League, 1901–​1914’, The Historical Journal, 45 (September 2002), 569–​599; A. Woollacoot, ‘ “All This is the Empire, I Told Myself ”: Australian Women’s Voyages “Home” and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness’, The American Historical Review, 102 (October 1997), 1003–​1029. 3 J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–​1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 11.

Unwanted Friends   311 subject. As Robinson explained, collaborative actors drawn from among colonies and soon-​ to-​be colonized societies were vital to the process of empire-​building. Robinson termed this local support for imperial rule the ‘non-​European foundations of European imperialism’. Imperial expansion was, he thought, as much a product of the agency and ideas of local actors as the designs and actions of British imperialists. In other words, British imperialism came about because of the very particular and peculiar local contexts in which it operated, as well as what was happening in Britain.4 Many historians have (of course) followed Robinson’s path.5 The cumulative effect of this scholarship is the widespread acceptance among historians that role of imperial subjects in the construction and maintenance of imperial rule can hardly be overstated. Across the European empires, countless numbers of imperial subjects practiced ‘the loyalist option’.6 It was embedded in practices such as indirect rule and within the rituals of imperial governance, particularly through the monarchy.7 As police officers, clerks, chiefs, soldiers, and a whole host of other figures, imperial subjects interacted with imperial forces and acted as intermediaries to influence British rule to a profound extent.8 This chapter brings together these two strands of historiography on British imperialism—​ loyalty and collaboration—​by looking at the question of the loyalty of non-​British imperial subjects. It takes as its focus moments of anti-​colonial rebellion during the twentieth century. Many of the British and non-​British subjects of the extant literature on imperial loyalty were practising, to borrow from Ann Laura Stoler, a ‘common sense’ loyalty. These were forms of loyalty that made sense to imperial rulers and, subsequently, to historians. As we have already noted, loyalty by settlers enabled imperial control over in distant lands. Chiefs enjoyed the power of what Mamdani famously terms ‘decentralised despotism’ under indirect rule.9 Clerks and soldiers got a salary and were governed by what John Cell terms a 4 R. Robinson, ‘Non-​ European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 118–​142. 5  D. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–​1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1991); R. Lamothe, Slaves of Fortune: Sudanese Soldiers and the River War 1896–​1898 (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2011); W. Lee (ed.), Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World (New York: New York University Press, 2011); T. Stapleton, African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe 1923–​80 (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2011). 6  P. Kratoska and B. Batson, ‘Nationalism and Modernist Reform’, in Nicholas Tarling (ed.), The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol. 2, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249–​ 317, 316. 7  W. Bramwell, ‘Loyalties and the Politics of Incorporation in South Africa: The Case of Pondoland, c.1870–​1913’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2015; J. Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, in Judith Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 232–​254; M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 62–​108; H. Sapire, ‘African Loyalism and its Discontents: The Royal Tour of South Africa, 1947’, The Historical Journal, 54 (January 2011), 215–​240; H. Sapire, ‘Ambiguities of Loyalism: The Prince of Wales in India and Africa, 1921–​2 and 25’, History Workshop Journal, 73 (January 2012), 37–​65. 8  B. Lawrance, E.L. Osborn, and R. Roberts (eds.), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); P. Morgan and S. Hawkins (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9 Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.

312   Daniel Branch ‘service ideology’.10 And those loyalists that partook of the spectacle of royal visits and other ceremonial occasions practiced a form of political participation that was instantly recognizable to imperial and colonial rulers. These forms of interaction with British imperialism were examples of Stoler’s ‘epistemic habits’, ideas ‘steeped in history and historical practices, ways of knowing that are available and “easy to think”, called-​upon, temporarily settled dispositions . . . ’11 This is a chapter instead about forms of loyalty that were not easy to think and that were even harder to practice: loyalty by individuals and communities thought by British rulers to be incapable of loyalty in moments of anti-​colonial rebellion through the final decades of British imperial history. The most common expression of this loyalty was some form of military service, or at least a demand for it, by imperial subjects, typically through membership of either the auxiliary ranks of the security forces or irregular paramilitary units. Jürgen Osterhammel gives the subject of such loyalty short shrift in his history of imperialism. He sees such actions to be analogous to the ‘treacherous cooperation of individuals and small cliques with a military occupation regime hated by the remainder of the subjugated population during the Second World War, causing untold damage to their compatriots’. Moreover, examples of such loyalty are, he argues, best understood as an ‘isolated incident’ rather than a wider phenomenon deserving of comparative analysis.12 Loyalists’ critics among their rebellious adversaries would agree. As far as their enemies considered their motivations at all, loyalists were derided. The Malayan Home Guard leaders Choo Mun Sing and Foo Chin Wan were ‘running dogs’, according to insurgents there in 1950.13 Given this context, it is not surprising that historians from former colonial territories, at least those that went through decolonization in the latter half of the twentieth century, may well share Osterhammel’s distaste for loyalty as a subject of study. Kenya’s historians fought a bitter intellectual battle in the 1970s and 1980s over the place of loyalists within nationalist historiographies of the Mau Mau rebellion.14 Nationalism continues to have a lingering but weakening influence on historical scholarship in such settings. But Osterhammel’s sentiments were widely shared by European and North American scholars sympathetic to nationalist causes too.15 In contrast, this chapter makes an argument for the significance of loyalists within British imperial history. There are country-​level studies of loyalists (or, at least, those described as such here) for almost every case mentioned in this chapter. But in contrast to the study of the theme of resistance, few attempts have been made by historians to consider loyalty on an imperial scale.

10 

Cell, ‘Colonial Rule’, 243. A.L. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 39. 12  J. Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1999), 64. 13  Cheong Sin Hoong to Choo Mun Sing and Foo Chin Wan, 10 January 1950, Imperial War Museum, papers of Col. John Davis (hereafter IWM Davis), box 5, Police Affairs file. 14  M. Clough, ‘Mau Mau and the Contest for Memory’, in E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (eds.), Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), 251–​267, 260–​261. 15  V. Crapanzano, The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); 2, 8, and 64. 11 

Unwanted Friends   313 The most obvious point to make at the outset is that far from being ‘individuals and small cliques’, loyalists were key parts of the British response to anti-​imperial rebellions. This is not surprising given the relatively small size of ‘the thinly stretched’ regular army.16 As scouts, porters, guides, spies, members of militias, and troops, more than 100,000 black and mixed-​ race loyalists collectively played a decisive role in the South African War.17 In Malaya half a century later, over 400,000 people served in the police and the auxiliary home guard force. This expansion ‘is the direct consequence of the Emergency’, argued the author of a briefing paper prepared for nationalist leaders attending constitutional negotiations in London in 1955. ‘If it were not for the shooting war, it [the police] might be about one third of this total’.18 A similar story can be told for every one of the cases discussed here. However, the significance of loyalty to each setting was not simply numerical or strategic. A history of loyalty tells us much more about citizenship and imperialism. Few loyalists in these different settings enunciated (or even wished to claim) a notion of imperial belonging. However, in all instances protestations of loyalty by loyalists represented significant arguments about the nature of citizenship in the British Empire and provoked telling responses among imperial rulers. Far from being ‘easy to think’, such loyalty provoked anxiety and uncertainty among imperial rulers. Put another way, both collaboration and resistance were the source of the ‘trouble’ that Antoinette Burton persuasively argues ‘was the characteristic feature of imperial power on the ground’.19 In its concentration on loyalty, this chapter is to be read as complementary to Burton’s work on dissent. It argues that loyalty did not stabilize the British Empire; the loyalty of subject peoples was provocative rather than reassuring. To many British imperialists, the presumed enemy inside the gates was just as unsettling as that beyond the walls. The assumed connection between race and ethnicity on one hand, and the proclivity for loyalty or rebellion on the other, profoundly shaped British responses to anti-​imperial rebellions. From such a perspective, loyalty from imperial subjects was not just unlikely, but unwanted. If loyalists could betray their race and kin, many British actors thought, they were inherently untrustworthy. Loyalists were therefore just as likely to be shunned by their erstwhile British allies as recognized.

Loyalists, Surrogates, Collaborators, and Allies There is no perfect term with which to describe those identified here as ‘loyalists’. A loyalist here is an imperial subject who, if only temporarily, actively supported the British cause during a period of anti-​colonial revolt. That support was demonstrated in some way through 16 Darwin, The Empire Project, 33. 17 

P. Warwick, Black People and the South African War 1899–​1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 4–​5. 18  Anon., ‘Federation Police’, undated paper, attached to T.H. Tan to Rulers-​Alliance delegation, 27 December 1955, Institute of South East Asian Studies (hereafter ISEAS), papers of H.S. Lee (hereafter HSL), 4/​007d. 19  A. Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1.

314   Daniel Branch participation in the conflict, whether as a member of a militia, an agitator for military action, or as a victim of the anti-​colonial forces. Because of this connection to certain forms of behaviour in the context of colonial wars, the category of loyalist was a gendered one. Half a century later in East Africa, only a handful of women met the criteria for the issuing of loyalty certificates in Kenya as the colonial government set about privileging loyalists during the political, economic, and social overhaul of Gikuyu society in response to the Mau Mau rebellion.20 The label of loyalist could be applied by the British, claimed by self-​proclaimed loyalists, or a slur by anti-​colonial rebels against their non-​British rivals. The label of loyalist, whether actively claimed by imperial subjects or ascribed to them by others, did not preclude an ambiguous, temporary, or multiple allegiances to British rule by those to whom it is applied. The term ‘loyalist’ is clearly imperfect in its inference that the actions of the subjects of this chapter were motivated primarily by a notion of loyalty to British rule in and of itself. By and large, most non-​British imperial subjects did not display the brand of loyalty described by John Darwin: ‘the passionate identification of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Newfoundlanders and South African “English” with an idealised “Britishness”; and their common devotion to “Empire” as its political form’.21 Instead, loyalty was a means to ends often either loosely or entirely disconnected from the interests of British imperialism. Surrogates, allies, intermediaries, and collaborators have all been used to good effect in work on such groups engaged in colonial conflicts.22 This chapter persists with ‘loyalist’ as it is the one term of all those mentioned that our subjects would have recognized, if not necessarily being wholly comfortable with its application to themselves. The term is not used here in its most literal sense. The majority of our actors made little or no reference to such ideas in their own explanations for their support of the British cause during the crises discussed here. In the most part, loyalty was a set of pragmatic, difficult decisions individuals made to survive in perilous moments of crisis.

Understanding Loyalty As this emphasis on ambiguity suggests, this is a history of agency, action, and contingency rather than of a particular, definable tradition within imperial political thought. Location mattered in determining the character of loyalty in different settings. In fin de siècle Cape Town and mid-​century Malacca, the loyalty of non-​British actors was profoundly influenced by global events and flows of people and ideas. Francis Peregrino, the Accra-​born grandson 20 District Commissioner Nyeri to Provincial Commissioner Central, 13 November 1956, KNA VQ/​1/​6. 21 Darwin, The Empire Project, xii. 22  D. Anderson, ‘Surrogates of the State: Collaboration and Atrocity in Kenya’s Mau Mau War’, in George Kassimeris (ed.), The Barbarisation of Warfare (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 159–​174; D. Anderson and D. Branch, ‘Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–​76’, The International History Review, 39 (January 2017), 1–​13; J. Dlamini, Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-​Apartheid Struggle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); M. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and the Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014).

Unwanted Friends   315 of an emancipated Hausa slave, used his South African Spectator newspaper to champion loyalty by Black and Coloured South Africans during the war against the Afrikaner republics as a way of building a free trans-​Atlantic, pan-​African community protected by the rights afforded to British citizens. The demand by Black and Coloured South Africans at the Cape was, Peregrino argued, ‘a noble impulse’.23 Tan Cheng Lock, the leading advocate of ethnic Chinese support for the British counter-​insurgency campaign in Malaya, was similarly minded when he wrote in 1951 that ‘I have been pro-​British all my life by conviction and from self-​interest’.24 He was not just thinking about the context of Malaya, then embroiled in its war between the British and the Malayan National Liberation Army, but also the ‘two potent perils’ that lay outside of Malaya’s borders. The first was the success of the Communist Party in China itself. The second was the rise of autochthonous nationalist movements across South East Asia that threated the existence of so-​called migrant communities from Burma to Java. The survival of British rule seemed the best bulwark against both perils until inclusive liberal nationalist parties could emerge in the region.25 By contrast, there was little that could be said to have been global or regional in emphasis about Gikuyu loyalty during the Mau Mau rebellion. Instead, its arguments were deeply rooted in the intellectual history of Kenya’s Central Highlands and differed markedly from the motivations for loyalty practiced by the neighbouring Kamba community.26 Indeed, even within a single colonial territory the motivations for loyalty and the forms it took could vary significantly. As Andrew Thompson has so ably demonstrated in the case of South Africa, the motivations for loyalty could differ even across relatively short distances and the boundaries of class, race, and ethnicity.27 As these examples suggest, attempting to identify a common intellectual history of loyalty across time and space is a futile task. This is hardly surprising; loyalists are another example of the ‘chaotic pluralism’ of British imperialism.28 Nevertheless, there are three common aspects to histories of loyalty across time and space in British imperial history: the ubiquity of empire; a demand for security; and the conditions of civil war demanding ambiguous political allegiances. The recurrence of loyalty during Britain’s colonial wars can be partly explained with reference to what Linda Colley has termed ‘the sheer ubiquity of empire’.29 As noted above, loyalty was an everyday strategy of engagement with ubiquitous forms of government. For more than two hundred years until the middle of the last century, the subjects of imperial 23 

South African Spectator, ‘ “Not Yet” But Pray When?’, 14 January 1901, 4. See also B. Nasson, Abraham Esau’s War: A Black South African War in the Cape, 1899–​1902 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge: 2002). 24  Tan Cheng Lock to Maxwell, 17 February 1951, 1, ISEAS, papers of Tan Cheng Lock (hereafter TCL), 5/​30. 25  Tan Cheng Lock, ‘The Re-​Organisation of the Malayan Chinese Association, 1951’, 28 October 1951, 1, ISEAS HSL/​3/​0003. 26  D. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 117–​ 147; M. Osbourne, Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya: Loyalty and Martial Race Among the Kamba, c.1800 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 27  A. Thompson, ‘The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c.1870–​1939’, The English Historical Review, 118 (June 2003), 617–​650. 28 Darwin, The Empire Project, 3. 29  L. Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–​1850 (London: Pimlico, 2003), 19.

316   Daniel Branch rule did not, for the most part, face a choice between independence and imperialism, but instead between one form of imperialism or another. Writing in 1910, the chiefs of Bechuanaland recalled the choices they confronted two decades earlier: ‘There were several separate Governments at that time, both Colonial, Dutch, Germany, of whom we had heard, but we did not pay any regards to them’. British rule was thought preferable as the best bulwark against Afrikaner control. It was ‘the great dislike which we have for the Dutch Administration of native affairs’ that ‘originally drove us to seek help and protection from England’.30 In this context, loyalty was a strategy for survival. It was a strategy based upon the reasonable calculation that in an era of ubiquitous empires, eventually the British would win.31 In a published letter to a government propaganda newsletter in Kenya, Maina Kinaichu dismissed the chances of a Mau Mau victory: ‘How can they win this war? Did you not see the war of the British and the Japanese, Italians, and the Germans?’.32 To imagine the downfall of the empire was to imagine the seemingly impossible until the final years of imperial rule. In Asia, the ubiquity of empire, in Britain and its imperial possessions at least, was shaken to its core by the Japanese advance through the Malayan peninsula and the fall of Singapore.33 But it would take another two decades for the full extent of the consequences of that humiliation to be appreciated. Even as India and Pakistan celebrated independence and Britain retreated from the eastern Mediterranean, colonial subjects elsewhere hardly thought it probable that they were soon to be citizens of new nation-​states. In Britain’s African colonies, civil servants and specialists in agricultural development bolstered the ranks of colonial administrators from Accra to Blantyre in an effort to encourage colonial economic growth that would in turn assist metropolitan post-​war recovery. Officials returned to their posts in South East Asia in the expectation of the restoration of British control. While the aims of each mission later changed to managing decolonization, British troops began their counter-​insurgency campaigns in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus in order to keep each in the empire. It took until 1957, in the aftermath of Suez and the independence of Malaysia, Sudan, and Ghana, for the creation in the remaining colonies of ‘a sense of the inevitability of imminent decolonization, which was not present even a year or two earlier’.34 Even then, where communism seemed set to fill the vacuum left by imperialism, the likes of Tan Cheng Lock attempted to prop up ailing colonial regimes until they were sufficiently strong enough to assume control themselves.35 Not only did the ubiquity of empire convince many loyalists of the inevitability of British victory in each conflict, but the opportunities for engagement with imperial rule only increased as a result of the conditions of war. The wars drew metropolitan attention and personnel to the colonies in exceptional ways. South Africa’s historiography of loyalism has made much of the ways in which African loyalism represented an appeal to 30 

Khama et al. to King Edward VII, 14 April 1910, TNA CO 879/​103/​7.

31 Darwin, The Empire Project, 9. 32 

Kinaichu to Editor, Uhoro wa Nyeri, 3 September 1954, KNA AHC/​9/​23. Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, xxix. 34 Young, The Postcolonial State in Africa, 1. 35 C. Bayly and T. Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005), xxx. 33 

Unwanted Friends   317 liberal imperialists in London over the heads of illiberal colonialists in Cape Town.36 This was hardly a naïve strategy. Despite the hardening of notions of imperial rule and racial difference in colonies, back in the metropole, economic, social, and political reform meant that from the mid-​nineteenth century British society was ‘more diverse, pluralistic and open’ than ever before. While their direct influence on the nature of British colonial rule may have been limited, the Quakers, the liberals, the Catholics, the bourgeoisie, the abolitionists, the evangelicals, the socialists, and a variety of other progressive organizations provided a vision of an ‘alternative Britain’ to which loyal imperial subjects could appeal for intercession in colonial disputes.37 At times of crisis, the distance between such actors and loyal imperial subjects dramatically reduced. With the influx of imperial servants, be they additional administrators or soldiers, came new opportunities for loyalists to seek to manipulate the colonial state. The potential to appeal to liberal imperial values over the heads of colonial authorities therefore grew exponentially in times of war. British observers often believed that the duality in the nature of British rule would confuse potential loyalists. Dinuzulu, the Zulu leader during the Anglo-​Boer War, was closer to the truth when he remarked that ‘he had now two heads’.38 The opportunities for accumulation were far greater with the imperial source of power intimately involved in the affairs of a colony. Often underwritten by imperial finance and instigated from London, salaries for auxiliaries and paramilitaries, preferential access to land and other resources, favouritism in the distribution of political patronage, and access to the spoils of victory seemed to be on offer for potential loyalists during periods of anti-​ colonial rebellion. But even more important was the promise of security. The demand for security and protection was no less important than the ubiquity of imperialism as a motivation for loyalty by imperial subjects. Loyalists had to make decisions about their allegiances in the most difficult of circumstances. Unencumbered by notions of international law and universal human rights until the mid-​twentieth century—​and even then these ideas were slow to influence the conduct of the wars of decolonization—​the military forces of the British empire repeatedly displayed little regard for the lives of imperial subjects. Many opponents of imperial rule thought this imperial violence could only be defeated with extreme violence by rebels. For the imperial subjects caught between these warring parties, the choices were horrifying. ‘They are between the millstones but they are powerless and voiceless’, wrote one Chinese Malayan leader.39 Loyalty appeared to many imperial subjects to provide at least two slightly different solutions to this dilemma. For the unambiguous loyalists—​those whose record of service in support of the colonial or imperial regime prior to or during the colonial wars discussed here marked them out as a likely target of anti-​colonial violence—​continued loyalty held out the prospect of protection by the security forces and state institutions. Security was hence a necessary condition for the emergence and survival of loyalty. But the relationship between loyalty and security was most noticeable in conditions of abeyance. For example, Chinese cooperation with the British counter-​insurgency effort in Malaya was significant across Negri Sembilan state, with the notable exception of Kuala Pilah sub-​district. In Kuala 36 

Thompson, ‘The Languages of Loyalism’.

38 

Zululand Military Commission, ‘Book of Evidence’, April 1902, 47, TNA WO/​32/​8071. Goh Chee Yan to Malcolm MacDonald, 22 November 1951, 2, ISEAS TCL 24/​005.

37 Darwin, The Empire Project, 59–​60. 39 

318   Daniel Branch Pilah, the lack of adequate police or army protection enabled the insurgents to regularly attack the officeholders of the pro-​British Malayan Chinese Association (MCA). As one of the organization’s leaders, Yap Man Tatt, noted of Kuala Pilah’s MCA branch, ‘unchecked intimidation’ by local MPLA activists meant ‘very little co-​operation came forth’ from the local Chinese community.40 In other settings, where fears of the brutality of both the British security forces and the anti-​colonial rebels were particularly acute, loyalty was more akin to a form of armed neutrality. In some locations in Kenya, for example, likely Mau Mau sympathizers were deliberately recruited into the Home Guard by local loyalist leaders as a way of neutralizing the war in the local area.41 Ironically, the demand for security that provides our second explanation for loyalty across our different cases significantly contributed to the creation of the conditions that account for our third explanation; the transformation of anti-​colonial violence into civil war. Time and time again, whether by design or not, British colonial regimes not only victimized subject peoples during the suppression of rebellions, but turned colonized societies against one another.42 Ethnic, racial, and class divisions were militarized with devastating long-​ term consequences. Lord Kitchener hoped in June 1901 that ‘the Boers could be induced to hate each other more than they hated the British’ and so ‘the British objective would be obtained’.43 Little changed over the following half century. When loyalists drawn from among subject peoples of colonial territories were incorporated into the security forces, the nature of the different conflicts discussed here was transformed. Cyprus provides perhaps the best example, where the Turkish Cypriot population was used as the basis for the mass recruitment of part-​time special constables, auxiliary police, and mobile reserve units in order to suppress Greek Cypriot demands for unification with Greece. Prior to the Emergency, there were just 1,397 police officers on the island. By 1956, the total strength of the various branches of the police stood at 5,878 men. Just 15% of this total was Greek Cypriot, dwarfed by the 70% of Turkish Cypriots who otherwise made up just 18% of the island’s total population.44 The Turkish Cypriot community was thus dragged into the conflict, sparking communal violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots; the insurgents had hitherto considered its target to be the British and not the Turkish Cypriots.45 As the Cypriot example suggests, loyalists were able to participate in a ‘privatization of violence’ whereby access to weapons and action against anti-​colonial rebels provided loyalists with opportunities to enact other agendas.46 Although a militarily pragmatic 40 

Yap Mann Tatt to Tan Cheng Lock, 26 October 1950, ISEAS TCL 3/​266.

41 Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya, 97.

42  C. Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber & Faber, 1986). 43  Quoted in A. Grundlingh, The Dynamics of Treason: Boer Collaboration in the South African War of 1899–​1902, trans. Bridget Theron (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2006), 270. 44 D. Anderson, ‘Policing and Communal Conflict: The Cyprus Emergency, 1954–​ 60’, in Robert Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires After 1945 (Abingdon: Frank Cass, 1994), 177–​205, 191. 45  E. Hatzivassilliou, ‘Cyprus at the Crossroads, 1959–​63’, European History Quarterly, 35 (October 2005), 523–​540, 534. 46 Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya; S. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Unwanted Friends   319 decision, allowing loyalists to privatize colonial violence provoked anxieties among imperial rulers. The privatization of violence by loyalists took the prosecution of the suppression of rebellion away from the realm of the epistemic habits and into the unseen and little understood myriad of micro-​foundations of violence. For an empire obsessed with knowledge, entrusting its security to individuals whose motives were so opaque to imperial actors was no small gesture and one that filled its rulers with great unease.47

Anxieties of Loyalty Decades of scholarship on the nature of imperial rule has demonstrated that ideas of race and other cultural influences caused panic, anxiety, and unpredictable responses by agents of imperial rule, be they settlers, missionaries, officials, or soldiers. It is too simple to draw a line that connects willing collaborators to under-​manned imperial armies and administrations and assume it continues to an embrace by imperial rulers of the loyalty of imperial subjects. Loyalists instead provoked anxiety and uncertainty among imperial rulers and settlers, responses that were rooted in a particular reading of British imperial history. Loyalty was always an unstable foundation for empire. The Indian Rebellion cast a long shadow over British imperialism in several ways, not least among them the suspicion it created of those non-​white subjects who swore their loyalty to the crown. If the sepoys could mutiny, who was to say that other ostensibly loyal allies of British imperialism would not do the same? British imperialism was further haunted by the spectre of settler-​led rebellion as it was by that of violence by its subjects, including North America in the 1770s, Canada in the 1830s, and Rhodesia in the final years of empire. And this is to say nothing of the diasporic populations—​Afrikaners at the Cape, the Indians and Irish everywhere—​spread around the empire that retained, it was often believed, a near-​permanent capacity for unrest based upon their ties to anti-​colonial political movements based in their homelands.48 The assumed disloyalty of Imperial subjects concerned British imperial rulers the most of all these different forms of disloyalty. This anxiety became military orthodoxy in the writings of Charles Callwell, the most respected military expert of the day at the turn of the century. According to Callwell, local populations were not to be trusted, and their use in conflict was to be restricted to scouting or the provision of basic intelligence on the movements of the enemy.49 In South Africa, this reticence meant little reliance on the sort of irregular, paramilitary unit that would become so characteristic of loyalist experience later in the century. Loyalty by white South Africans was, Alfred Milner, governor of the Cape Colony and high 47  On the politics of knowledge within British imperial history, see J. Hevia, The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-​Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and H. Tilley with R. Gordon (eds.), Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 48  C. van Onselen, Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa 1880–​1990 (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2010). 49  C. Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3rd ed. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1906), 352; D. Whittingham, ‘ “Savage Warfare”: C.E. Callwell, the Roots of Counter-​Insurgency, and the Nineteenth Century Context’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23 (September 2012), 591–​607, 593, 600.

320   Daniel Branch commissioner for South Africa, hoped, to be controlled under the auspices of the regular army.50 Milner’s concern was primarily strategic. He was wary of irregular paramilitary units being formed given the lack of regular military support available to aid defence in instances of Boer attacks, hence risking weapons falling into the hands of the enemy.51 Doubts about loyalists assumed far more pernicious forms. Time and time again, accounts of what Burton terms ‘the spectacle of British counter-​ insurgency—​the reverse atrocity factor’ include the victimization of loyalists by British actors unwilling to distinguish between friend and foe, from India in 1857 to Kenya a century later.52 British rulers suffered from recurring doubts about the motivations of loyalists. For example, the intention in the early 1920s to make the Palestine Gendarmerie a mixed Jewish and Arab force was abandoned due to suspicion by the British of the local population. Demobilized Black and Tans from Ireland were recruited instead.53 At first, the counter-​insurgency campaigns of the mid-​twentieth century were marked by similar attitudes by imperialists towards their loyalist subjects. Initial efforts to encourage Chinese loyalty in Malaya were hindered by the British authorities in South East Asia. Proposals in 1950 to form Chinese-​only police units in Perak were rejected by the local police commander on the grounds that ‘there is too great a danger of Chinese defection’.54 Even when recruitment did take place, British military officers were reluctant to deploy the few Chinese in active service in significant roles in the counter-​insurgency campaign. Lim Sing, a member of the Chinese Assault Team based at Bidor, Perak, asked to be demobilized in July 1949 so he could become a police informer instead. ‘I have the whole heart to help the Government to get rid of the bandits’, he wrote, ‘but until now I have no chance because I have to remain in the camp always to do sentry duty’.55 Eventual recognition of Chinese loyalists in Malaya by the British and their incorporation into both the counter-​insurgency campaign and the processes of decolonization tell us a great deal about the reasons why they and their predecessors in other similar conflicts were the subject of colonial anxiety. As John Darwin has demonstrated, from 1870 onwards the nature of British imperialism was more interventionist and more standardized than it had been hitherto. The age of high, formal imperialism demanded less ambiguous relationships and identities by both ruler and ruled within the British Empire. Imperialists worked towards greater integration of the empire in terms of trade, political institutions, legal codes, and what Darwin terms ‘British beliefs and ideas’, to which notions of race were key.56 The integration of the empire compounded other trends dating back to at least the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Morant Bay uprising of 1865, whereby ideas of race became more influential in the conduct of the day-​to-​day business of imperialism.57 By the end of the nineteenth century, for British 50 

Milner to Kitchener, 18 December 1899, TNA WO/​105/​19. Milner, ‘Memorandum on Local Irregular Forces’, 24 December 1899, TNA WO 105/​19. 52 Burton, The Trouble with Empire, 59, 61; D. Anderson, H. Bennett, and D. Branch, ‘A Very British Massacre’, History Today, 56 (August 2006), 20–​22. 53 Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars, 91. 54  Barnard to Davis, 21 February 1950, IWM Davis, box 5, Police Affairs file. 55  Lim Seng to Davis, 30 July 1949, IWM Davis, box 5, Police Affairs file. 56 Darwin, The Empire Project. 57 C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–​ 1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 12. 51 

Unwanted Friends   321 imperialists ‘their enthusiasm for racialised others was strictly limited’.58 Power, wealth, and influence accordingly shifted in favour of white Britons and away from non-​white elites who had previously managed much of Britain’s empire.59 This had a profound effect on the reception offered by British rulers to non-​British loyalists. For a century until the 1950s, authentic loyalism was understood by British actors to be an expression of nationalism and hence race. From such a perspective, Africans, Chinese, and Malay could not be loyal to Britain. Even the Afrikaners were considered too distinct by virtue of their Dutch heritage to be loyalists. As Sir Walter Hely-​Hutchinson, the governor of Natal, wrote in 1899 of the Afrikaner population of British-​ruled Natal, ‘The most that we can expect is, that they take no active part against us’.60 Half a century later, David Gray, a senior civil servant in Malaya during the war there, made a similar observation. ‘Loyalty to the immediate locality is the only real loyalty we can expect from Malayan Chinese at the present juncture’, Gray thought.61 The context of decolonization transformed imperial notions of citizenship and British attitudes towards loyalists. By the mid-​1950s, British objectives in Malaya had shifted from maintaining imperial rule to managing a process of decolonization. Preserving the influence of Britain and its Western allies in the post-​colonial world was of paramount concern, which demanded relationships with loyalists be reconstituted at the denouement of empire.62 In an effort to ensure the lasting stability of an independent Malaya, the British government had made it clear in 1951 that decolonization would not occur until there was evidence of multiracial political unity between Chinese and Malay leaders who shared an opposition to communism. This required the incorporation of Chinese loyalists like Tan Cheng Lock into the institutions of the state and the recognition of the rights of Malaya’s Chinese community.63 At the same time, the role of Chinese loyalists within the counter-​insurgency significantly increased.64 A similar story can be told for Kenya too; initial disregard for Kikuyu loyalists in the fight against Mau Mau was replaced by recognition and then reward as preparations began to be made for decolonization.65 To acknowledge and recognize loyalty of imperial subjects was to recognize the limitations of empire and the capacity of its white rulers to exert control, and the possibility for Britain’s interests to be championed and protected by non-​British actors. In Malaya and Kenya, imperial loyalists became citizens of newly independent states.

58 

Ibid., 379. V. Bickford-​Smith, ‘The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880–​1920’, in Philip Morgan and Sean Hawkins (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 194–​227. 60  Hely-​Hutchinson to Chamberlain, 15 September 1899, UOBL, Ms Milner 281. 61  Gray, ‘Kaifong’, enclosed with Gray to Davis, 19 November 1951, IWM Davis, box 6, Defence file. 62  W.R. Louis and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, in Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 452–​502. 63  T. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 351–​352. 64  Gray, ‘The Chinese Problem in the Federation of Malaya’, July 1952, 12, IWM Davis, box 8, New Villages file. 65 Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya, 148–​178. 59 

322   Daniel Branch

Conclusion The history of loyalists is ultimately a reminder of the complexity of the responses of imperial subjects to British rule. John Darwin warns that ‘those long-​favoured categories of ‘imperialism’ and ‘nationalism’ as the binary opposites of imperial history are of limited value in making sense of this story’.66 This brief overview of loyalists in Britain’s twentieth-​ century colonial wars arrives at a similar conclusion. Most obviously, this chapter has argued that resistance was not the only or most common form of response to British rule in a range of different settings. But the purpose of the chapter is not to set loyalty in opposition to resistance. Instead, it demonstrates the fluidity and ambiguity of the responses adopted by colonized peoples to British rule. Nevertheless, one could still reasonably expect that, given the importance of loyalists to establishment and protection of the imperial edifice, loyalists would have both been easily recognizable to British imperialists and rewarded accordingly. As Sir Graham Bower, who served as imperial secretary to the high commissioners for South Africa between 1884 and 1897, put it: ‘An Empire held together by brute force and coercion is a rotten structure which the first breath of wind will destroy. An Empire held together by mutual loyalty, affection and good will, can not only resist a gale, but is strengthened by outside attacks’.67 But Bower well demonstrates the contradiction in the view of loyalists held by many British imperialists. For all of his insistence on the importance of loyalists to the British imperial project, Bower held a very precise definition of who could defined as such. He also argued in the context of the coming war in South Africa that ‘the Empire has more to fear from the self-​styled loyalists of uncertain origin than from the Dutch. The Dutch at all events are the same race as ourselves’. The objects of Bower’s opprobrium were not (on this occasion) the likes of Peregrino or other black and mixed-​race loyalists; he did not even consider the possibility that Africans could be loyal imperial subjects. Instead, he was concerned that British policy in South Africa was being dictated ‘by the City firms of Jewish extraction’.68 As Bower’s sentiments suggest, loyalists illustrate the insecurities and contradictions at the heart of late British imperialism. Just as Burton has shown the profound crises in imperialism occasioned by rebellions, so we can observe the same for loyalty. The imperial experience unquestionably informed and hardened ideas of race among the British peoples in the metropole and abroad.69 But this dominant ideology of empire ironically made the ruling of subject peoples more difficult for the British. After all, empires, including the British in an earlier period, had historically been built on a very different approach to managing the imperial politics of difference between rulers and ruled and between different sections of subject societies.70 As the British became less inclined to put trust in local intermediaries and more certain of their own racial difference from the subject peoples of the empire, so their 66 Darwin, The Empire Project, 12.

67  G. Bower, Sir Graham Bower’s Secret History of the Jameson Raid and the South African Crisis, 1895–​ 1902, edited by Deryck Schruder and Jeffrey Butler (Cape Town: Van Riebeck Society, 2002), 7. 68  Bower to Ommanney, 11 May 1906, 121, UOBL Mss Afr s 26. 69  B. Schwarz, The White Man’s World: Memories of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 70  J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 12.

Unwanted Friends   323 suspicion of any imperial subject apparently contesting their rule or claiming the privileges of citizenship was seen as threat, be they loyalist or rebel. Black South Africans proclaiming their Britishness were more threatening to British imperialism than white Afrikaner rebels; Gikuyu members of the Home Guard in 1950s Kenya threatened to undermine the ideology of settler colonialism just as much as Mau Mau’s forest fighters. Rather than revealing the history of an empire-​wide notion of imperial belonging, our history of loyalists instead provokes us to follow Linda Colley in considering where the nation ended and the empire began.71 This gap between the nation and the empire could not be closed. By the late nineteenth century, cosmopolitan imperialism had been completely supplanted by a tendency ‘to make “we/​they,” “self/​other” distinctions between colonizing and colonized populations’.72 As Catherine Hall argues about Victorian Birmingham, ‘supposed racial characteristics were always an implicit part of their categorisations. This was nothing new, this was part of being English’. For the British rulers of the empire, their British identity and all its attendant ideas of modernity were formed in opposition to the assumed identities of the territories that formed the British Empire.73 Ironically, the tension between nationhood and imperial loyalty was only fully reconciled by Malayan and Kenyan loyalists in the era of decolonization. However, loyalists then fought for the empire in order to shape the nation-​states that would succeed it.

Select Bibliography Anderson, D., ‘Policing and Communal Conflict: The Cyprus Emergency, 1954–​60’, in Robert Holland, ed., Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires After 1945 (Abingdon: Frank Cass, 1994), 177–​205. Anderson, D., ‘Surrogates of the State: Collaboration and Atrocity in Kenya’s Mau Mau War’, in George Kassimeris, ed., The Barbarisation of Warfare (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 159–​174. Anderson, D., H. Bennett, and D. Branch, ‘A Very British Massacre’, History Today, 56, (August 2006), 20–​22. Anderson, D., and D. Branch, ‘Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–​76’, The International History Review, 39 (January 2017), 1–​13. Anderson, D., and D. Killingray (eds.), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830–​1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press: 1991). Arnold, J., Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq (London: Bloomsbury, 2009). Asquith, H., Ireland: Dominion Scheme: Reprisals (London: Liberal Publication Department, 1920). Bayly, C., and T. Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005).

71 Colley, Captives. 72 

Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 12.

73 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 8–​9.

324   Daniel Branch Bickford-​Smith, V., ‘The Betrayal of Creole Elites, 1880–​1920’, in Philip Morgan and Sean Hawkins, eds., Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 194–​227. Bower, G., Sir Graham Bower’s Secret History of the Jameson Raid and the South African Crisis, 1895–​1902, edited by Deryck Schruder and Jeffrey Butler (Cape Town: Van Riebeck Society, 2002). Bramwell, W., ‘Loyalties and the Politics of Incorporation in South Africa: The Case of Pondoland, c.1870–​1913’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Warwick, 2015. Branch, D., Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Brennan, N., ‘A Political Minefield: Southern Loyalists, the Irish Grants Committee and the British Government, 1922–​31’, Irish Historical Studies, 30 (May 1997), 406–​419. Burbank, J., and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Burton, A., The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Callwell, C., Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, 3rd ed. (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1906). Cell, J., ‘Colonial Rule’, in Judith Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 232–​254. Clough, M., ‘Mau Mau and the Contest for Memory’, in E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, eds., Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration (Oxford: James Currey, 2003), 251–​267. Cohn, B., ‘Representing Authority of Tradition in Victorian India’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 165–​210. Colley, L., Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600–​1850 (London: Pimlico, 2003). Crapanzano, V., The Harkis: The Wound That Never Heals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Darwin, J., The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–​1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Dlamini, J., Askari: A Story of Collaboration and Betrayal in the Anti-​Apartheid Struggle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Griffiths, J., The Branch Life of Empire: Imperial Loyalty Leagues in Antipodean Cities, c.1900–​ 1939 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Grundlingh, A., The Dynamics of Treason: Boer Collaboration in the South African War of 1899–​ 1902, trans. Bridget Theron (Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2006). Hall, C., Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–​1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Harper, T., The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Harris, T., ‘British Informal Empire during the Great War: Welsh Identity and Loyalty in Argentina’, Itinerario, 38 (December 2014), 103–​117. Hart, P., The I.R.A. and Its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork 1916–​1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Hatzivassilliou, E., ‘Cyprus at the Crossroads, 1959–​ 63’, European History Quarterly, 35 (October 2005), 523–​540.

Unwanted Friends   325 Hevia, J., The Imperial Security State: British Colonial Knowledge and Empire-​Building in Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). van Heyningen, E., and P. Merrett, ‘The Healing Touch’: The Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa 1900–​1912’, South African Historical Journal, 47 (November 2003), 24–​50. Holland, R., Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​ 1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Kalyvas, S., The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Kratoska, P., and Batson, B., ‘Nationalism and Modernist Reform’, in Nicholas Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Vol. 2, part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249–​317. Lamothe, R., Slaves of Fortune: Sudanese Soldiers and the River War 1896–​1898 (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2011). Lawrance, B., E.L. Osborn, and R. Roberts (eds.), Intermediaries, Interpreters, and Clerks: African Employees in the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006). Lee, W. (ed.), Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion, and Warfare in the Early Modern World (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Louis, W.R., and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, in Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 452–​502. Lowry, D., ‘The Crown, Empire Loyalism and the Assimilation of non-​British White Subjects in the British World: An Argument Against “Ethnic Determinism”’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31 (June 2003), 96–​120. Mamdani, M., Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Morgan, P., and S. Hawkins (eds.), Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Moyd, M., Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and the Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014). Nasson, B., Abraham Esau’s War: A Black South African War in the Cape, 1899–​ 1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). van Onselen, C., Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa 1880–​ 1990 (Cape Town: Zebra Press, 2010). Osbourne, M., Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya: Loyalty and Martial Race Among the Kamba, c.1800 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Osterhammel, J., Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1999). Riedi, E., ‘Women, Gender, and the Promotion of Empire: The Victoria League, 1901–​1914’, The Historical Journal, 45 (September 2002), 569–​599. Robinson, R., ‘Non-​European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 118–​142. Sapire, H., ‘African Loyalism and its Discontents: The Royal Tour of South Africa, 1947’, The Historical Journal, 54 (January 2011), 215–​240. Sapire, H., ‘Ambiguities of Loyalism: The Prince of Wales in India and Africa, 1921–​2 and 25’, History Workshop Journal, 73 (January 2012), 37–​65.

326   Daniel Branch Schwarz, B., The White Man’s World: Memories of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Stapleton, T., African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe 1923–​80 (Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, 2011). Stoler, A.L., Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Thompson, A., ‘The Languages of Loyalism in Southern Africa, c.1870–​1939’, The English Historical Review, 118 (June 2003), 617–​650. Tilley, H. with R. Gordon (eds.), Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Townshend, C., Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber & Faber, 1986). Warwick, P., Black People and the South African War 1899–​1902 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Whittingham, D., ‘ “Savage Warfare”: C.E. Callwell, the Roots of Counter-​Insurgency, and the Nineteenth Century Context’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 23 (September 2012), 591–​607. Woollacoot, A., ‘ “All This is the Empire, I Told Myself ”: Australian Women’s Voyages “Home” and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness’, The American Historical Review, 102 (October 1997), 1,003–​29. Young, C., The Postcolonial State in Africa: Fifty Years of Independence, 1960–​2010 (Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

Chapter 17

‘I ndepende nc e or De ath’? Rank a nd Fi l e Recru itment, I de ol o g y, and Desertion du ri ng t h e War s of Dec ol oni z at i on in Ind onesia a nd Mal aysia, c.194 5–​19 6 0 Roel Frakking Introduction Leaders of insurgent organizations deciding upon open warfare in the name of national liberation or secession needed recruits. Recruits, in turn, needed to cross the threshold that separates inaction and neutrality from participation and activism. Only when subjugated communities pooled into insurgent ranks in sufficient numbers to become activists willing to risk their lives could insurgencies hope to overcome their often modest beginnings and gather enough arms, intelligence, and resources (political, economic, and social) to fatally wound the state’s better armed and funded forces.1 At first glance, the transition from bystander to insurgent seems unproblematic. The historical record of insurgencies details how scores of recruits took up arms to defeat stronger armies.2 The violent recolonization of British-​occupied Malaysia and Dutch-​occupied 1  Mao Tse-​tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. S.B. Griffith (Hawthorne, BN Publishing 2007 [1961]), 20–​22; in this volume: N. MacMaster, ‘Guns, Food and Money: Logistic Support and Mountain Guerrilla Forces in Algeria’. 2  J. Donnel, G. Pauker, and J. Zasloff, Viet Cong Motivation and Morale in 1964: A Preliminary Report (Santa Monica: Rand Cooperation, 1965), 9; E. Lieuwen, ‘Regular Armies and Insurgency: The Case of Mexico’, in R. Haycock (ed.), Regular Armies and Insurgency (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 22.

328   Roel Frakking Indonesia following the conclusion of the Second World War swelled the ranks of the incipient insurgent movements in both territories. By 1947, the Republik Indonesia fighting the Dutch had consolidated some 170,000 troops into its Tentara Nasional Indonesia (Indonesian National Army, TNI), which found support among thousands of local, semi-​autonomous troops.3 The British estimated that at its apogee the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) fielded some 10,000 predominantly Chinese fighters in the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA).4 According to the MCP, these insurgents depended on a further 250,000 supporters, which included the Min Yuen, or ‘Masses Organisation’, for food, recruits, intelligence, and shelter.5 Unsurprisingly, insurgent leaders unequivocally stated that the people they claimed to be fighting for supported them to the bitter end. The life-​or-​death attitudes the leadership expounded were seemingly based on immutable ideological foundations that both insurgents and their powerbase, which included peasants, civil servants, and students, shared. Such reciprocity stemmed from an inevitable awakening to oppression across South East Asia and elsewhere, where ‘the millions-​strong masses of farmers’ awoke with an ‘anti-​ imperialist consciousness’.6 This chapter unpacks the above-​ mentioned mobilization numbers in late-​ colonial contexts of decolonization by retrieving the experiences of individual insurgents.7 Focusing on their behaviour and choices during the Indonesian War for independence (1945–​1949) and the anti-​British liberation war in Malaysia (1948–​1960), in combination with the varied progress of both insurgencies, it explores the reasons locals had for joining and abandoning insurgencies. In doing so, the chapter seeks to probe the limits of revolutionary ideologies by exploring whether ordinary people internalized the insurgency leadership’s decolonization rhetoric. Was, for example, the slogan Merdeka atau Mati (‘Independence or Death’), splashed on thousands of walls across Indonesia, true testimony of strong revolutionary sentiments across Indonesian society, or did the words of one witness ring truer, that ordinary people just wanted to be left alone?8 The unsurprising answer is ‘both’, and that is exactly the point. By highlighting insurgents’ micro-​histories and the notion that bystander roles became increasingly unavailable, this chapter treats participation in insurgency warfare as a spectrum on which support for and/​ or armed activism in the name of insurgents and counter-​insurgents were possible.9 Those 3  P.M.H. Groen, Marsroutes en Dwaalsporen: Het Nederlands Militair-​strategisch Beleid in Indonesië, 1945–​1950 (The Hague: SDU, 1991), 117; NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​1396, Overzicht en Ontwikkeling van den Toestand, 6 Januari 1947, No. 6/​III. 4  TNA, CO 537/​3752, Malayan Security Service Political Intelligence Journal No. 11/​1948. 5 L. Comber, Malaya’s Secret Police 1945–​ 60: The Role of the Special Branch in the Malayan Emergency (Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute, 2008), 45; R.W. Kromer, The Malayan Emergency in Retrospect: Organization of a Successful Counterinsurgency Effort (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 1972), 7. 6 Anonymous, De Grondslagen van het Marxisme-​ Leninisme: Het Einde van het Koloniale Stelsel (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus, 1960), 15, translation mine. 7  ‘Decolonization’ is a misleading term: Indonesia declared itself independent in August 1945; its war against the Netherlands was a defensive war in that respect. 8  A.G. Martha, C. Wibisono, and Y. Anwar, Pemuda Indonesia dalam Dimensi Sejarah Perjuangan Bangsa (Jakarta: Yayasan Sumpah Pemuda, 1984), 150; NL-​HaNA, 2.10.14/​4989, Verslag van Bevindingen Inzake het Verblijf van de Amerikaanse Waarnemers te Semarang Gedurende 2, 3, 4 en 5 October, 7 October 1947. 9 R. Petersen, Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), chap. 2.

‘Independence or Death’?    329 who crossed the threshold into activism had options, at various points in time and space, to recross the same threshold into other forms of activism. Choices, however, were not entirely voluntary, this chapter argues, but shaped by external factors that switched bystanders into participants of varying sorts and back again; a process that, despite propaganda claiming otherwise, affected ideologies. The spectrum approach involving multiple ‘identities’ helps solve the dilemma Jocelyn Viterna signalled, that ‘if the characteristics that explain activism are shared by activists and nonactivists, then how can these characteristics be the critical causal factors behind popular mobilization?’.10 I show that in those specific spaces where violence was ubiquitous or the threat of violence highly plausible, circumstances pushed people into activism regardless of their disposition towards it—​and the causes connected to such activism—​through socialization or otherwise. Through the participation spectrum, this chapter departs from the notion of unalterable dichotomous choices. It goes beyond ‘good versus bad’ and ideology narratives—​understandably espoused by postcolonial victors—​to show that communities, disinterested bystanders, fierce anti-​colonial fighters, and those out to destroy them together moved in liminality, in ‘areas-​in-​between’, in ‘the unknown [and] the ambivalent’.11 The chapter brings into focus key elements for understanding mobilization based on the recognition of people’s multifaceted reasons for joining and deserting. These reasons vary from grievances, opportunities, and membership of certain social networks to ideology, revenge-​taking, and, most crucially, personal survival. People did not just appear in a given battlespace.12 Rather, they were drawn into participation, forced into it through violent mobilization, and/​or actually lent support to anti-​colonial ideologies tied to post-​revolutionary outcomes expounded by insurgent leaderships.13 The thrust of the argument is that to understand participation in conflict, in this case by colonized individuals, a complex matrix of influences leading into activism needs to be considered. This confluence of reasons included combinations of ideology, pre-​participation material conditions, and historical contingencies, as well as promises of access to resources, safety, and possibly independence. Understanding participation logically also requires an understanding of desertion. This is because the limits of participation, i.e. insurgents’ reasons to abandon the fight, codetermine levels of cohesion of insurgent organization. Desertion also brings to the fore differences between rank and file experiences of insurgency and those of the leadership; a distinction not always countenanced. Reasons for desertion closely mirror those that led to activism in the first place. When insurgent organizations failed to provide what they had promised—​for instance, material 10  J.

Viterna, ‘Pulled, Pushed, and Persuaded: Explaining Women’s Mobilization in the Salvadorian Guerrilla Army’, American Journal of Sociology, 112/​1 (2006), 2. 11  I. Thames, Over Grenzen: Liminaliteit en de Ervaring van Verzet (oration, Utrecht University, 17 May 2016), 7; Conceptually, this chapter draws from other studies dealing with participation during violent conflict, such as D. Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) or T.D. Mason, Caught in the Crossfire: Revolution, Repression and the Rational Peasant (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). For state-​sponsored retellings of conflict, see: K.E. McGregor, History in Uniform: Military Ideology and the Construction of Indonesia’s Past (Singapore: NUS Press, 2017). 12 Some studies still depart from this notion: see J. Corum, Training Indigenous Forces in Counterinsurgency: A Tale of Two Insurgencies (Carlisle Barracks: Strategic Studies Institute, 2006). 13  Viterna, ‘Pulled, Pushed, and Persuaded’, passim.

330   Roel Frakking and social advancement and protection—​or showed too little result in terms of its political objectives, insurgents opted to desert rather than face the consequences of military defeat, provided they could do so relatively safely. The resulting disintegration of insurgent movements can often be attributed to another crucial exogenous factor: the control of territory. Wherever insurgents’ control over a given territory was subject to a credible challenge—​typically in the form of sustained government incursions or options to safely abandon one’s post—​group cohesion/​solidarity collapsed. In such scenarios, fighters and supporters abandoned the cause, often because deepening insecurity, increased risk, and shortages of food and other essential resources made the cost of supporting an insurgency unsustainable.14 The result was that latent tensions boiled over, leading to a violent cycle of betrayal, punishment, and retribution, as the ideological factors that drove people to join an insurgency dissipated to reveal highly personal interests. The multilayered prism that this chapter builds explains the complexities and fluidity of mobilization to a completer degree than studies that tend towards broad, macro-​level and meso-​level explanations.15 Where desertion is not included but only the onset of conflict is, the relationship between the ebb and flow of protracted warfare and an insurgency’s coherence is diminished. Multilayered interpretations, furthermore, challenge and decentralize the role of ideology in warfare, even if it was present in many quarters. This chapter, in that sense, critically engages with others studies considering the impacts of ideology, a determinant that, in some readings, can, when meaningfully constructed and enacted, link insurgents and their supporters more closely. Ideology, put differently, can help overcome the negative impacts that the motivational heterogeneity of support for insurgency have on group cohesion, enhancing the prospects of ultimate success.16 The difficulties of cultivating a shared ideology, its role in having people take up arms, its intransigent nature, and how ideology varied across ranks, is what this chapter addresses.17 Finally, inclusion of other, more personal variables, such as safety and access to food, contextualize conclusions saying that people can be forced into participation as long as incumbent forces or their opponents control a given area.18 Participation, this chapter contends, depends on volatile admixtures of insurgent leadership credibility, incumbent violence, and the alliances both engendered.19

14 Petersen, Resistance and Rebellion, 75–​76.

15  For more broad explanations for insurgent organization cohesions, see P. Staniland, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). 16  F. Gutiérrez Sanín and E.J. Wood, ‘Ideology and Civil War: Instrumental Adoption and Beyond’, Journal of Peace Research, 51/​2 (2014), 213–​226; ; ; J. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 52; For a very brief discussion of the difficulties of ideologies in conflict, see: K. Hirose, K. Imai, and J. Lyall, ‘Can Civilian Attitudes Predict Insurgent Violence? Ideology and Insurgent Tactical Choice in Civil War’, Journal of Peace Research 54/​1 (2016), 48. 17  To a lesser extent, this chapter explores the connectedness between levels of violence and supposed ideology; see: K.M. Thaler, ‘Ideology in Civil Wars: Theory and Evidence from Mozambique and Angola’, Civil Wars 14/​4 (2012), 546-​567. 18  S. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 5. 19  Also see Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, 14.

‘Independence or Death’?    331

Cutting the Throat of the Hollanders: Top-​ Down Ideological Foundations of Insurgency Following the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the British and Dutch sought to restore the status quo to their former South East Asian colonies, then called British Malaya and the Netherlands East Indies. However, the returning colonial powers encountered a very different situation to the one they had left fleeing from the Japanese. In the ashes of the European and Japanese occupation, communities found political space and freedoms to finally realize ‘ideas such as peace, democracy, and self-​government’.20 The returning colonial aggressors sought to contain the aspirations of local peoples through reforms that introduced incremental political change without undermining the colonial order.21 Such weak compromises inevitably brought the colonial authorities into conflict with groups and organizations that sought fundamental change. In the case of Malaysia, the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) instigated a series of violent strikes and protests in the period 1945 to 1948 by force of its having penetrated political parties and labour unions. These protests were motivated by a combination of economic hardship, disillusionment with British political projects, such as the Malayan Union, and the continued denial of basic rights. As levels of tension and violence mounted between increasingly aggressive British countermeasures and suppressed landless Chinese who were ‘reluctant to go quietly’, the MCP was forced to cut short its preparations for insurrection and actually stage it in June 1948.22 Meanwhile, to the south, Dutch officials had refused to recognize the Republic of Indonesia whose leaders, notably republican president Sukarno and vice-​ president Mohammad Hatta, had proclaimed independence on 17 August 1945. Despite widespread support for the Republic, Dutch authorities divided communities against each other through a patchwork of federal states and autonomous areas supposedly under lasting Dutch authority.23 After more than four years of sustained Indonesian resistance, including five rounds of political agreements and two Dutch large-​scale military operations (July 1947; 20 C.

Keng, The Masked Comrades: A Study of the Communist United Front in Malaya, 1945–​48 (Singapore: Times Books International, 1979), 1–​2. 21  J. van Doorn, ‘Indië als Koloniaal Project’, in J. van Goor (ed.), The Indonesian Revolution: Papers of the Conference held in Utrecht, 17–​20 June 1986 (Utrecht: Utrecht University, 1986), 90; J.P. Ongkili, Nation-​building in Malaysia, 1946–​1974 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1985), 53–​59; H. van den Doel, Afscheid van Indië: De Val van het Nederlandse Imperium in Azië (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2001), 157–​165. 22 Keng, The Masked Comrades, 1–​17; Ongkili, Nation-​building, 21, 27, 29; R. Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948–​1960 (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004), 37–​38, 59–​61; K. Hack, ‘Corpses, Prisoners of War and Captured Documents: British and Communist Narratives of the Malayan Emergency, and the Dynamics of Intelligence Transformation’, Intelligence and National Security, 14/​4 (1999), 214; T.N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 94. 23  C. DuBois, Social Forces in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 52–​53; for a propagandistic reading, see: W.A. van Goudoever, Malino Maakt Historie: Een Overzichtelijke bewerking van Notulen en Tekstuele Redevoeringen ter Conferentie van Malino 15–​25 Juli 1946 (Batavia [Jakarta]: De Regeerings Voorlichtings Dienst, 1946).

332   Roel Frakking December 1948), the Dutch were forced to finally recognize Indonesian independence in December 1949. The outcome in Malaysia was very different, where the British and their allies drove the MCP across the Thai border and into insignificance following twelve years of protracted warfare, three years after independence. In doing so, the British found that their counter-​insurgency campaign created sufficient political stability to hold general elections in 1955, which resulted in a victory for the Malay-​Chinese Alliance party and Tunku Abdul Rahman, who then led Malaysia to independence in 1957.24 Regardless of the fact that the wars of liberation in Indonesia and Malaysia produced divergent outcomes, insurgent forces in both cases faced similar challenges and difficulties. Mobilizing populations wracked by destitution, communal rifts, fear, and hunger, who also were facing open-​ended yet uncertain futures, was no easy task. One strategy that was adopted by anti-​colonial forces in Indonesia and Malaysia was to divide populations into two distinct camps—​friends and foes. The objective was to make neutrality, especially where colonial and anti-​colonial zones of control met, impossible—​a strategy that was, of course, also adopted by counter-​insurgent forces.25 In this sense, ideology became key. Insurgent commanders—​irrespective of their political leanings—​projected a unified anti-​colonial message to the masses. They appealed to a ‘coherent and relatively stable set of beliefs and values’ based on shared hardships, grievances, and desired post-​conflict outcomes, often predicated on regime change.26 Such messages also had an internal purpose, since they helped to consolidate cohesion within rebel organizations.27 Either way, insurgency ideologies required modes of thinking founded upon the notion that entire populations were ripe for revolution. Speaking in Jakarta, West Java, one communist speaker held that ‘the only thing that remains for us is to cut the throats of the Hollanders, or to drive them from Indonesia completely’.28 For similar reasons, the local Kebaktian Rakyat Indonesia Sulawesi commander signed his ‘final notice’ in the name of the entire population demanding that Dutch troops occupying Makassar in Sulawesi surrender in December 1947. He claimed that everyone wanted independence and was prepared to die attaining it.29 The ideological link between people and combatants was all-​important for victory: ‘only a strong ideology . . . can make a guerilla [sic] war explode’, wrote TNI General Abdul Haris Nasution. It tied the guerrilla to ‘the spirit of resistance in the people’.30

24  A. Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948–​1960 (London: Frederick Muller, 1975), 470; Staniland, Networks, 191. 25 See, for example NL-​ HaNa, 2.10.62/​5819, Getypt pamflet met tekeningen, undated, unsigned, NEFIS Document No. 4492. This pamphlet depicts two Indonesians fighting for the Dutch: Bendjol, who shot his brother who did fight for the TNI, and Kisoet. Both feel they are sinning for not joining the resistance, all for some beef, cheese, and butter. 26 K. Knight, ‘Transformations of the Concept of Ideology in the Twentieth Century’, American Political History Review, 100/​4 (2006), 625; Gutiérrez Sanín and Wood, ‘Ideology and Civil War’, 215. 27  TNA, CO 1022/​46, M.C.P. Document ‘Study’, 3. ‘Criticism on Comrade X’s working style based on business-​ism’, 3 December 1953, SSB: 4019/​19. 28  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132, 416, Communisme rond Batavia, 26 August 1948, Nr. JD2/​86063/​G. 29  NL-​HaNA, 2.10.14/​3742, Soerat Pemiretahoekan Penghabisan!!!, Dossier Bijlagen bij Hoofdstuk III, Archief AS Bundel VIII-​40 Zuid-​Celebes Affaire. 30  A.H. Nasution, Fundamentals in Guerilla Warfare and The Indonesian Defence System Past and Future (Information Service of the Indonesian Armed Forces, 1953), 23, 25.

‘Independence or Death’?    333 The MCP/​MNLA, too, claimed to speak for all communities—​Indian, Malay, and Chinese—​suffering under British rule. They had to do so, stated the revived Freedom News in January 1949, ‘because the British Imperialists are still continuing to enslave the people of the colonies [through] such atrocious measures as arson, killing, imprisonment [and] mopping up’.31 Everyone was ready to sacrifice, claimed North Johore guerrilla leader Tan Kan in his diary: ‘Human beings are born to struggle’; to ‘endure [empire] is death’.32 Indonesian resistance leader Robert Wolter Mongisidi could have spoken for many across Java, Sumatra, and other islands when he appealed to his audience’s shared history of subjugation. The Japanese had only added insult to injury, and now the Dutch again ‘tore [at] the wound that was already severe!’ The people had awakened ‘ferocious as a starving tiger’.33 In Malaysia and Indonesia, middle grounds seemed non-​existent. The ideological calls to arms did not fall on deaf ears. The insuperable drive to oust colonial powers after 1945 marked the apogee of a trajectory that had been maturing across Southeast Asia for decades. The Indonesian and Malaysian nationalist movements—​ including Sukarno’s Partai Nasional Indonesia and the MCP—​ had been organizing throughout the first half of the twentieth century.34 Cadres’ revolutionary credentials could stretch back years. Now, MCP leaders such as Chin Peng or Shamsiah Fakir openly advocated for the all-​out final push.35 They expected to find the ‘determination to sacrifice and the spirit to save the public’ everywhere.36 As the number of fighters above indicates, people thronged to join mass organizations by the thousands.37 Many did so for the reasons Harun gave his friend, Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL) soldier Jalhay. Harun said that ‘maintaining our republic Indonesia is paramount’ because now that Indonesia was free, it had to remain free. ‘What you always call Batavia [Jakarta] city we will give back its original name Djakarta’.38

31 

‘Preface on Revival of Publication’, Freedom News 1 (1949), 1, emphasis mine. CO 537/​3753, Malayan Security Service Political Intelligence Journal [hereafter MSSPIJ], Serial No. 14/​1948, 31 Juli 1948. 33 NL-​ HaNA, 2.10.62/​ 1312, Pamphlet R.W. Mongisidi, annex to VII to Agno. DD2/​ 73, 6 November 1946. 34  K. Stutje, Campaigning in Europe for a Free Indonesia: Indonesian Nationalists and The Worldwide Anticolonial Movement, 1917–​1931 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2019); J.M. Pluvier, Overzicht van de Ontwikkeling der Nationalistische Beweging in Indonesië in de Jaren 1930 tot 1942 (‘s-​Gravenhage: N. V. Uitgerij W. van Hoeve, 1953), 41; Kheng, The Masked Comrades, 23–​27; J. Coates, Suppressing Insurgency: An Analysis of the Malayan Emergency (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 20; Y.C. Fatt, ‘Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Singapore during the 1930s’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 8/​2 (1977), 202. 35  R. Maidin, The Memoirs of Rashid Maidin: From Armed Struggle to Peace (Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2005), 8–​11; S. Fakeh, The Memoirs of Shamsiah Fakeh: From AWAS to 10th Regiment (Petaling Yajah: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2009), 13–​14; ‘Rashid, Why I Turned Red’, in J. Wong Wing On (ed.), From Pacific War to Merdeka: Reminiscences of Abdullah CD, Rashid Maidin, Suriani Abdullah & Abu Samah (Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2005), 29–​35. 36  TNA, CO 537/​3753, Supplement 10/​48. M.S.S. P.I.J. issued with MSSPIJ No.15/​48 on 15.8.48. 37  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132, 416, Communisme rond Batavia, 26 August 1948, Nr. JD2/​86063/​G. 38  S. Jalhay, Allen Zwijgen: Merdeka and Andjing Nica tot Apra (Purmerend: no publisher, 1983), 28–​29. 32 TNA

334   Roel Frakking

A Holy Cause? Rank and File Ideological Roads to Resistance Continuing, Harun stated that ‘we fight for a holy cause, until the bitter end’. The question remains, however, whether his case was typical. Harun’s words resonated strongly with leadership narratives, but did prospective rank-​and-​filers transition into activism for similar, ostensibly ideological reasons? Without doubt, many individuals and groups indeed shared insurgent leaders’ ideological beliefs. The point here, however, is that ideology was less predicated upon the inflexibility of revolutionary, political end-​goals and more upon different, at times personal, socio-​economic interpretations of revolution. Certain individuals and groups were predisposed to highly ideological forms of activism. In such cases, specific and ideological experiences and outlooks that pre-​dated the onset of insurgencies were crucial mobilizing factors. This helped them overcome activism-​inhibiting barriers, especially within the context of specific social networks.39 These trajectories could be animated by shared, ideological pre-​histories, as was the case for Sukarno or luminaries of the MCP.40 For such people, anti-​colonial resistance was an ideological context they were born into, with entire villages sharing similar outlooks.41 Such pre-​war political views found fertile ground within the massive changes wrought by the Japanese occupation of South East Asia. Despite Japanese atrocities and the doubtful veracity of their promises of independence, the occupiers had introduced possibilities of self-​actualization that many, including anti-​colonial ideologues but also others thirsting for change, connected with and tapped into. Japan’s continued cultural, political, and economic strength in the region had not gone unnoticed; elites now responded to the appeal of pan-​ Asian prosperity, albeit with trepidation. Ideas, such as a ‘state as a consciousness-​raising force’ that connected with its subjects, found mass appeal, precisely because they were so markedly different from the workings of the colonial state.42 At the same time, these ideas resonated with earlier nationalist thinking. Militarization by the Japanese, furthermore, had enthused tens of thousands of Indonesian youths for revolution, making them recognize their own, pre-​existing collective power. These realizations reinforced the feeling that different futures lay ahead, as did anti-​colonial victories elsewhere in South East Asia.43 Such 39 

Viterna, ‘Pulled, Pushed, and Persuaded’, 6. L.J.A. Schoonheyt, Boven-​Digoel (Batavia: N.V. Drukkerij De Unie, 1936), 165–​167; T. Shiraishi, ‘The Phantom World of Digoel’, Indonesia, 61 (1996), 94; C. Peng, My Side of History: As Told to Ian Ward and Normal Miraflor (Ipoh: Media Masters Publishing, 2003). 41  See the story of Lin Guan Ying, whose entire village joined the MCP in resisting the Japanese; Agnes Khoo (ed.), Life as the River Flows: Women in the Malayan Anti-​Colonial Struggle: An Oral History of Women from Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore (Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2007), 51; NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​3422, Overzicht Ontwikkeling Toestand van 3-​Gerdereg. ‘Prinses Irene’, 3 August 1949, No.: 11/​ AB3. 42  T.N. Harper, ‘A Long View on the Great Asian War’, in D. Koh Wee Hock (ed.), Legacies of World War II in South and East Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), 9, 13–​15. 43 TNA, AIR 20/​ 10377, Review of the Emergency in Malaya from June 1948 to August 1957, 12 September 1957; TNA, CO 1022/​210, Pan-​Malayan Review of Security Intelligence, No. 3–​March 1953; R. Cribb, Gangsters and Revolutionaries: The Jakarta Peoples’ Militia and the Indonesian Revolution 1945–​1949 (Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1991), 40–​41. B.R. O’G Anderson, Java in a Time 40 

‘Independence or Death’?    335 circumstances certainly may have expedited the transition into the TNI ranks for those who had already been accustomed to war as pre-​war KNIL soldiers.44 Others who saw great possibilities consisted of those who wanted to throw off cultural and socio-​economic restraints that had held them back. Women in Malaysia and Indonesia, for instance, felt that revolutionary contexts afforded them opportunities the colonial status quo would never have.45 The MCP’s message regarding poverty and liberation appealed to many. Within the MNLA, hardships were equally divided between women and men.46 ‘[We] could go into battle like the men’, declared Chen Xiu Zhu, who became section leader.47 For many participants, social advancement and ideologies went hand in hand.48 High-​level politics often galvanized ideological fervour locally. January 1948’s Renville Agreement between Republic and Dutch authorities is a case in point. Concluded on board the USS Renville anchored in Jakarta Bay in January 1948, ‘Renville’ was a continuation of the failed 1947 Linggarjati Agreement which had granted the Republic de facto control over Java, Madura, and Sumatra. Under Renville, however, the Republic acquiesced to equal power-​ sharing with the other states within the federated United States of Indonesia that would attain independence in December 1949 under Dutch tutelage. Furthermore, TNI forces would retreat from Dutch-​administered, federal territories to the Republican seat of power in Yogyakarta.49 Worse still, from the Republican point of view, the agreement reignited talks about implementing the plebiscite that had been part of previous negotiations. It allowed people on Java, Sumatra, and Madura who wished a separate, autonomous status within the future United States of Indonesia to formalize that wish by ballot.50 TNI evacuation and the plebiscite rallied staunch supporters of the Republic throughout 1948. Aside from those Republicans who stayed behind in Dutch employ, new and existing struggle organizations took up the TNI’s slack.51 In February, twelve members of various struggle groups reconnoitred Bandung for a possible attack on the city; others evaded evacuation orders or hid weapons. One resistance leader reminded locals not to cooperate with of Revolution: Occupation and Resistance, 1944–​1946 (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing 2006 [1972]), 1–​ 15, 30; W.H. Elsbree, Japan’s Role in Southeast Asia’s Nationalist Movements, 1940 to 1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), 149. 44  T.B. Simatupang, Het Laaste Jaar van de Indonesische Vrijheidsstrijd 1948–​ 1949: Een Authentiek Verslag door de Voormalig Chef-​staf van de Indonesische Strijdkrachten (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1985); B. Bouman, Van Driekleur tot Rood-​ wit: De Indonesische Officieren uit het KNIL, 1900–​ 1950 (’s-​ Gravenhage: Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis, 1995). 45  At the same time, however, gender roles could be massively re-​enforced; Harper, ‘A Long View’, 14. 46  R. Frakking, ‘“Collaboration is a Delicate Concept”: Alliance-​formation and the Colonial Defense of Indonesia and Malaysia, 1945–​1957,’ PhD dissertation, European University Institute, Florence, 2017, 257; Khoo, Life as the River Flows, 46. 47 Khoo, Life, 81. 48  Ibid., 51, 56. 49 Groen, Marsroutes en Dwaalsporen, 122–​ 123; R. J. McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 206; A.M. Taylor, Indonesian Independence and the United Nations (London: Stevens & Sons, 1960), 89. 50  M.D. Boogaarts, Parlementaire Geschiedenis van Nederland Na 1945: De Periode van het Kabinet-​ Beel 1946–​1948 Nederlands-​Indië, D, eerste helft b (Nijmegen: Gerard Noodt Instituut, 1995), 3,134, 3,146, 3,148. 51 ANRI, RA.18/​ 135, Siaran Kilat. Kedudukan pegawai-​ pegawai Republik Indonesia Didaerah Pendudukan Belanda, 1947–​1948.

336   Roel Frakking the Dutch, while in Krawang, West Java, the resistance took thumbprints and threatened with death anyone who dared speak against the Republic.52 Responding to word from the Republican government that mass insurrection was imminent in September due to Republican–​Dutch negotiations slowing down, one Sujono and his followers organized support for the TNI around Jakarta and for the associated Sharpened Bamboo Spear movement around Bogor.53 Ali Bujiarjo founded the Gerakan Plebisit Republik Indonesia in February. This grassroots organization aimed to explain to the people they should vote for the Republic. Through voting, they could ‘take back [the autonomous areas] that the Dutch illegally formed’. Netting some 20,000 supporters in Jakarta, GPRI chapters sprang up in places such as Bekasi, Krawang, Purwakarta, Palembang, and Malang.54

Flung into Concentration Camps: External Drivers of Insurrection Ideological motivations were by no means the main sources of revolutionary power, although the latter abounded everywhere.55 As one MCP money collector estimated, only 10% of the rank and file were highly motivated participants.56 Interviews with groups of surrendered insurgents in Malaysia, even if limited in number and held in controlled ( hostile) circumstances, seemed to substantiate the collector’s claims.57 Insurgent movements included members who were neither ideologues, nor reluctant participants. Many insurgent fighters and supporters occupied a middle ground where exogenous factors linked to the inequities of colonial rule generated feelings of anger and resentment that drove them to join armed insurrections.58 The Japanese occupation devastated the economies of Indonesia and Malaysia, and post-​ war reconstruction efforts did little to remedy the long-​term impact of depression and war on the poorest and most vulnerable.59 By 1954, many still lived ‘in wretched conditions’ in 52  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​393, VVD Weekrapport van 3 t/​m 9 Februari 1948, 17 February 1948, No.: G/​ WR/​13/​48; NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​393, VVD Weekrapport van 10 t/​m 16 Februari 1948, 25 February 1948, No: G/​WR/​16/​48. 53  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​416, Communisme rond Batavia, 26 August 1948, Nr. JD2/​86063/​G. 54 ANRI, AlgSec/​ 133, Oprichting van de ‘Gerakan Plebisit Repoeblik Indonesia’ met Batavia als Centrum, Geh.ag.965/​APO3/​48. 55  ANRI, RA.3a. Alg. Secretarie Deel I/​585, Nota Inzake het Indonesisch Binnenlandsch-​Bestuur, 20 October 1948; R. B. Karels, ‘Mijn Aardse Leven Vol Moeite en Strijd: Raden Mas Noto Soeroto, Javaan, Dichter, Politicus, 1888–​1951’, PhD dissertation, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, 2008, 223. 56  ISEAS, TCL/​ 11.05, Translation of a Letter from Tan Cheng Siong regarding the MCP and the Emergency, 8 May 1950. 57  Of 103 Surrendered Enemy Personnel, roughly a quarter fell into the ‘convinced’ group; TNA, WO 291/​1773, A Study of the Reasons for Entering the Jungle Among Chinese Communist Terrorists in Malaya Part I. Overt Reasons, 26 November 1953, ORS(PW) Memorandum No. 11/​53. 58  P. Regan and D. Norton, ‘Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, 49/​3 (2005), 319–​336; D. Ost, ‘Politics of Mobilization and Anger: Emotions in Movements and in Power’, European Journal of Social Theory, 7/​2 (2004), 229–​224. 59  For a long-​ term impact of wars and depression and their relation to post-​1945 insurrection in Southeast Asia, see Harper, ‘A Long View’.

‘Independence or Death’?    337 Malaysia despite the 1950–​1951 hike in tin and rubber prices caused by the Korean War.60 For years, hunger, failed crops, and droughts plagued regions in both Dutch and Republican-​ controlled areas.61 Endemic economic insecurity meant that membership of insurgent movements offered avenues for advancement otherwise unattainable, including, for example, greater access to basic resources, enhanced personal status, and opportunities for adventure.62 One 22-​year-​old youth joined the local MCP cell for food and ‘singing and basketball’. Another was equally tempted by the promise of free food, but also education.63 Food also prompted activism in Indonesia. Tentara Dessa (Village Army) units were made to scrounge for revolutionary groups; locals broke away from Dutch administrators’ influence once they failed to supply sustenance.64 Resistance groups certainly banked on people’s desperation: it placed hefty sums on the heads of Dutch ‘dogs’, i.e. anyone assisting Dutch authorities.65 Restricted economic opportunities connected to a pressing lack of safety and security. In search for the latter, people were pushed into participation and activism. In Malaysia, Chinese communities had scant reason to side with the British and Malay rulers. Pre-​ war distrust between Chinese and Malays, whom the British traditionally favoured, was deepened by post-​ 1945 revenge-​ taking stemming from collaboration and resistance under the Japanese.66 Years after 1945, a high proportion of Malaysia’s Chinese population remained disenfranchised and unrecognized as citizens, with 400,000 mainly Chinese squatters illegally occupying agricultural lands.67 As the MCP depended on support from predominantly Chinese communities, the British perennially kept them under strict surveillance within ‘compact, easily administered’ communities through the forced resettlement of more than 500,000 Chinese into so-​called New Villages and some 60,000 into labour lines. With military necessity always prevailing over New Villagers’ needs, resettlement caused

60  Opinion:

‘The People Protest’, The Singapore Free Press, 27 August 1954, 4; R. Stubbs, Counter-​ insurgency and the Economic Factor: The Impact of the Korean War Prices Boom and the Malayan Emergency (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1974). 61  ‘Dr. Gani over de Voedselsituatie’, De Nieuwe Courant, 5 March 1947, 1; NL-​HaNA, NHM, 2.20.01/​ 8910, Overzicht Economische Situatie in de Bevrijde Gebieden per 10 Januari 1949, 25 January 1949. 62 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion, 6; TNA, WO 291/​1699, Interrogation of 112 Surrendered Communist Terrorists in 1955, May 1956, Memorandum No 4/​56; ‘Rampok’, Java Bode, 16 November 1949, 2; ‘War Against the Gangs’, The Straits Times of Singapore, 12 March 1954; ‘M.I.C. Condemns Gangsterism’, The Straits Times, 4 July 1948, 3. 63 ANM, 1988/​ 0012903, D.A.Gen/​47 Emergency Authorities, Liaison With, Conf. Psychological Warfare Section Monthly Report, September 1957, No. 60. 64 NL-​ HaNA, 2.13.132/​3422, Overzicht Ontwikkeling Toestand van 3-​Gerdereg. ‘Prinses Irene’, 3 August 1949, No.: 11/​AB3; NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​223, Overzicht en Ontwikkeling van de Toestand, 10 Januari 1947, No. 17/​III-​C. 65  NL-​HaNA, 2.10.62/​5478, Pamflet get. ‘Ketangoenan’, translation 2, 28 November 1947, No. 4151. For the same tactic in Vietnam, see: ANOM, 3 HCI/​232-​233, Extract from Viet Nam News Service, Rangoon, 1 July 1949, appendix to Transmission No. I87 (Fd-​4) du 26 September 1949, 8 October 1949, No. 5589 Cab; I am thankful to Pierre Asselin for having shared this source with me. 66  TNA, CO 825/​42/​5, Tan Cheng Lock, Memorandum on the Future of British Malaya, 1 November 1943; C. Boon Kheng, ‘Sino-​Malay Conflicts in Malaya, 1945–​1946: Communist Vendetta and Islamic Resistance’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 12/​1 (1981), 109. 67 Ongkili, Nation-​Building, 51; TNA, CO 717/​ 178/​1, Report of the Committee Appointed by His Excellency the High Commissioner to Investigate the Squatter Problem, 10 January 1949, No. 3 of 1949.

338   Roel Frakking structural resentment.68 On multiple occasions, villagers’ anger boiled over into violence, leaving one resettlement officer clubbed to death, for example.69 Stubborn Dutch insistence that the Netherlands still had a role to play in Indonesia forced people to mobilize. The November 1946 Linggarjati Agreement—​the basis for subsequent negotiations such as those on the USS Renville cited above—​recognized Republican power over Java, Sumatra, and Madura. The Hague, however, did not give the Republic’s new status much countenance. By the time of Linggarjati’s March 1947 ratification, Dutch officials had reinterpreted the accord so that the Republic’s standing was greatly diminished, especially within the coming federated United States of Indonesia.70 Linggarjati nonetheless forced many into specific directions with its recognition of Republican power. Some Chinese communities, caught between two fires, tried to await further developments. Indonesians under direct Dutch control feared exposure to Republican retaliation and, in some cases, organized themselves politically as a counterbalance. Rejoicing republicans demanded immediate governance over various cities. Dutch actions on the ground contravening Linggarjati, however, crushed any elation, making room for uncertainty and lasting recriminations.71 The need for protection from life-​threatening violence dragged disinterested people into insurgent activism, trumping other considerations.72 Mass violence, for example, ranged from executions and sexual attacks to food restrictions and the creation of interior borderlands that enforced compliance.73 Colonial, racist mindsets dictated that the subjugated only understood force. Operating in that scorched-​earth context, colonial troops stuck to that adagio.74 The British undertook mass arrests and declared a state of emergency on 18 June 1948, after the MCP had fully launched its revolt.75 ‘Emergency Regulations’ allowed for far-​reaching measures including collective detention or punishment and forced 68  TNA, CO 717/​178/​4, Weekly Situation Report, 11–​17 November 1949, No. 4; TNA, CAB 21/​1681, Federation Plan for the Elimination of the Communist Armed Forces in Malaya’, 24 May 1950, appendix to Memorandum by the Minister of Defence, 7 July 1950, MAL.C.(50) 23; ‘Malaya’s New Displaced Person’, The Straits Times, 18 September 1955, 6; Frakking, ‘ “Collaboration is a Delicate Concept” ’, 234–​ 236. ‘Economic Needs of Squatter Clash with Army Aims’, The Straits Times, 2 December 1955, 8. 69  Shui, ‘The Masses Hammered the Red-​ haired Devil to Death’, Freedom News, 33 (1953), 3–​4; ‘A Record of How the Renegade Lam Swee was Beaten up in Johore Bahru’, Freedom News, 29 (1952), 13. 70  R. Frakking, ‘Het Middel Erger dan de Kwaal?: De Opkomst en het Failliet van het Instituut der Ondernemingwacht in Nederlands-​Indië, 1946–​50’, MA dissertation, University of Utrecht, 2011, 11–​12. 71 NL-​ HaNA, 2.10.14/​2417, De Linggadjati-​overeenkomst geteekend; NL-​HaNA, 2.10.14/​2417, Kort Verslag betreffende de Bestuursvoering in de Preanger over de maand Maart 1947. 72 M. Humphreys and J. Weinstein, ‘Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War’, American Journal of Political Science, 52/​2 (2008), 449; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 115, 117; A. Oberschall and M. Seidman, ‘Food Coercion in Revolution and Civil War: Who Wins and How Do They Do It?’, Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History, 47/​2 (2005), 337, 401; J. Fearon and D. Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, American Political Science Review, 97/​1 (2003), 75. 73  See R. Frakking and M. Thomas, ‘Windows onto the Micro-​dynamics of Insurgent and Counter-​ insurgent Violence: Evidence from Late Colonial Southeast Asia and Africa Compared’, in T. Brocades-​ Zaalberg and B. Luttikhuis (eds.), Empire’s Violent End: Comparing Dutch, British, and French Wars of Decolonization, 1945–​1962 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022), 49–​70. 74  TNA, CAB 21/​1681, Report Squatter Committee, Various Matters Discussed with the Authorities in Malaya, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 July 1950, MAL.C.(50) 25. 75  ‘Mass Arrests in Hunt for Communists. Federation-​wide Raid on Headquarters. More than 100 Suspects Captured in Selangor’, Malay Mail, 21 June 1948.

‘Independence or Death’?    339 resettlement.76 In total, some 30,000 people were detained. Of these, 10,000 Chinese were deported to China, spelling humanitarian disaster for expellees.77 Hundreds of detainees and dependants crammed themselves aboard single ships. On one voyage, an infant died; another passenger attempted suicide.78 Suspected spies were killed by their fellow travellers, who dumped their bodies into the sea.79 Arriving in China, survivors told how British attackers had burnt down their villages and ‘flung [everyone] into concentration camps’. Li Hsueh-​mei was ‘beaten eight times until she vomited blood’ because MNLA troops had passed near her house. Attempted suicide did not save her from detention. Her husband was made to sit naked on a block of ice for hours. Interrogators often utilized the threat of execution—​a threat that was reportedly acted upon in a number of cases where individuals were hanged without much in the way of proof. Chen Chun-​yung had survived torture only to witness how a detention camp ‘riot’ was quashed by troops, leaving three dead and thirty injured.80 Even if Chinese news outlets had perhaps inflated witness accounts, MCP propaganda regarding British torture and detainee disappearances rang true in Malaysia.81 Dutch and Indonesian forces operating under the Dutch flag showed the population similar disdain. The aforementioned plebiscite was soon used to cow local communities into acquiescence. Dutch complaints averred that the Republic leaned ‘on the simpleminded’ in various villages through plebiscite-​related ‘subversive activity’.82 Such reporting naturally failed to mention Dutch aggression. Soldiers killed thirty-​four people in Kediri for apparently incorrectly answering the question whether they chose ‘Indonesia’ or the ‘Republic’.83 Mass detention crowded prisons beyond capacity. Protected by civilian and military authorities, including within courts, military and police acted with impunity. They killed and took prisoner thousands of ‘enemies’, often within mere months.84 Some cases gained immediate notoriety, such as the thousands of Indonesians killed predominantly at the hands of the Special Troops Corps on South Sulawesi between December 1946 and March 1947, or the

76  A. Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948–​1960 (London: Frederick Muller, 1975), 188, 194; TNA, CO 1022/​148, Extract from a Savingram, No. 83 Sec. From the Federation of Malaya addressed to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 30 October 1951. 77  Frakking, ‘Collaboration’, 231. 78  TNA., FCO 371/​92374, Cypher O.T.P. 16 July 1951, No. 626, FC 1821/​114. 79  TNA, FCO 371/​83543, Report on Voyage of Muinan, 3 December 1951, FC 1822/​59. 80  TNA, FO 371/​92374, Translated News Extract from Nan Fang Jih Pao, dated 20.5.51, TNA, FO/​871/​ 115; TNA, FO 371/​92374, Translated News Extract from Nan Fang Jih Pao, FC 1821/​108; TNA, FO 371/​ 92373, Translated News Extracts from Nan Fang Jih Pao dated 21.3.1951, FC 1821/​73. 81  TNA, WO 291/​ 1699, Interrogation of 112 Surrendered Communist Terrorists in 1955, May 1956, Memorandum No 4/​56. 82 ANRI, AlgSec/​ 133, Oprichting van de ‘Gerakan Plebisit Repoeblik Indonesia’ met Batavia als Centrum, Geh.ag.965/​APO3/​48.; ‘Subversieve Actie’, Het Dagblad, 15 June 1948, 2. 83 ANRI, RA26/​ 498, R. Soewardja, Commissaris Polisi, Kl. II. Pelaporan Provokatie Belanda, 24 February 1948, No. 568/​Pol/​PAM. 84  NL-​ HaNA, 2.13.132/​3356, Verslag over het 1e Kwartaal 1949, Nr. 40/​Co/​1V-​Geheim; NL-​HaNA, 2.10.14/​4989, Politieke Toestand van de Bevrijde Gebieden, over de Maand Augustus 1947, annex to Politieke Toestand Bevrijde Gebieden over de Maand Augustus 1947, 27 September 1947, No. 110/​G/​REC; NL-​HaNA, 2.09.16/​182, De Hoofdambtenaar ter Uwer Beschikking, B. J. Lambers to P.G., 27 December 1946, no number; NL-​HaNA 2.09.95/​76, Procureur Generaal H. W. Felderhof to Lt. Gouverneur Generaal van Ned.Indië, 2 August 1948, No. 4122; Frakking, ‘Collaboration’, 85, 249–​250.

340   Roel Frakking forty-​six TNI prisoners who suffocated in a train carriage in East Java in 1947. In truth, however, colonial enforcers looted, wounded, and killed purposefully and structurally.85 Insurgents likewise showed little compunction, killing fellow countrymen and women. To them, as for incumbent forces, a major dynamic to violence was its capacity to force ordinary people’s compliance. Violence detracted from the colonial regime’s claim that its agents protected the people. Therefore, violence had to be performative and visible.86 MCP forces targeted the mandatory British identity card system, attacked Europeans and workers on plantations, and destroyed rubber trees.87 In 1950, the MNLA claimed to have killed 1,320 ‘Traitors’.88 Indonesian fighters employed similar methods.89 Anyone considered a collaborator was targeted, ranging from local enforcers and administrators to ordinary people who had somehow caused offence, or who were deemed not revolutionary enough.90 Facing heightened insecurity, people opted to side with the insurgents. On the one hand, constant harassment from colonial enforcers paved the way, with people betting on resistance cells for protection.91 Thus, when the curfew was lifted from Pusing New Village, ‘practically every able-​bodied Chinese left the town’ for the jungles.92 On the other hand, the ability of local resistance cells to make their presence felt made decisions to remain neutral rather costly. Performing increasingly incriminating tasks, hapless labourers were pulled 85  R. Limpach, De Brandende Kampongs van Generaal Spoor (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom, 2016); NL-​HaNA, 2.20.01/​8910, Mr. J.S. Sinninghe Damsté, Voorzitter ALS to W.J. de Jonge, Voorzitter Federabo, 30 July 1948, V.V./​No. 61; NL-​HaNA, 2.20.01/​8910, Mr. J.G. van ‘t Oever, Waarnemend Voorzitter ALS to Jhr. Mr. W.J. de Jonge, 2 August 1948, V.V./​No. 62; NL-​HaNA, 2.20.01/​8910, Van ‘t Oever to De Jonge, 12 September 1948, V.V./​No. 73, 12 September 1948; NL-​HaNA, 2.09.19/​58, De Krijgsraad te Velde te Batavia in de Zaak van de Auditeur Militair ratione oficii tegen: Manuputty, Zefanja, Rolno. 315/​1948 8709; NL-​HaNA, 2.09.19/​58, De Krijgsraad te Velde te Batavia in de Zaak van de Auditeur Militair ratione oficii tegen: Mihardja, Kasman en Nanang. 86  NL-​HaNA, 2.09.19/​182, Pleun van der Plank, 45 jaar, Hoofdinspecteur van Politie te Medan Op heden, 23 Juli 1949; TNA, CO 717/​178/​4, Weekly Situation Reports prepared in Eastern Department, 28 October–​3 November, No. 40. 87  ‘Deaths’, ‘Obituaries’, The Planter, 24/​ 7 (Kuala Lumpur: Incorporated Society of Planters, 1948), 539; TNA, CO 537/​3753, Appendix C, C1, C2 and C3 to Review of the Security Situation in Malaya, 27 February 1953, CIS(52) (15) (Final); ‘2 Buses Fired’, The Singapore Free Press, 14 June 1950, 1; ’16 Cards Stolen’, Malaya Tribune, 22 February 1950, 1. 88 ‘A Chart Showing the War Achievements of 6 Regiments of the MRLA’, Freedom News, 28 (1952), 14. 89  ANRI, RA.24/​1717, Laporan Ke-​II, Gaboengan Lasjkar Perdjoeangan Indonesia, 16-​9-​1947; ANRI, RA.18/​45, Instroeksi oentoek para Asisten-​Asisten-​Wedono dan Loerah-​Loerah, yang berkewajiban langsung memimpin perlawanan Rakjat terhadap Moesoeh. 1947. 90 NL-​ HaNA, 2.10.14/​3463, Veiligheid op ondernemingsgebied, 22 October 1948, No. Kab./​2487/​ 21340/​P.Z.; NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​730, Opgave van Ontvoerde en Vermoorde Bestuursambtenaren en Volkshoofden sedert 19 December 1948, bijgewerkt tot 31 Juli 1949; ANM, 1979/​0006628, Murder of Indian Tapper in the Slim River of Perak, CID/​FM/​155/​22; ANM, 1979/​0006628, Officer-​in charge, Police District Pagoh to the Compensation Officer, 11 March 1953, LDM. No (CIC) 8/​53 4. 91  TNA, WO 291/​1773, A Study of the Reasons for Entering the Jungle Among Chinese Communist Terrorists in Malaya Part I. Overt Reasons, 26 November 1953, ORS(PW) Memorandum No.11/​53; ISEAS, TCL/​11.05, Translation of a Letter from Tan Cheng Siong regarding the MCP and the Emergency, 8 May 1950. 92  ISEAS, HSL 7, (b)7.47, Petition from MCA and United Malay National Organization UMNO to Templer; also see TNA, FO 1091/​28, Donald MacGillivray to Malcolm MacDonald, 8 March 1955, DEF. TS.107/​1.Vol.III.

‘Independence or Death’?    341 into the resistance. Others received outright threats that left them little choice but to actively assist insurgents.93 Although interrogated by notoriously violent Dutch intelligence operators, many, such as farmer Sukasian, stated that he was pressed into joining the ‘Iron Horse’ struggle group by their leader Sugito. Resistance commander Muhammed likewise pressed people into his orbit.94 One Indonesian soldier’s family was so severely threatened that he passed on details about the layout of a Dutch army camp.95 In Malaysia, a 17-​year-​ old went further: he left his home for the MNLA outright. Recruiters had threatened to kill him and his family.96 Friendship and familial ties to those already crossed over into action facilitated assistance to resistance cells; if found out, those thus implicated were likely to be rounded up or even executed by colonial troops.97

Without Blood on their Hands: The Wages of Desertion Not everyone decided to risk travelling with insurgents. As a consequence of the dual pressure from insurgent and Dutch or British forces, people often tried to cooperate with both insurgents and colonial forces where possible. They could do so as long as a specific area did not pass definitively into the hands of a particular combatant group.98 That being said, even those who had become activists ensconced in jungle and mountain hideouts could still abscond from the ranks. This last section will explore the circumstances that led activists to transition back into working against the TNI, MNLA, and other struggle groups. People deserted insurgent movements for the same reasons they joined them. Structural hardships, characterized by increasingly violent incursions by government forces and hunger, which, in the case of Malaysia, was occasioned by British food restriction operations, drove their decisions. For isolated insurgents, these hardships became significant push factors once they combined with latent dissatisfaction within the particular cells to which they belonged, such as the lack of personal progress and personal animosity with leaders. Chances to break away, however, had to be present to remove stumbling blocks to

93  TNA,

WO 291/​1699, Interrogation of 112 Surrendered Communist Terrorists in 1955, May 1956, Memorandum 4/​ 56; NL-​ HaNA, 2.10.62/​ 988, Proces Verbaal van Getuige Verhoor Raden Sadikin Karaatmadja, 2 Oktober 1947; Proces-​Verbaal van Getuige-​verhoor Soekatma bin Hadji Achmad, 27 September 1947, annexes to 10 Pn.-​V. in duplo, 8 Oktober 1947, No. 993. 94 NL-​ HaNA, 2.10.62/​7305, Voorlopig Ondervragingsrapport SMI. Koll., Nr.: U/​V/​427, in Besluit Nummer 18; NL-​HaNA, 2.10.62/​7305, Verhoorrapport Soeharto, 14 Januari 1948, No. 4515, in Besluit Nummer 16. 95  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​393, VVD.weekrapport van 5 t/​m 12 Januari 1948, 21 Januari 1948, No.: G/​WR/​ 04/​48. 96 ANM, 1988/​ 0012903, D.A.Gen/​47 Emergency Authorities, Liaison With, Conf. Psychological Warfare Section Monthly Report, September 1957, No. 60, PWS/​Sec/​17/​57. 97  NL-​HaNA, 2.10.62/​2442, Rakimin, 31 Juli 1946, Ondervragingsrapport No.SB/​160/​PAL; NL-​HaNA, 2.09.95/​76, Andi Tjallo, Soellewatang van het Landschap Sawitto, 16/​VIII-​’47.B.C.S. 98 Frakking, ‘Collaboration’, 270–​ 271; NL-​HaNA, 2.10.29/​97, Rapport van de Vertegenwoordiger P.G. voor Bantam, 28 September 1949, No. 101/​VPGB/​49.

342   Roel Frakking desertion.99 Access to a livelihood, demobilization, and safe passage out of the jungle, often again through social networks, were prerequisites before many wavering insurgents would consider deserting.100 Unfortunately for insurgents, these opportunities were most readily available once government forces violently assumed control of a particular area. Local shifts in power relations caused fighters to switch sides regardless of possible ideologies or the final outcome of the insurgency itself. For example, although The Hague would formally recognize the Republic of Indonesia’s independence during December 1949’s Round Table Conference, Republican fighters throughout the preceding years of warfare were liable to choose safety over endangering their lives for an end goal that at times appeared uncertain, even if momentarily.101 In this regard, they differed little from those who fled from the MNRLA’s ranks in anticipation of defeat. Haji Panji, a local strongman operating East of Jakarta, certainly was compelled to undermine the insurgent cause by shows of colonial strength. He surrendered in May 1947, hounded by Dutch forces and disaffected with the political manoeuvres of the Republic. With hundreds of his followers, Panji operated counter-​gangs assisting Dutch endeavours to violently occupy Klender and Karawang. As Panji continued to chafe against control, the Dutch eventually killed him. They blamed his death on the TNI.102 Ideologues, such as the district head in Pekalongan and ‘friend of Sukarno’, could also acquiesce to Dutch control. His people demanded safety, the district head declared.103 Possibly less ideology-​driven resistance fighters were directed into camps after surrender.104 After Renville’s forced TNI evacuation, a mixed group of some 700 demobilized TNI soldiers and family members evacuating TNI soldiers had left behind had little choice but to accept aid by the ‘Community Relief Body’ in Bandung.105 Ex-​MCP fighters, designated Surrendered Enemy Personnel (SEP), likewise folded under security forces harassment.106 The desertion of one fighter, via the intelligence that she or he shared, could lead to the immediate ambush of others: more 99  Considerable forces precluded desertion. Even if not ‘ideologues’, many MRLA entered the jungles in 1948 to not come out for years. See: TNA, WO 291/​1699, Interrogation of 112 Surrendered Communist Terrorists in 1955, May 1956, Memorandum No. 4/​56. 100  H. Albrecht and K. Koehler, ‘Going on the Run: What drives Military Desertion in Civil War?’, Security Studies, 27/​2 (2018), 179–​203; K. Koehler, D. Ohl, and H. Albrecht, ‘From Disaffection to Desertion: How Networks Facilitate Military Insubordination in Civil Conflict’, Comparative Politics 45/​ 4 (2016), 439–​457. 101  R. Cribb, ‘Military Strategy in the Indonesian Revolution: Nasution’s Concept of “Total People’s War” in Theory and Practice’, War and Society, 19/​2 (2001), 151–​152. 102  R. Cribb, ‘De HAMOTs van Luitenant Koert Bavinck: Het Bendewezen van Djakarta in Dienst van het Nederlands Gezag, 1947–​1949’, in P.H. Kamphuis et al. (eds.), Mededelingen van de Sectie Militaire Geschiedenis Landmachtstaf, vol. 12 (Den Haag: SMGL, 1989), 68–​78. 103  NL-​ HaNA, 2.10.14/​4989, Verslag van de Bevindingen inzake het Verblijf van de Amerikaanse Waarnemers te Semarang Gedurende 2, 3, 4 en 5 October, 7 October 1947. 104  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​301, Verslag Lasjkarkamp Soemoer, Verslag over de Week, 31 Mei, 1947, No. 352; NL-​HaNA, 2.10.14/​3613, Richtlijnen Verhandeling Aanmelding Verzetsgroepen en Verzetslieden, 15 January 1949, No. Kab/​91/​993. 105  NL-​HaNA, 2.10.62/​927, Screening ex-​TNI-​militairen te Bdg, 3 Juni 1948, No. 575; for parallels with French colonial Indochina, see C. Goscha’s chapter in this volume. 106  TNA, CO 1030/​ 20, Federal Government Press Statement D. Inf. 7/​55/​42 (DOPS); ANM, 1988/​ 0012903, D.A.Gen/​ 47 Emergency Authorities, Liaison With, Conf. Psychological Warfare Section Monthly Report, September 1957, No. 60, PWS/​Sec/​17/​57.

‘Independence or Death’?    343 fighters captured meant more ambushes. These dynamics broke entire MCP operations, especially where high-​ranking members decided to betray their former comrades.107 Security forces attacks exacerbated the bite of other, often outside pressures that reduced insurgent resolve. Food shortages weakened local cells considerably. Elements of the First TNI Division in West Java traded weapons for sugar; around Bandung, its Fourth Brigade was forced to downsize. Abandoned, an unknown but large number of ex-​fighters supposedly sought to join the KNIL in exchange for victuals.108 Hunger drove Sudarmo to (unsuccessfully) petition for his dismissal from the Republican Navy.109 MCP cells, the MNLA, and its Min Yuen supporters turned to food cultivation.110 However, coinciding with the MCP’s own October 1951 Directives—​which stipulated retreat to deep jungle bases to relieve the pressure from civilians in order to re-​establish waning rapport with them—​harsh British food restrictions forced resettled communities to rebuff MCP approaches.111 Its operatives soon experienced difficulties procuring food; cadres warned against ill-​advised operations to alleviate ‘acute food shortage’.112 Consequentially, an increasing number of SEPs conceded they had been starved out of hiding.113 Hunger quickly brought simmering unrest to the surface where it hurt insurgent cohesion. Although harbouring desires for ‘anti-​Dutch underground’ activities, ‘TNI deserters and ex-​TNI personnel’ around Purwokerto switched sides, noted Dutch commentators, as they were discontented with ‘economic conditions both in the Republic and the TNI itself ’. They reportedly cited homesickness, as well.114 The MCP was similarly plagued by steep divides between soldiers and leaders. One commander romantically pursued a non-​revolutionary without ‘educating her’ while his fighters took risks doing the MCP’s work. Elsewhere, executives fell for ‘bureaucratism and subjectivism’ that undermined ‘the methods of Marxism/​Leninism’ and confused the masses.115 SEPs in Kedah objected to leaders’ better diets and ‘preferential treatment’.116 ‘The humiliation dealt [to] me by the higher-​ups [and] 107 ANM, 1988/​ 0012903, D.A.Gen/​47 Emergency Authorities, Liaison With, Conf. Psychological Warfare Section Monthly Report, September 1957, No. 60, PWS/​Sec/​17/​57. 108  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​223, Overzicht en Ontwikkeling van den Toestand, 31 December 1946, No. 1/​ III-​C-​1. 109 NL-​ HaNA, 2.10.62/​7305, Verhoorrapport betreffende Soedarmo, 19 December 1947, No.114, in Besluit Nummer 12. 110  TNA, 1022/​15, The Security Weekly Intelligence Summary No. 119 [hereafter SFWIS] For the Week Ending [hereafter FTWE] 14th August 1952. 111 TNA, CO 1022/​ 205, Review of the Security Situation in Malaya, Paper by the Combined Intelligence Staff, 27 February 1953, CIS (52) (15) Final; Chin Peng with Ian Ward and Normal Miraflow, Alias Chin Peng: My Side of History (Ipoh: Media Masters Publishing, 2003), 280, 284, 295, 315; TNA, CO 1022/​209, Pan-​Malayan Review of Security Intelligence No. 1, January 1952. 112  K. Hack, Dialogues with Chin Peng: New Light on the Malayan Emergency (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005), 162; ANM, 1988/​0012903, D.A.Gen/​47 Emergency Authorities, Liaison With, Conf. Psychological Warfare Section Monthly Report, September 1957, No. 60, PWS/​Sec/​17/​57. 113  ‘Hunger Caused Surrender’, Singapore Standard, 3 September 1954, 3; ISEAS, HSL, 20.35, A Study of Surrenders in Malaya during the Period January 1949 to June 1954, 14 July 1954, Operational Research Section (Psychological Warfare) Memo No. 11/​54; TNA, WO 291/​1699, Interrogation of 112 Surrendered Communist Terrorists in 1955, May 1956, Memorandum No 4/​56. 114  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​416, Netherlands Forces Intelligence Service Signalment No. 13, 13 September 1948, No. 5867/​JD2. 115  TNA, CO 1022/​46, M.C.P. Document ‘Study’ 6. ‘A Few Instances of Lack of Sincerity’; ‘Study’ 7. ‘To Study a Scientific Method of Leadership’ (By Tan Kah Ying), 3 December 1953, SSB: 4019/​19. 116  TNA, AIR 22/​507, SFWIS No. 193 FTWE 14 January 1954.

344   Roel Frakking the hardship of the jungle’ prompted one fighter’s desertion. Another’s ‘bad treatment by leaders’, hunger, and the realization the MCP would not win made her hail a taxi to a local special constable post to surrender.117 Reduced costs of and actual rewards for desertion allowed more insignificant insurgent grievances to build towards abandoning the revolution. At that point, the appeals of surrender—​ paramount among them survival—​ would prove stronger than fellow-​ insurgents’ threats of putting to death any and all dissenters.118 Insurgents were seduced in various ways. In Indonesia, instead of long-​term detention or worse, those who earlier ‘went over to the Republic’ could desert relatively safely by accepting the (not too voluntary) offer to point out weapon caches or take up arms against their erstwhile comrades.119 As Panji’s example has shown, desertion could be based on the collective reaction of networks. Surrender was certainly discussed among insurgents.120 British Royal Air Force aircraft dropped millions of surrender pamphlets and, from loudhailers, droned on about the advantages of surrender.121 Many MCP operatives attained SEP status by coming in carrying surrender pamphlets.122 The British activated family networks to pass on to insurgents that, unlike those who were captured, SEPs would not be persecuted, hanged, or shot; pamphlets depicted comrades rumoured to have been shot alive and well.123 A young Min Yuen member was talked into surrendering by her husband who assured her they both would survive the British welcome.124 With MCP power waning, the Malaysian states could afford to offer amnesty to insurgents. As one Chinese daily noted how it had affected the war in ‘Mau Mau land’, Kenya, the idea of amnesty rippled through MCP’s top echelons where it drew condemnation, although the MNLA Headquarters in Thailand itself did not a priori decline a parley with the Malaysian authorities.125 Where barriers to desertion lowered perceptibly, insurgents responded, especially when opportunities for vocation and income presented themselves. After having deserted, 117 ANM,

1988/​0012903, D.A.Gen/​47 Emergency Authorities, Liaison With, Conf. Psychological Warfare Section Monthly Report, September 1957, No. 60, PWS/​Sec/​17/​57. 118  ‘Bones Tell Tale of a “Comrade” Who Argued’, The Straits Times 11 November 1954, 1. 119  NL-​HaNA, 2.13.132/​301, Verslag Lasjkarkamp Soemoer, Verslag over de Week, 31 Mei, 1947, No. 352; NL-​HaNA, 2.10.14/​3613, Richtlijnen Verhandeling Aanmelding Verzetsgroepen en Verzetslieden, 15 January 1949, No. Kab/​ 91/​ 993; NL-​ HaNA, 2.13.132/​ 1315, Richtlijn Verhandeling Aanmeldende Verzetsgroepen en Verzetslieden, 8 April 1949, No. Kab/​1003/​7459. 120  TNA, WO 291/​1763, A Study of Surrender Behaviour Among Chinese Communist Terrorists in Malaya, May 1953, No.1/​53. 121  TNA, AIR 22/​507, SFWIS No. 17 for the Week Ending 24 September 1953. 122  TNA, AIR 22/​507, SFWIS No. 17 FTWE 24 September 1953. 123  TNA, CO 1022/​ 49, Commissioner’s Instructions No. 3, The Treatment of Surrendered Enemy Personnel (S.E.P.) and Captured Enemy Personnel (C.E.P.), undated, CP(SR) 426; TNA, CO 1022/​15, SFWIS No. 112 FTWE 26 June 1952; TNA, WO 291/​1763, A Study of Surrender Behaviour Among Chinese Communist Terrorists in Malaya, May 1953, No.1/​53. 124 ANM, 1988/​ 0012903, D.A.Gen/​47 Emergency Authorities, Liaison With, Conf. Psychological Warfare Section Monthly Report, September 1957, No. 60, PWS/​Sec/​17/​57. 125 ISEAS, TCL/​ 173.3, Editorials The Emergency, 1 September 1955, No. 197; ‘Intensified War on Reds Next Week’, The Straits Echo & Times, 7 January 1956, 1; ISEAS, HSL/​18.2, English Translation of a Statement by a Representative of the Malayan Races Liberation Army Supreme Command HQ, 7 June 1955; ISEAS, HSL/​20.24b, Expose the So-​called ‘General Amnesty’ Intrigue: A Certain Responsible Comrade of the Selangor State Committee of the MCP replies to Our Reporter on the Problem Regarding the So-​called ‘General Assembly’.

‘Independence or Death’?    345 Wagiman, for instance, applied for a position with the police in Ambarawa in Central Java (he was rejected); Dutch commanders made former resistance fighters into—​probably unwilling—​informants.126 Dutch authorities in West and East Java, furthermore, actively pursued former TNI officers for positions in the military or for local administrative posts. Ex-​TNI soldiers and members of revolutionary struggle organizations (pemuda) were also sought after as labourers, an opportunity few savoured.127 In Malaysia, by August 1957, the growing pool of decamping MCP fighters counted some 2,000 in number.128 Those who surrendered mentioned how in their new job—​often as propagandist or with the police, it should be noted—​they were paid and had access to food and comforts that had been scarce or absent while in the jungles.129 Provided deserters did not have ‘blood on their hands’, their SEP status proved desirable as a passport to ‘a new start in life’.130 Communist blood was acceptable, however: Central Executive Committee member Ah Kuk’s bodyguard brought in Ah Kuk’s head as a bartering chip.131 Although neither for Malaysia and Indonesia can we gauge in what measure deserters acted voluntarily, many SEPs surprised British operatives with how quickly they settled into their new roles.132 Aside from performing in anti-​MCP plays attended by thousands, they led patrols to former comrades, betrayed high-​level MCP meetings, or pointed out those paramilitaries that MCP agents had compromised.133 Desertion, however, left many without much choice: their erstwhile comrades in arms would not hesitate to take revenge on the now-​SEPs.134

Conclusion By retrieving insurgent testimonies, this chapter has used their micro-​trajectories into activism against late-​colonial regimes to illuminate the nature and complexities of recruitment during the war against the British and the Dutch. Although highly violent colonial intelligence services extracted them, and they were often printed as part of British or Dutch 126 NL-​ HaNA, 2.10.62/​ 7305, Voorlopig Verhoorrapport Betreffende Wagiman, 4 Februari 1948, No.: U/​III/​1081, in Besluit Nummer 19; NL-​HaNA, 2.09.95/​76, Verklaring van den Res.Kapt. V.S.D. R.P.P. Westerling; Verklaring van de Olt. Vermeulen, J.B. 127  ‘TNI-​strijders worden in West-​Java Gerehabiliteerd’, Het Dagblad, 17 April 1948, 2; ‘Voormalige TNI-​ers Herschoold’, 14 June 1949, 3; Mr. Kosasih bezocht W.-​Java, ‘Niet Vragen en Wachten, maar aan het Werk!’, Indische Courant voor Nederland, 3 June 1950, 1. 128 TNA, AIR 20/​ 10377, Review of the Emergency in Malaya from June 1948 to August 1957, 12 September 1957, COS.1636/​24/​10/​57. 129  ‘“Comrade X” Tells Why He Gave Himself Up’, The Straits Times, 9 March 1952, 10; ‘I Surrendered’, The Straits Times, 13 June 1951, 6. 130  TNA, 1022/​48, Note of a Meeting Held at King’s House on 28 October 1951. 131  TNA, AIR 22/​507, SFWIS No. 158 FTWE 14 May 1953. 132 TNA, AIR 20/​ 10377, Review of the Emergency in Malaya from June 1948 to August 1957, 12 September 1957, COS.1636/​24/​10/​57. 133  TNA, CO 1022/​15, SFWIS No. 105 FTWE 8 May 1952; TNA, AIR 22/​507, SFWIS No. 171 FTWE 13 August 1953; TNA, AIR 22/​507, SFWIS No. 201 FTWE 11 March, 1954; TNA, AIR 22/​508, SFWIS No.215 FTWE 17 June 1954. 134  ‘I Was a Bandit: I Tired of It’, The Straits Times, 22 February 1951, 6.

346   Roel Frakking propagandistic newspapers, these testimonies combined sufficiently with other, less problematic sources show that insurgencies did not hinge on innate, immutable ideologies. Local alterations to power dynamics and interests that complicated power relations relegated the significance of ideologies next to other, more pressing concerns. Ordinary people, perhaps not looking to openly express their true views on the future, could transform into activists—​even if for personal rather than ideological reasons—​when the stumbling blocks barring them from doing so fell away. This process functioned for both insurgent and incumbent forces. Controlling areas through naked, visible force removed barriers to participation and pushed people into varying degrees of activism. Through violence insurgents manipulated communities’ thirst for safety. Both Republicans and MCP cadres were ‘helped’ by colonial states that equally proved ruthless in their enforcement of compliance. Prompting people into action was not necessary for everyone, however. Destitution within failed, war-​torn economies dovetailed with personal drives for social advancement, access to food, and other means to navigate chaotic circumstances. As a result, people actively linked up with local resistance cells. Contrary to studies that focus on insurgency’s onset to analyse mobilization, this chapter has widened the analysis to include moments of desertion. This step is essential to delineate the limits of anti-​colonial, ideological narratives as insurgency drivers and to shed light on negative impacts upon insurgent cohesion. More importantly, it lays bare decolonization’s essence: that colonized populations lived in liminal areas that necessitated different choices due to changing local circumstances. This liminality ensured that once insurgencies and counter-​ insurgencies began to falter, whether temporarily, locally, or structurally, its fighters began to waver, too, with both dynamics amplifying each other. Insurgent desertion exacerbated latent fissures in insurgent cell cohesion, causing erstwhile activists to seek new affiliations with an uncaring colonial state that had actively hunted them previously. MCP leader Tan Kan had been right when he averred that colonized people were ready to struggle, but what he and other ideologues failed to see was that most people only do so under very specific circumstances.

Select Bibliography Branch, D., Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Gutiérrez Sanín, F. and E.J. Wood, ‘Ideology and Civil War: Instrumental Adoption and Beyond’, Journal of Peace Research, 51/​2 (2014), 213–​226, https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​00223​4331​ 6653​645. Hack, K., ‘Corpses, Prisoners of War and Captured Documents: British and Communist Narratives of the Malayan Emergency, and the Dynamics of Intelligence Transformation’, Intelligence and National Security, 14/​4 (1999), 211–​241, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​026845​2990​ 8432​578. Harper, T.N., ‘A Long View on the Great Asian War’, in D. Koh Wee Hock (ed.), Legacies of World War II in South and East Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007), 7–​20. Kalyvas, S., The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

‘Independence or Death’?    347 Limpach, R., De Brandende Kampongs van Generaal Spoor (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Boom, 2016). Mason, T.D., Caught in the Crossfire: Revolution, Repression and the Rational Peasant (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Petersen, R., Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Thames, I., Over Grenzen: Liminaliteit en de Ervaring van Verzet (oration: Utrecht University, 17 May 2016). J. Viterna, ‘Pulled, Pushed, and Persuaded: Explaining Women’s Mobilization in the Salvadorian Guerrilla Army’, American Journal of Sociology, 112/​1 (2006), 1–​45, https://​doi. org/​10.1086/​502​690. Weinstein, J., Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Chapter 18

Hanoi’s Nat i ona l Liberation St rat e g y, 1954 –​1 97 5 Pierre Asselin Introduction The Vietnam War was the most consequential conflagration of the Cold War era. For all the ink historians have spilled to relate the United States’ experience and what went wrong, they have written little about the ‘other side’ and what it did to emerge victorious. The result has been a widely shared perception of the war as an American tragedy with little or no heed paid to the agency—​to say nothing of the suffering—​of the Vietnamese.1 This chapter explores the strategies and tactics used by decision-​makers of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam) to defeat the United States and bring about the reunification of their country under exclusive communist aegis. It demonstrates that the guerrilla that has come to define the war in the West was in fact only one aspect of a highly sophisticated campaign comprising equally important political and diplomatic components. To prevail in the contest with the United States, Hanoi waged a multifaceted war that rallied not only fighters but also partisans at home and abroad to support them materially and morally. In the final analysis, this chapter demonstrates, the United States lost the Vietnam War owing less to its own shortcomings than to the experience, resourcefulness, and ingenuity of its adversaries. The Vietnamese communist victory over the regime in Saigon and its American allies roused leftist revolutionary movements across the Third World. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) drew both lessons and strength from the victory. But circumstances in Vietnam proved so unique as to make the communist strategy for achieving national liberation irreplicable. 1  For

glaring examples see Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945–​1975 (New York: Harper, 2018); David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 2002); George Donelson Moss, Vietnam: An American Ordeal, 6th Edition (New York: Routledge, 2016).

Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy    349

Vietnamese Communist Strategic Thinking, 1954–​1964 The Geneva Accords of July 1954 ended the eight-​year-​long Franco-​Vietminh or Indochina War (1946–​1954) by calling for a ceasefire, the concentration of forces into two temporary zones separated at the seventeenth parallel, and national elections within two years to decide which zonal authority—​communists in the North or ‘nationalists’ in the South—​would henceforth preside over the unified state.2 Coming as they did in the immediate aftermath of the Vietminh’s dramatic victory over the 16,000-​strong French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, the Accords seemed to deny the communist-​led Vietminh the fruits of complete victory. As it turned out, those terms satisfied Ho Chi Minh and other communist leaders because they secured their main strategic objective by then: precluding American intervention.3 By the time of Dien Bien Phu, the United States was paying for 80% of the French war effort in Indochina. Nearly everything used by France to combat the Vietminh was American, save the troops themselves. The longer the war dragged on, Ho and his comrades thought, the greater the probability of direct US involvement. After the fifty-​five-​day battle of Dien Bien Phu, which exerted a massive physical and psychological toll on Vietminh forces, that was a risk Ho refused to assume.4 That same concern over American intervention encouraged Vietnamese communist authorities to abide by the Accords at first—​for the most part. They relocated from their wartime base at Viet Bac on the Chinese border to Hanoi following the withdrawal of the French from the city in October 1954. They complied with the ceasefire when it came into effect, ordering those who fought on their behalf below the seventeenth parallel to regroup above it and, as Phi Van Nguyen shows in this volume, begrudgingly permitting civilians, including nearly one million Catholics, to flee southward.5 That said, in violation of the letter and spirit of the Accords, the Hanoi government mandated some 10,000 of 80,000 Southern combatants to stay behind as an insurance policy in the event the ceasefire collapsed. Instead of sustaining their national liberation struggle after July 1954, Vietnamese communist leaders set out to consolidate their power and rehabilitate the devastated economy in the North.6 They had their work cut out for them. Ho and his comrades had little experience managing an actual state. They had done so briefly, in 1945–​1946, with mixed results. The situation in 1954 was not as bad as it had been back then, but it was bleak. As Christopher Goscha demonstrates elsewhere in this volume, the war against France had laid to waste the transport infrastructure and dislocated the economy to the point of causing starvation in 2  The best account of the Indochina War is Christopher Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2022). 3 Pierre Asselin, ‘The Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the 1954 Geneva Conference: A Revisionist Critique’, Cold War History, 11/​2 (2011), 155–​195. 4  On the regional and international implications of Dien Bien Phu, see James Waite, The End of the First Indochina War: A Global History (New York: Routledge, 2012). 5 See also Phi Van Nguyen, ‘Fighting the First Indochina War Again? Catholic Refugees in the Republic of Vietnam, 1954–​1959’, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 31/​1 (2016), 207–​246. 6  Balazs Szalontai, ‘Political and Economic Crisis in North Vietnam, 1955–​56’, Cold War History, 5/​4 (2005), 395–​426.

350   Pierre Asselin some areas. Before abandoning the North, the French cannibalized factories and hospitals and, with the assistance of American commandos, sabotaged the public works and transportation systems. A deeply flawed land reform campaign, undertaken in 1953 partly to boost enlistment into and motivate the Vietminh, compounded the myriad challenges confronting Ho’s regime.7 The Party’s decisions to accept the partition of Vietnam unsettled Southern fighters. Not only did it leave them with nothing to show for their sacrifices over the past eight years, but they were now expected to relocate to the North—​the DRVN, leaving their families and fellow partisans at the mercy of the rival regime in Saigon, the State of Vietnam (SOVN, associated to the French Union until July 1954 and a sovereign entity thereafter) under former Emperor Bao Dai. Out of anger, frustration, and a sense of betrayal, many turned their backs on Ho Chi Minh. Perhaps most consequentially, partition paved the way for the ascendancy of the staunchly anti-​communist Ngo Dinh Diem as paramount leader in Saigon. As SOVN Prime Minister, Diem led a ruthlessly successful campaign against rivals, including communists depleted by redeployments to the North, in 1955. Later that same year, he organized elections that sidelined Bao Dai and anointed him president of a new state, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN).8 Wanting nothing to do with the Geneva Accords, Diem severed political ties to France and set out to build a viable non-​communist state below the seventeenth parallel. The determination of Vietnam’s ‘Miracle Man’ to challenge the DRVN so impressed Washington that it dramatically increased support to his regime starting that year, bypassing France.9 Ho’s passivity in the face of these developments exasperated Southern communist leader Le Duan. Born in Quang Tri Province, just below the seventeenth parallel, Le Duan had devoted his adult life to the Party. He endured atrocious stints in colonial jails before leading the armed struggle in the deep South during the Indochina War. Battle-​hardened and steely resolved, he resented Ho for selling out Southerners and agreeing to the Geneva Accords. He held his tongue for a while, as Party etiquette dictated. But in 1956, he and other Southern leaders determined that the Party must start actively challenging Diem before it was too late. During a visit to Hanoi later that year, Le Duan impressed upon Ho and other top leaders the need to resume armed struggle immediately in the South. His appeal fell on deaf ears, though he did secure their consent to targeted killings, kidnappings, and bombings of enemy assets. Terrorism was no new tactic for Vietnamese communists. Ho and his comrades had murdered hundreds, possibly thousands, of Trotskyists and non-​communist nationalists, as well as members of politico-​religious movements—​namely, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao—​ and pro-​French ethnic minorities before and after declaring Vietnamese independence on 2 September 1945.10 The campaign that began in 1957 heartened supporters and intimidated

7  The

land reform campaign is expertly considered in Edwin E. Moise, Land Reform in China and North Vietnam: Consolidating the Revolution at the Village Level (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) and Alec Holcombe, Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–​1960 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2020), 139–​199. 8  Jessica M. Chapman, Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 86–​115, 146–​172. 9 Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race, and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 10  David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 519.

Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy    351 rivals but achieved little beyond that. In fact, the response by Diem’s security forces was so swift and effective as to occasion the ‘darkest days’ of the communist movement in the South. Feeling the heat, Ho convened a special meeting of top Party leaders in January 1959. Following lengthy and contentious deliberations, their decision—​Resolution 15—​called for sustained insurgent activity by specially trained ‘armed propaganda brigades’. To reduce the risk of provoking Washington, still a strategic priority for Ho, subsequent instructions mandated the brigades to avoid targeting regular elements of the South Vietnamese army and attack irregular forces, namely, district-​and village-​level militias, instead. Where conditions allowed, the brigades should organize ‘popular uprisings’, a tactic used by the Party to seize power back in 1945 consisting of issuing a local call to arms, seizing security and administrative headquarters, and forming a ‘people’s council’ to take over administrative responsibilities and turn the new ‘liberated area’ into a ‘revolutionary base’ for further such actions. Repeated across the South, this process of rural consolidation informed by Maoist revolutionary precepts would inevitably culminate in a ‘general uprising’ and capitulation of the regime in Saigon before the Americans directly intervened. Resolution 15 proposed creating a Vietminh-​like united front to encourage non-​communist participation in these endeavours.11 This began a gradual shift of Party priorities from Northern reconstruction to Southern liberation. In support of the latter, in mid-​1959 Hanoi formally reopened a network of supply lines previously built by the Vietminh connecting Northern and Southern Vietnam through the Annamese Cordillera (Truong Son Mountains) and into Laos and Cambodia, as well as a maritime supply artery running the length of the Vietnamese coast. These land and sea ‘Ho Chi Minh’ trails served to infiltrate Northern men and supplies in support of the insurgency in the South.12 In December 1960, the united front prescribed by Resolution 15 came into being. Known as the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, colloquially known as Viet Cong), it officially advocated the overthrow of the ‘camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists’ to bring about peaceful unification and reform. Answering secretly to Hanoi, the NLF had autonomy in implementing but not making policy. Its armed wing, the Liberation Armed Forces (LAF), took orders from the General Staff of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), the DRVN’s standing army. Its first recruits were in fact trained and led by PAVN officers secretly infiltrated into the South via the Ho Chi Minh trails. The NLF was literally a front organization for Hanoi.13 The Southern insurgency gained momentum through 1961–​1963 thanks to increased support from the North and recruitment efforts in the South. As they gained experience and 11  ‘Nghi quyet Hoi nghi Trung uong lan thu 15 (mo rong): Ve tang cuong doan ket, kien quyet dau tranh giu vung hoa binh, thuc hien thong nhat nuoc nha’ (Resolution of the 15th Plenum [expanded]: On Increasing Unity and Determination to Struggle to Preserve Peace and Achieve Unification of the State) in Dang Cong san Viet Nam, Van kien Dang—​Toan tap, Tap 20: 1959 (Party Documents—​Collected Works, Vol. 20: 1959) (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban Chinh tri quoc gia, 2002), 57–​92. 12 On the Ho Chi Minh trails, see John Prados, The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Wiley, 2000); Dang Phong, Five Ho Chi Minh Trails (Hanoi: The Gioi Publishers, 2012). 13  Declaration of the First Congress of the South Viet Nam National Front for Liberation (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962); Carlyle Thayer, War by Other Means: National Liberation and Revolution in Viet-​Nam, 1954–​60 (Cambridge, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 180–​189.

352   Pierre Asselin confidence, Southern insurgents grew bolder, staging sophisticated attacks against both irregular and regular South Vietnamese forces, to Ho’s discomfort. Progress was meaningful but limited, as South Vietnamese security forces gained experience, confidence, and external assistance of their own. Trained by advisers and, after 1961, lavishly supplied with armoured vehicles, helicopters, and other hardware from the United States, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) became formidable. Meanwhile, the 1962 Strategic Hamlet programme adapted from ‘new villages’ created by the British during the Malayan Emergency cut off insurgents from peasants in parts of the South, undermining recruitment efforts.14 Fortified hamlets and related initiatives demonstrated such promise that President Diem thought the NLF would soon be vanquished. Fortunately for the insurgents, the Strategic Hamlet programme stalled and eventually unravelled. Most significant, a Buddhist-​led protest movement eventuating from Diem’s favouritism towards fellow Catholics, his nepotism, and growing authoritarian tendencies gained such momentum during the summer of 1963 that Washington, itself frustrated by Diem’s refusal to heed its counsel, supported a coup against the RVN President hatched by his own generals. On 2 November 1963, the bodies of Diem and his brother and closest adviser, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were recovered from the back of an armoured vehicle.15 The coup in Saigon brought to a head long-​simmering tensions in Hanoi between Party moderates who believed caution remained in order and hardliners who sought all-​out war. During a special meeting of Party leaders in December 1963, Le Duan indignantly denounced moderates as traitors—​‘revisionists’ in communist parlance—​and called for their purge from Party ranks. Insisting on the need to capitalize on the political turmoil in Saigon, he introduced a plan for vigorous military action to secure two objectives: destruction of strategic hamlets and decimation of ARVN forces. Properly supported and implemented, the plan would deliver complete victory within two years—​ before the United States had a chance to intervene, Le Duan claimed. The special meeting concluded with endorsement of the plan in the guise of Resolution 9 and the selection of Le Duan as new paramount leader. In the ensuing purge, Ho lost all decision-​making powers, retaining only his titles and symbolic role as ‘Uncle Ho’, the venerable face of the Vietnamese reunification struggle.16 Northern assistance to Southern insurgents increased dramatically thereafter. At first, Le Duan was confident that Southerners themselves could secure the objectives outlined in Resolution 9, armed as they now were with ample modern weapons. He changed his mind after the Tonkin Gulf incidents of August 1964 that produced a US congressional resolution granting President Lyndon Johnson a virtual blank check to wage war in Vietnam. Construing time as suddenly of the essence, Le Duan sent the first complete PAVN units—​ elements of the 304th and 325th divisions—​down the land Ho Chi Minh Trail to partake in the so-​called Winter-​Spring campaign alongside LAF troops. Instead of securing victory

14 Élie Tenenbaum, Partisans et centurions: Une histoire de la guerre irrégulière au XXe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2018), 295. 15 Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 16  Pierre Asselin, Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–​ 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 53–​69.

Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy    353 by Spring 1965, as Le Duan had hoped, large-​scale PAVN involvement in ‘mass combat operations’ precipitated direct American intervention.17

Wartime Strategy Washington’s decisions to answer the Winter-​Spring campaign by deploying the first of hundreds of thousands of troops to South Vietnam and commencing sustained bombings of the North in March 1965 dismayed but did not shock Le Duan and the rest of the DRVN leadership. As was their habit, they had hoped for the best while preparing for the worst. After Resolution 9, they had redoubled efforts to mobilize the population and expanded the armed forces through conscription and mandatory re-​enlistments. They had erected a sophisticated air defence system with Soviet and Chinese assistance, and evacuated non-​ essential personnel, including children and the elderly, to the countryside. Inferring from the Korean precedent that Washington and its allies would likely invade the DRVN, Hanoi had even built a web of defensive bunkers with advice from the North Koreans, assistance from the Chinese, and financial backing from the USSR and East European states. Hanoi predicated its strategy in the ‘American War’ on the one devised in the Indochina War plus lessons learned from Algeria’s successful war of independence, recently concluded, as well as on Maoist revolutionary principles employed and refined during the last stages of the Chinese Civil War (1946–​1949). As the Indochinese and Algerian conflicts in particular had demonstrated, a Third World actor could not defeat a big Western power by force of arms alone. To prevail, it needed to diversify its struggle so the outcome was not exclusively contingent on the military contest. Hanoi thus planned to ‘liberate’ the South and reunify the country under its own aegis, using three distinct but carefully calibrated ‘modes of struggle’.18 The first mode was military. It entailed defending the North from US airs attacks while pursuing the attrition of enemy ground forces in the South. By official Vietnamese communist accounts, the Americans were the PAVN’s ‘core and decisive adversaries’ who had to be ‘wiped out’ on Southern battlefields. However, despite the Americanization of hostilities, Hanoi remained committed to the core goal of Resolution 9, that is, annihilating South Vietnamese armed forces. To that end, Hanoi sought to draw American forces away from populated coastal regions defended by ARVN units. From 1966, communist military strategy aimed to fight the Americans on four principal battlefields: the Southeastern Region, the Central Highlands, Military Region 5 (Middle Central Vietnam), and the Tri Thien Region (Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces and Hue City). Communist forces could easily retreat from those battlefields to sanctuaries in ‘neutral’ Laos and Cambodia, or in the deepest recesses of the Mekong River delta, which offered ample hiding places.19

17 Military Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–​1975, trans. Merle Pribbenow (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 137–​138. 18  William J. Duiker, ‘Ho Chi Minh and the Strategy of People’s War’, in Mark A. Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall (eds.), The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 152–​174. 19  Military Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam, 153–​172.

354   Pierre Asselin The second mode of struggle was political and consisted of winning Southern hearts and minds. From experience, Vietnamese communist leaders understood that the well-​being and effectiveness of their armies were contingent upon the degree of support they received from civilians. As the old Maoist adage suggested, communist fighters were the fish and the people the water; without the latter the former could not exist, much less thrive. To win over the masses, Hanoi relied on specially trained cadres who embedded themselves in rural communities and extolled the merits of the revolutionary struggle while denouncing the immorality and futility of the joint effort by American ‘imperialists’ and their Saigon ‘puppets’ to suppress it. While cadres occasionally resorted to violence, intimidation, and coercion, their methods were generally peaceful to avoid driving people into the arms of the enemy. The political struggle procured not only food and other commodities, but also recruits for communist armies. Of the three modes, Hanoi considered the political one most fundamental. The last mode was diplomatic. It aimed to internationalize the Vietnam problem to muster maximal moral, political, and material support from overseas on the one hand, and isolate American policymakers on the other. Despite the Sino-​Soviet dispute undermining its unity, the entire socialist camp rallied behind Hanoi and the NLF after March 1965, providing everything from surface-​to-​air missiles and jet fighters to medical supplies and sugar. But material aid was not enough; Hanoi also coveted moral approbation from non-​ communist states and progressive action groups. In this it drew inspiration from Algerian revolutionaries who had used the United Nations and other international forums to condemn France’s criminal war, win over world opinion, and pressure Paris to relent.20 Hanoi surmised that similarly denouncing America’s war would compel Washington decision-​ makers to curtail US involvement in Vietnam or, at a minimum, accept a negotiated settlement on DRVN terms.21 Winning over the non-​communist world was the main reason Hanoi maintained the public pretence that its struggle constituted a war of national liberation fuelled by patriotic ambitions, and not a communist bid for mastery of Vietnam. It was also the reason it aggressively promoted the myth that Ho Chi Minh and other leaders of the anti-​American resistance were nationalists. Publicly downplaying their intimate ties to Marxism-​Leninism and the socialist camp while touting their nationalist credentials allowed Vietnamese communist authorities to favourably influence foreign perceptions of the war. That is, effectively mixing communism and nationalism facilitated rallying both domestic and world opinion behind Hanoi’s cause while emboldening the anti-​war movement in the United States and elsewhere. Instead of viewing the conflict in Vietnam as the civil war that it was, international audiences came to accept Hanoi’s portrayal of neo-​imperialist aggression abetted by local ‘stooges’ against a bona fide broad-​based national liberation movement. That not

20  On Algerian revolutionary diplomacy, see Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 21  William J. Duiker, ‘Victory by Other Means: The Foreign Policy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’, in Marc J. Gilbert (ed.), Why the North Won the Vietnam War (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 47–​ 75; Pierre Asselin, ‘ “We Don’t Want a Munich”: Hanoi’s Diplomatic Struggle during the American War, 1965–​1968’, Diplomatic History, 36/​3 (2012), 547–​581.

Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy    355 only validated characterizations of the regime in Saigon as an illegitimate ‘puppet’; it also encouraged Third World governments and other actors, namely, the Afro-​Asian and non-​ aligned movements, to endorse Hanoi’s agenda.

Just War Flaunting the anti-​American resistance as a ‘just war’ to counter Washington’s ‘imperialist aggression’ facilitated winning over popular support at home and abroad, mobilizing human resources in the North, and recruiting fighters and partisans in the South. To those same ends, Vietnamese communist authorities insisted their victory was unavoidable by trumpeting yet another myth, that of historical Vietnamese indomitability in the face of external aggression, a trope they had invented themselves earlier.22 While internal records demonstrate Vietnamese communist leaders questioned their prospects at times, they never wavered in public. ‘Quyet chien, quyet thang’ (Determined to Fight, Determined to Win) was a motto they used ad nauseum in post-​1965 propaganda to project an image of confidence and resoluteness. That starkly contrasted with the situation in the United States, where policymakers always seemed unsure of the merits of military intervention.23 Besides myths and slogans, Hanoi resorted to disinformation and intimidation to rally the Northern masses. Population control only increased over time. From the moment the DRVN took control of the North in 1954, its fearsome Ministry of Public Security (Bo Cong an) under Tran Quoc Hoan—​the ‘Beria of Vietnam’—​closely monitored people’s activities and movements. The authorities did this to more efficiently carry out the rehabilitation and socialist transformation of the economy, as well as to ensure compliance with their policies and prevent dissidence. There was nothing extraordinary about this; authoritarianism defined communist regimes. After Le Duan toppled Ho Chi Minh and embarked on the total war strategy, Hanoi tightened restrictions on the population. The DRVN effectively became a totalitarian police state. In the interest of self-​preservation, neighbours informed on neighbours, friends on friends. The Party’s monopoly over public dissemination of information—​it controlled all media outlets through the Ministry of Culture (Ministry of Propaganda until 1955)—​allowed it to dictate the war’s narrative in the North. Each week hostilities claimed hundreds, sometimes thousands, of Vietnamese lives. To avoid damage to morale and its own repute, Hanoi never shared such news. Radio broadcasts and newspapers related instead the heroic deeds of PAVN troops and the grossly inflated numbers of US troops killed and planes shot down in a given period. While Northerners knew firsthand that war was never that one-​sided, they had no way to access the full story. Letters home from sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers 22 

See Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). According to the myth, the Vietnamese were heir to a millennia-​old tradition of uniting and resisting as one when powerful foreign invaders, including the Chinese on several occasions and the Mongols in the thirteenth century, threatened their national independence. Hanoi pushed the myth so widely and effectively that it endures to this day, even in the West. 23  On North Vietnam’s conduct of the war, see Lien-​Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

356   Pierre Asselin serving in various capacities in the South would have painted a more nuanced picture, but superiors prohibited PAVN troops and others deployed below the seventeenth parallel from communicating with relatives. The movements of foreign visitors to the DRVN, most of them sympathetic journalists and activists invited to witness the destruction occasioned by American bombs, were so carefully managed as to afford no opportunity for candid conversation with civilians.24 Those who dared openly express their suspicions or question official accounts answered to the dreaded Ministry of Public Security. Vietnamese communist leaders considered any direct or indirect criticism of their handling of the war as ‘counterrevolutionary’, tantamount to national treason, and punishable by death. Through the intermediary of the Ministry of Public Security, the leaders assumed the roles of judge, jury, and executioner. Fear of retribution, not unanimous enthusiasm for the war, accounted for the absence of an anti-​war movement in the DRVN after 1965. Some Northerners zealously supported the war effort, to be sure. Most, however, passively acquiesced in the policies of their government while eagerly waiting for hostilities to end and reuniting with loved ones. Intellectuals were most cynical about the regime’s handling of the war. They expressed their incredulity not openly, however, but in subtle and deniable ways, using art, music, and creative writing. The Northern intelligentsia produced a remarkable body of works offering fascinating glimpses into the dreariness of wartime life. Since relating the challenges of life during the war remains taboo or formally prohibited in Vietnam today, those works constitute the only extant testament to people’s daily tribulations.25 In the South, communist cadres had to be more tactful and less overbearing than leaders in the North since they competed with Saigon for people’s loyalty. To rally supporters in rural communities, cadres used a carrot-​and-​stick approach. The carrot was land reform and redistribution. Following the ‘liberation’ of an area by communist forces, wealthy landlords were dispossessed and their landholdings parceled out to landless peasants and small landholders. This not only helped gain people’s allegiance, but also ensured a stable supply of food, cash, and other necessities as the new landholders henceforth paid taxes to revolutionary authorities. While the tax burden was generally sensible, it became so onerous during periods of extreme hardship for communist forces, such as after the costly Tet Offensive and follow-​up campaigns of 1968–​1969, that peasants refused to pay or offered to give their land back.26 The stick was violence, namely, assassinations and kidnappings, used as punishment for and deterrent against collaboration with rival authorities in Saigon. Unforgiving and ruthless towards enemies as communist cadres and troops could be, they did their utmost to avoid hurting innocent civilians unnecessarily since that counteracted the political struggle Hanoi valued so much. To be sure, communist forces brutalized and killed innocents, most 24 This

comes across in the accounts of Americans who visited North Vietnam during the war. Among others, see Harry S. Ashmore and William C. Baggs, Mission to Hanoi: A Chronicle of Double-​ Dealing in High Places—​A Special Report from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968) and Harrison E. Salisbury, Behind the Lines: Hanoi, December 23, 1966–​January 7, 1967 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). 25  The works by painter Bui Xuan Phai, philosopher Tran Duc Thao, and poets Tran Dan, Van Cao, and Hoang Cam are particularly revealing. 26  On communist revolutionary strategy and efforts in the South, see Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy    357 infamously in Hue during the Tet Offensive when hundreds were murdered and their bodies dumped in mass graves. But those were extrajudicial acts carried out by local commanders, not matters of policy. Thanks to the millions of civilians backing its cause across both halves of Vietnam, Hanoi enjoyed a remarkable degree of strategic and tactical flexibility. Its mantra ‘Each Citizen Is a Combatant, Each Village Is a Combat Trench’ was the quintessence of revolutionary warfare involving civilians ‘struggling’ in non-​conventional ways alongside professional soldiers to defeat the enemy. In the South, unarmed partisans sheltered, fed, collected information, and even laid booby-​traps for communist forces. The Americans and their allies never knew what to expect from non-​combatants, much less what to do about those suspected of active involvement in the resistance against them. Killing them, however suspect, was a war crime; turning a blind eye endangered American and allied lives. Hanoi understood and did its best to exploit these circumstances, to the exasperation of its enemies.

Communist Forces Communist effectives in South Vietnam consisted of two armies, the PAVN and the LAF, and three formations.27 Regular or Main Forces were professional soldiers of the PAVN and elite troops of the LAF. Responsible for national defence, they were organized according to standard military structure up to the division level and took orders directly from Hanoi. They carried sophisticated small arms and light weapons and were as professional and disciplined as any armed force in the world, if not more. They answered to seasoned officers, many of them battle-​tested veterans of the Indochina War. Skilled and mobile, Regular Forces were on the frontlines of major combat operations. Regional Forces were second-​line ‘defence troops’ operating within their home provinces and answering to regional commands, known as Interzone Committees. Their combat readiness and effectiveness varied greatly. Some units were as competent as Regular Forces; others were as poorly trained, armed, and disciplined as village militias. Regional Forces supported Regular Forces in combat and otherwise engaged the enemy on their own in ambush-​style attacks. They were essentially professional local guerrillas. Lastly, Popular Forces consisted of village defence and other militias and paramilitary groups. They were rudimentarily trained and equipped and did not wear uniforms. They worked the fields or performed other labour during the day and laid booby-​traps at night. Despite their limited skills and capabilities, militias were invaluable, providing as they did vital information and logistical assistance to Regular and Local Forces. Militia men and women wearing traditional peasant outfits, namely, black shirts and loose pants resembling Western pajamas, became the face of the anti-​American resistance in the Western imagination even though they rarely if ever actually engaged US troops in combat. In hindsight, militia men and women were less the face of the revolutionary struggle than its eyes and ears. Hanoi perpetuated that misleading image to create favourable impressions of its armies and conceal its role in directing them among foreign audiences. The notion of patriotic peasants, including women, armed with rudimentary weapons resisting lavishly 27 

For the best treatment in English, see Military Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam.

358   Pierre Asselin equipped US forces occupying their country evoked images of puny David bravely and brazenly taking on the mighty Goliath. It also popularized the myth that an ardent desire to defend their native land stirred them, as it had their ancestors who fought the Chinese and Mongols eons ago and the French and Japanese more recently. Exploiting the stylized notion of peasant-​guerrillas gallantly shielding country and family from American invaders was among Hanoi’s most masterful and effective public relations manoeuvres. It ennobled its own cause while delegitimizing Washington and Saigon’s. Indeed, the international community never considered those who fought for Saigon patriots in the same vein as those who fought for Hanoi. Instead, global opinion increasingly accepted Hanoi’s premise that South Vietnamese forces were ‘lackeys’ of the Americans and traitors to their own nation. Despite the passage of time and scholarship demonstrating their spuriousness, these fictions still inform Western thinking on the Vietnam War. As just noted, Regular Forces in the South included large contingents of North Vietnamese troops. At the height of the war, there were approximately 270,000 PAVN regulars below the seventeenth parallel. The average Northern combat soldier was a male aged between 21 and 28 from a peasant household. He had at least one brother, since only sons were exempted from military service so they could look after their parents. He volunteered for service owing less to a sense of patriotic duty than to avoid the shame, for himself and for his family, of being drafted, which was for all intents and purposes inevitable.28 Expected of honourable sons and citizens, volunteering also entailed the prospect of an assignment better than combat duty in the South. Besides propaganda spewed by the government, pressure to enlist came from relatives, teachers, and peers. American bombings of the North, the rationale for which was lost entirely on a population without access to a free press, were an equally compelling reason to sign up. Dodging the draft or failing to report for duty was not an option, as it brought shame to the family plus governmental as well as societal retribution against relatives.29 After completing basic training, PAVN recruits destined for the South were grouped into three-​man cells and underwent specialized military and ideological training lasting up to three months. The training revolved around the mantra ‘Use Weakness to Defeat Strength, Use Rudimentary Weapons to Defeat Modern Weapons, and Use a Drawn-​out Struggle to Defeat a Swift Offensive’. During this secondary training, recruits learned that fighting foreign aggressors was not only their moral obligation, but also a time-​honoured Vietnamese tradition. Instructors did not dwell on the fact that recruits would spend as much time and effort trying to kill other Vietnamese, as it was easier to train and motivate soldiers for combat by telling them their enemy was foreign. Some PAVN soldiers were surprised and disorientated when they first confronted other Vietnamese. It was specifically to mitigate their moral conundrum that communist authorities sought to dehumanize their Vietnamese rivals by labeling them ‘traitors’ and ‘reactionary lackeys’. Despite intensive ideological indoctrination, recruits rarely became devout communists. Similarly, they

28 

One’s family background before 1945 in particular could be a powerful incentive for enlistment, too. accounts relating the personal experiences of North Vietnamese soldiers include John Edmund Delezen, Red Plateau: Memoir of a North Vietnamese Soldier (Cleveland: Corps Productions, 2006) and James G. Zumwalt, Bare Feet, Iron Will: Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields (Jacksonville, FL: Adducent/​Veterans Publishing Systems, 2010). 29  English-​ language

Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy    359 believed in the righteousness of fighting and sacrificing for the homeland, but only to a degree. Fundamentally, PAVN recruits accepted their fate for want of any alternative. North Vietnamese troops journeyed to South Vietnam via the land Ho Chi Minh trail. That took anywhere between two weeks and two months, depending on the weather, and was invariably perilous. Deadly as Americans bombs were, mosquito-​borne diseases, malaria in particular, were more hazardous, as were malnutrition/​starvation, dysentery, dehydration, heatstroke, and snake bites. The same hazards tormented the troops during their time in Southern Vietnam, with the added strains of combat. For some, the rush of combat actually provided reprieve from daily drudgery, just as it did for their enemies. For most, comfort came from the belief that fighting the Americans helped make their families in the North safer. PAVN troops fought gallantly and performed other duties with alacrity because the safety and overall well-​being of their own peers depended on it. In this sense, the base motivation of the average Northern soldier fighting in the South was no different from that of his US or ARVN counterpart. It is one of the great fallacies of the war that communist troops prevailed in the end because their cause was nobler than their enemies’, and they were thus more willing to sacrifice themselves in its name. Despite undergoing rigorous ideological training, Northern soldiers were largely uninterested in the politics of the war once deployed in the South, preoccupied as they were with their own survival. Contrary to the image painted by Western historians of communist troops as selfless automatons, North Vietnamese soldiers were as human as American soldiers and Marines, haunted by the same fears, apprehensions, and concerns. Unlike American fighting men who served twelve to thirteen-​month ‘tours of duty’ in South Vietnam, Northern rank-​and-​file troops were there for the duration. That made them slightly more fatalistic and attuned to the reality that their war would end in one of two ways: victory or death. That was partly the reason many Northern soldiers did not defy orders against sending letters home: better not writing at all than giving loved ones false hope. To ensure troops behaved exemplarily and performed optimally, Hanoi assigned one political commissar to each military unit down to the platoon level, if conditions permitted. The commissar shadowed and served as political counterpart to the unit’s military leader. During downtime, the commissar reminded soldiers of the justness of their cause and the inevitability of their victory. Doubling as unit counsellor and chaplain, the commissar assisted soldiers grappling with personal issues, including emotional problems, and mediated disputes among soldiers and between soldiers and their officers. The political commissar boosted morale and kept spirits high in challenging times, becoming a parental figure of sorts in some units. He supervised ‘criticism and self-​criticism sessions’, a Party tradition aimed at promoting introspection, investigation, assessment, learning, adaptation, and, ultimately, improvement through frank exchanges of opinions among members of the same subdivision.30 During the American War, such sessions afforded any PAVN soldier, irrespective of rank, an opportunity to openly express his thoughts on the unit’s performance and leadership. Frequently held immediately after combat operations, the sessions proved

30  On

the practice of criticism and self-​criticism in communist Vietnam see Kevin D. Pham, ‘To Tighten or Relax Social Bonds?: Vietnamese Criticism and Self-​Criticism, and Liberal Self-​Exploration’, European Journal of Political Theory, 0/​0 (published online on 7 November 2022), https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​ 147488​5122​1135​991.

360   Pierre Asselin invaluable in enhancing the effectiveness and adaptability of communist forces in the South.31 Southern fighters affiliated with the NLF/​LAF, for their part, consisted in small part of coerced draftees but in large part of volunteers with a personal vendetta against Saigon or the Americans. Patriotic duty inspired few. The death of a close relative at the hands of Americans and an entrenched tradition of filial piety constituted a potent combination. Pressure from relatives, friends, or fellow villagers was an equally compelling reason to enlist, as were the desire to dodge the RVN draft and the NLF promise of land. Yet others volunteered to escape the grind of village life. Young women joined the Popular Forces to emancipate themselves, including evading marriage. The most dedicated among them became political agents mandated by their superiors to use their femininity to recruit male combatants.32 Both Southern and Northern women played active roles in the anti-​American resistance. Featured prominently as fighters in communist propaganda, women rarely participated in combat operations. When they did, it was as medics, nurses, and logistical experts. Typically, ‘long-​haired warriors’ served in support roles. Their more impactful contributions were in the political realm. They made excellent cadres and were integral to the success of the struggle for hearts and minds in the South. Southern women also distinguished themselves as informants, spies, and moles. Some managed communications networks. Few Northern women set foot in the South during the war, but they, too, made meaningful contributions by assuming the economic and political responsibilities of men pressed into military service.33

Communist Warfare Hanoi’s military strategy in the South consisted of the ‘three spearhead attack’, that is, military action against the enemy, political action among the masses, and propaganda and agitation work among enemy troops. Combat operations conducted by communist forces were a mixture of guerrilla and conventional actions.34 Guerilla warfare, waged daily, encompassed a broad spectrum of small-​scale, low-​intensity mobile actions carried out by Regional and Popular Forces. Ambush-​style attacks were most common. Other actions included sabotaging enemy installations; neutralizing through death or intimidation local 31 

Douglas Pike, PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), 164–​180. Hunt, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War, 1959–​1968 (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 68–​114. 33 Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War: Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); François Guillemot, Des Vietnamiennes dans la guerre civile: L’autre moitié de la guerre, 1945–​1975 (Paris: Les Indes savantes, 2014); Jessica M. Frazier, Women’s Antiwar Diplomacy during the Vietnam Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 34  ‘Tu tuong quan su Viet Nam trong hai cuoc khang chien chong thuc dan Phap (1945–​1954) va chong de quoc My (1954–​1975) duoi su lanh dao cua Dang Cong san Viet Nam’ (Vietnamese Military Thought in the Two Resistance Wars Against French Colonialism [1945–​1954] and Against American Imperialism [1954–​1975] Under the Leadership of the Communist Party of Vietnam), in Duong Xuan Dong (ed.), Tu tuong quan su Viet Nam trong chien tranh giu nuoc (Vietnamese Military Thought in the War to Protect the Country) (Hanoi: Nha xuat ban Chinh tri quoc gia Su that, 2019), 278–​327, 359–​466. 32  David

Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy    361 authorities employed by or collaborating with the enemy; laying landmines along key transportation arteries and close to bridges; and setting up booby-​traps along footpaths to impede the movement of and demoralize enemy troops. Any man, woman, or child was a potential participant in the guerrilla activity. Owing to that, American troops often distrusted all Vietnamese. That suspicion yielded the saying ‘The Only Good Vietnamese Is a Dead Vietnamese’ and attendant massacres of civilians such as took place at My Lai in 1968. Documented massacres were propaganda gold for Hanoi, serving as they did to amplify Vietnamese and international rancor toward the United States. While guerrilla warfare remains eponymous with the war, Vietnamese communist leaders considered conventional action just as important to meet their purposes. In the period 1964–​ 1975, the PAVN and LAF conducted more than fifty large-​scale or ‘mass’ combat operations, including seven inside Cambodia and Laos. Their longest campaign lasted ten months; the shortest was five days. While guerrilla warfare wore out the enemy and hindered his movement, conventional operations aimed variously to annihilate large numbers of enemy troops and weapons; create, consolidate, and expand ‘liberated’ areas to conduct further military or other operations; counter the political work of the enemy known as ‘pacification’; and support local guerrillas. Fundamentally, large-​scale operations, including the 1968 Tet Offensive and 1972 Easter Offensive, sought to change the so-​called balance of forces in the South with a view to delivering ‘decisive victory’. Experiences and lessons learned from the war against France conditioned this thinking. After eight years of inconclusive war, the Vietminh’s dramatic victory in the conventional battle at Dien Bien Phu had broken the stalemate and set the stage for the Geneva Conference and eventual departure of the French. After 1965, communist leaders were steadfast in their belief that the same type of dramatic military victory in a singular campaign would compel the Americans to leave Indochina.35 An equally important but lesser-​known means of combatting South Vietnamese forces was dich van. Difficult to render into English, the term is best translated as ‘proselytizing and propaganda work among enemy forces’. It consisted in undermining morale and encouraging defection among rank-​and-​file ARVN troops. Inspired by communist tradition according utmost importance to information warfare as well as by Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which stressed using propaganda to sow doubt and discord in enemy ranks, dich van had proven its usefulness during the Indochina War. Through the policy of jaunissement (yellowing), the French had exploited political, social, ethnic, and religious cleavages to mobilize more Indochinese fighting men. Dich van was a way to undo this. By way of illustration, at Dien Bien Phu Vietminh operatives had used loudspeakers to incite the defection of an entire company of ethnic T’ai servicemen, allowing for the bloodless seizure of their outpost. In the American War, as in the French, communist authorities used a variety of means and approaches to convince rival Vietnamese troops of the error of their ways, the futility of their cause, and the pointlessness of their sacrifice. They did so directly by means of infiltration into ARVN ranks as well as indirectly through printed materials and radio broadcasts, including letters and recorded messages from relatives. It is impossible to measure accurately the effectiveness of such efforts. However, judging from the importance Hanoi accorded to

35  Sophie Quinn-​Judge, ‘The Ideological Debate in the DRV and the Significance of the Anti-​Party Affair, 1967–​68’, Cold War History, 5/​4 (2005), 479–​500.

362   Pierre Asselin dich van and related endeavours, they paid significant dividends, or so leaders there believed. While Western historians have attributed the high desertion and defection rates of South Vietnamese troops to their poor training and lack of motivation, circumstantial evidence from Vietnam suggests that may have had as much if not more to do with communist propaganda efforts.

Conclusion The triumph of America’s enemies in the Vietnam War—​shocking as it seemed at the time, and as scholars since have made it out to be—​was not surprising. Vietnamese communist leaders were more determined and focused on the realization of their objectives than their American and South Vietnamese counterparts. They also had more experience. Years spent struggling against the French and Japanese had impressed upon them the merits of strong leadership, organizational discipline, and strategic patience. As battle-​hardened revolutionaries themselves, they understood the sacrifices needed to prevail and were willing to make them. Their callousness in the face of the unimaginable losses and suffering endured by their own compatriots was as remarkable as it was tragic. Perhaps most important, leaders in Hanoi had a clearly delineated strategy. Predicated on three different yet carefully calibrated modes of struggle, the strategy was a testament to their resourcefulness, flexibility, and experience. It attested, too, to their own awareness of the limits of military power, something their counterparts in Washington never grasped fully enough.36 Winning over the masses domestically through political struggle facilitated recruitment of partisans essential for sustaining communist armies. Without them, Hanoi could never have met its objectives in the South. Americans and their South Vietnamese allies valiantly competed for Southern hearts and minds but never matched the competence of their adversaries in that domain. Besides, they were too focused on counting dead adversaries—​the infamous ‘kill ratios’ and ‘body counts’ by which American war leaders measured progress in the conflict—​to care enough about the attitude of Southern civilians toward the war. However, it was on the diplomatic front that Hanoi most observably bested Washington. Communist leaders’ astounding ability to manipulate and rally international opinion proved vital for securing indispensable material, political, and moral support from governments and non-​ governmental organizations around the world. In nurturing opposition to American involvement in Vietnam, they limited the policy options of decision-​makers in Washington. Tentative in its approach to Vietnam from the beginning, the Johnson administration was deeply divided and increasingly ineffectual in managing the war by mid-​1968. Recognizing the impossibility of victory while acknowledging the unpopularity of the war at home and abroad, President Richard Nixon committed himself to ‘peace with honor’ and started withdrawing US troops from Vietnam the moment he assumed the presidency, to the delight of communist leaders reeling from devastating losses the previous year. Hanoi’s

36  See Gregory Daddis, Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Hanoi’s National Liberation Strategy    363 diplomatic victories offset its military reverses. All things being equal, Hanoi outperformed, outplayed, and outsmarted Washington and Saigon in the Vietnam War. Despite heavy losses sustained on the battlefield, communist forces acquitted themselves exceedingly well. Disparaged and essentialized as simpletons or automatons in Western accounts of the war, as previously noted, main line troops of the PAVN and LAF were as professional as their American adversaries. They were also better prepared for the warfare that typified the war than American soldiers and Marines. After all, their own leaders dictated the nature, pace, and scope of the ground war. Perhaps most important, main line PAVN and LAF troops were trained by and under the command of seasoned veterans of the French War. Beyond extensive expertise in guerrilla and ‘jungle’ warfare, these veterans possessed invaluable knowledge, from keeping rifles clean during the rainy season to mitigating the symptoms of diarrhoea without medication and building a smokeless fire. Insights shared by veterans who commanded them in conjunction with experience gained after deployment to the South made communist forces ingenious enemies. Equipped with a wide and sophisticated array of weapons provided by the socialist camp, they became redoubtable. To defeat communist forces in combat, the United States and its allies brought the full brunt of their superior (non-​nuclear) firepower and technology to bear upon them. Close-​ and long-​range artillery and air support were major assets, but they produced significant collateral damage, including countless civilian casualties and refugees, that dogged the United States on the political and diplomatic fronts. Indeed, that was the great paradox confronting Washington decision-​makers: to reduce the risks assumed by their own forces, they sanctioned policies and practices that endangered the very people they were presumably in Vietnam to protect. That included spraying the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange, creating ‘free-​fire’ zones, and using heavy artillery and bombs in populated areas. That paradox was not the product of circumstances; Hanoi created it to improve its own prospects for victory. And that is the grossly simplified story of the Vietnam War: a war fought by two sides whose nature was often dictated by only one. Admittedly, American policies suffered from certain flaws. However, the outcome of that conflict was decided less by those flaws than by the merits of Hanoi’s national liberation strategy. That strategy and the victory it produced emboldened revolutionary fighters and their leaders across the Third World, most immediately in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Starting in 1975, Yasser Arafat’s PLO considered itself bearer of the national liberation mantle previously carried by the DRVN and NLF.37 Unlike those movements, however, Vietnamese communist leaders controlled a state and, with it, ample human and material resources. That state functioned as a ‘great rear base’—​in their own parlance—​ for their armies combatting American and other allied forces in the South. It facilitated the tasks of recruiting fighters on the one hand, and rallying the masses though mass-​ mobilization efforts and coercion on the other. It also allowed communist authorities to mount large-​scale, conventional campaigns. Indeed, theirs was no ordinary national liberation war; Vietnamese communists had effectively liberated half their country by the onset of American military intervention. Equally important, the DRVN and the NLF received steadfast and extremely generous support from foreign allies, namely, the USSR and China,

37  Paul T. Chamberlin, The Global Offensive: The United States, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Making of the Post-​Cold War Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

364   Pierre Asselin because Indochina became a crucible of the Cold War. To be sure, Hanoi demonstrated the possibilities of national liberation predicated on a militant Marxist-​Leninist template through its victory in the Vietnam War, but its unique circumstances and strategy set it apart from other movements and organizations aspiring to national liberation.

Select Bibliography Asselin, Pierre, Vietnam’s American War: A History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Chanoff, David, and Doan Van Toai, Portrait of the Enemy (New York: Random House, 1986). Duiker, William, Sacred War: Nationalism and Revolution in a Divided Vietnam (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1994). Goscha, Christopher, Vietnam: A New History (New York, Basic Books, 2016). Henderson, William D., Why the Vietcong Fought: A Study of Motivation and Control in a Modern Army in Combat (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). Hunt, David, Vietnam’s Southern Revolution: From Peasant Insurrection to Total War, 1959–​1968 (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). Marangé, Céline, Le communisme vietnamien, 1919–​1991: Construction d’un État-​nation entre Moscou et Pékin (Paris: Sciences Po., 2012). Military Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–​1975, trans. Merle Pribbenow (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). Nguyen, Hai, ‘The Hidden Memory of the Vietnam War: Examining the Motivations of Soldiers on the Battlefields’, PhD dissertation, Texas Tech University, 2017. Nguyen, Lien-​Hang T., Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). Opper, Marc, People’s Wars in China, Malaya, and Vietnam (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020). Pike, Douglas, PAVN: People’s Army of Vietnam (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986). Prados, John, The Blood Road: The Ho Chi Minh Trail and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Wiley, 2000). Race, Jeffrey, War Comes to Long An: Revolutionary Conflict in a Vietnamese Province (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Zumwalt, James G., Bare Feet, Iron Will: Stories from the Other Side of Vietnam’s Battlefields (Jacksonville, FL: Adducent/​Veterans Publishing Systems, 2010).

Chapter 19

Ge nder, Mobi l i z at i on, an d Insurgency i n S ou t h Africa Young Comrades in the 1980s Township Uprisings Emily Bridger In 1984, South Africa’s system of racial segregation known as apartheid commenced its final decade. The end of apartheid is often heralded internationally as a ‘peaceful’ transition that avoided civil war and mass casualties. However, this decade was the deadliest in South Africa’s recent history, with more recorded deaths due to political violence than any other period. From September 1984 onwards, many of the country’s townships witnessed renewed resistance against the apartheid state in response to localized conflicts surrounding high rents, ineffective local government, and failed apartheid reforms. This sparked a period of unprecedented political violence, as new waves of militant anti-​apartheid protest were met by the state’s escalation of counter-​insurgency tactics. A defining characteristic of this period, often labelled the township uprisings or the People’s War, was the centrality of students and youth who were both the primary agents of collective action and the main victims of state detentions and violence. These young people—​loosely referred to as the ‘comrades’—​engaged in both non-​violent protest and political violence against the police, suspected informers, and townships residents deemed to be jeopardizing the success of the country’s liberation struggle. In both public and academic portrayals, the comrades are generally depicted as uniformly and inherently male. The existing historiography argues that as township politics grew increasingly confrontational during the mid-​1980s, girls and young women were excluded from activism and largely demobilized from the struggle, engaging only rarely in political violence.1 However, new research demonstrates that while youth politics was male dominated, young men were not the only insurgents involved in South Africa’s township

1 

Jeremy Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics in the 1980s’, Agenda, 10 (1991), 77.

366   Emily Bridger uprisings. Girls and young women, albeit in much smaller numbers, also picked up stones to throw at police vehicles, attempted to defend their communities, and engaged in various forms of political violence.2 This chapter explores gender, mobilization, and insurgency through the study of South Africa’s township uprisings of the 1980s. The research is drawn from oral history interviews with former comrades from Soweto, a township located 20 kilometres southwest of central Johannesburg. Interviewees were between the ages of 13 and 19 when they decided to join the liberation struggle as teenagers and school students.3 Those interviewed, and particularly former female comrades, spoke candidly about their past involvement in insurgency, sharing thrilling, nostalgic, and also harrowing stories of their roles as activists. These interviews are essential to understanding why individuals felt compelled to join the liberation struggle and can more broadly be used to challenge or contextualize macro-​level explanations for why people participate in insurgencies. This chapter asks why some young women made the unconventional choice to join the liberation movement and engage in political violence, focusing on interviewees’ own recollections of the past. In doing so, it seeks to address a wider gap in research on gender and insurgency, arguing for the need to better understand how gender shapes people’s decisions to join armed groups. It argues that while both young men and women shared many grievances that drew them towards the liberation movement, and shared similar emotional benefits from their participation, both these push and pull factors were shaped by and experienced through young people’s gender.4

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency Since the end of the Second World War, girls and women have participated in insurgencies and civil wars across the globe. In Africa, from the 1950s to 1980s, women played key roles in anti-​colonial liberation movements, becoming activists, soldiers, and spies in countries such as Kenya, Mozambique, Algeria, and Zimbabwe. In the continent’s more contemporary insurgencies and civil wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Uganda, women have again joined fighting forces, with some willingly offering their services and others being forcibly recruited. In all of these conflicts they have assumed a wide range of roles, from frontline combatants, to porters and messengers, to weapon smugglers and recruiters. The prevalence of women’s participation in armed groups is not limited to the African continent, but is a characteristic shared by many recent insurgencies, including those in Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, Colombia, Nicaragua, Syria, and many others.5 The essential roles women play in 2  Emily Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth and South Africa’s Liberation Struggle (Oxford: James Currey, 2021); Emily Bridger, ‘Soweto’s Female Comrades: Gender, Youth and Violence in South Africa’s Township Uprisings, 1984–​1990’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 44/​4 (2018), 559–​574. 3  All interviews were conducted by the author in South Africa between 2014 and 2016. 4  Dyan Mazurana, ‘Women, Girls, and Non-​State Armed Opposition Groups’, in Carol Cohn (ed.), Women & Wars (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 153. 5  See Jessica Trisko Darden, Alexis Henshaw, and Ora Szekely, Insurgent Women: Female Combatants in Civil Wars (Washington, D.C: Georgetown University Press, 2019); Miranda Alison, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-​National Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Paige Whaley Eager, From Freedom Fighters to Terrorists: Women and Political Violence (Hampshire: Ashgate

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency    367 liberation movements and non-​state armed groups have not gone unnoticed by colonial and state powers, which have routinely developed particularly gendered methods of counter-​ insurgency to suppress and nullify women’s political agency. Yet conflict and political violence are still predominantly seen as male activities. Much of the literature on insurgencies and civil wars presumes men to be the default agents of political violence, with the terms ‘combatants’ or ‘soldiers’ requiring the prefix ‘female’ to include women.6 This is in part due to gendered stereotypes which continue to associate men with the more active, daring, and aggressive roles of soldiering during conflict, and women with passivity, vulnerability, and victimhood.7 Women who do engage in political violence are often viewed as ‘an aberration at best and demonic at worst’ for contravening these stereotypes which associate womanhood with motherhood, nurturing, and non-​violence.8 Assumptions about women’s passivity, coupled with the stigmatization of violent women, have led to a frequent neglect of female insurgents in public perceptions of and academic research on conflicts and liberation movements. In most wider theorization or large comparative studies of insurgency, male experience is taken as representative of all combatants, and women’s experiences ‘have been systematically obscured and under-​represented in (all but feminist) research on rebellion and insurgency’.9 These gaps in our historical understanding of insurgencies are furthered by the challenges of conducting research on female combatants. Women in insurgent groups are less likely to be in leadership positions, play official combat roles, or be formally demobilized. In post-​conflict societies they are also often stigmatized for their previous breaches of gender norms, politically marginalized, and excluded from public memorialization. These factors make it more difficult for researchers to access information about female combatants. Yet scholars at times have also used androcentric research methods when asking why people join insurgencies which exclude women’s participation from view. Large-​n quantitative studies exploring the grievances that drive people to participate in insurgencies often use variables that take male experience as standard, such as per capita income or male education completion rates. Such studies not only take male experience as normative, but also fail to account for how men and women experience different forms of deprivation.10 When research does include female insurgents, it tends to focus on them as a distinct category, seeing

Publishing, 2008); Chris Coulter, Miriam Persson, and Mats Utas, Young Female Fighters in African Wars (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2008). 6  Miranda Alison, ‘Women as Agents of Political Violence: Gendering Security’, Security Dialogue, 35/​ 4 (2004), 447. 7  Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 8 Eager, From Freedom Fighters to Terrorists, 1. 9  Zoe Marks, ‘Gender Dynamics in Rebel Groups’, in Rachel Woodward and Claire Duncanson (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military (London: Palgrave, 2017), 238. For broad studies of insurgency that take male experience as normative, see Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy M. Weinstein, ‘Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War’, American Journal of Political Science, 52/​2 (2008), 436–​455; Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, ‘Greed and Grievance in Civil War’, Oxford Economic Papers, New Series, 56/​4 (2004), 563–​595; Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars’, Perspectives on Politics, 1/​3 (2003), 475–​494. 10  Alexis Leanna Henshaw, ‘Where Women Rebel: Patterns of Women’s Participation in Armed Rebel Groups, 1990–​2008’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 18/​1 (2016), 39–​60.

368   Emily Bridger their gender as the most salient aspect of their identities—​thus taking them as women first and insurgents second. In such studies, emphasis is often placed either on women’s forced recruitment and sexual victimization, or on their feminist motivations for joining and hopes of post-​conflict emancipation and empowerment.11 Feminist scholars such as Cynthia Enloe and Carolyn Nordstrom have challenged the gendered assumptions that dominate thinking about conflict and insurgency.12 Inspired by the theoretical shifts proposed by these authors, scholars have documented the involvement of women and girls in conflicts and civil wars around the globe.13 By illuminating how women can simultaneously be victims and perpetrators, these authors complicate the stereotypical image of women in conflict. They demonstrate how women and girls are not simply coerced into participating, but join fighting forces for a wide range of reasons, including their commitment to political ideology, to escape domestic abuse or patriarchal constraints at home, or to challenge their own social, economic, or political marginalization. Yet still, a problematic paradigm remains in much research on gender and insurgency, in which women are either excluded from research or are treated as a separate group whose gender is the defining identifier of their lives and the key explanation for why they join rebel groups and take up arms against the state.

South Africa’s Insurgents South Africa’s armed struggle against apartheid officially lasted from 1961 to 1994. After the electoral victory of the National Party and introduction of apartheid in 1948, the country’s opposition movements engaged in non-​violent and increasingly popular resistance against the state. But after a decade such protest had led to little change. It was not until after the Sharpeville Massacre of March 1960—​in which sixty-​nine unarmed protestors were killed by apartheid police—​and the subsequent banning of the African National Congress (ANC) and other opposition organizations, that the struggle officially turned to armed resistance

11 

Jocelyn Viterna, Women in War: The Micro-​processes of Mobilization in El Salvador (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6. More recent work has acknowledged how women can exert tactical agency even in repressive contexts. See Susan McKay and Dyan Mazurana, Where are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone and Mozambique: Their Lives during and After War (Quebed: Rights and Democracy, 2004); Mats Utas, ‘Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering: Tactic Agency in a Young Woman’s Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone’, Anthropological Quarterly, 78/​2 (2005), 403–​430. 12 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Carolyn Nordstrom, Girls and Warzones: Troubling Questions (Uppsala: Life and Peace Institute, 1997); Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (New York: Zed Books, 1998). 13  Miranda Alison, ‘Cogs in the Wheel? Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’, Civil Wars, 6/​4 (2003), 37–​54; Karen Kampwirth, Women and Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Victoria Bernal, ‘From Warriors to Wives: Contradictions of Liberation and Development in Eritrea’, Northeast African Studies, 8/​3 (2001), 129–​154; Harry G. West, ‘Girls with Guns: Narrating the Experience of War of Frelimo’s “Female Detachment”’, Anthropological Quarterly, 73/​4 (2000), 180–​194.

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency    369 with the launch of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the ANC’s military wing, in December 1961.14 South Africa is rarely included in comparative studies of insurgency, in part because the country’s armed struggle defies easy categorization. Temporally, it sits awkwardly between the anti-​colonial insurgencies of the 1950s and 1960s and the ‘new war’ insurgencies of the 1990s. It also resulted in comparatively few (officially recorded) deaths and uneven disruption to civilian life. Throughout most of the apartheid period, the armed struggle can be classified as a ‘low-​intensity’ conflict, only progressing into a civil war in the mid-​to late 1980s. MK itself consisted of only a few thousand soldiers, many of whom never engaged in direct combat. The army never triumphantly marched through the country to liberate South Africa, as apartheid ultimately ended through a negotiated settlement, not military victory.15 In military terms, the efforts of MK were largely a failure, and strategically contributed little to the end of apartheid. However, MK did play a hugely significant role in more ideological, moralistic, and symbolic terms. It was a key symbol of ongoing resistance which helped to attract popular support to the wider liberation struggle. Prior to 1984, MK’s small numbers of well-​trained soldiers were the primary agents of insurrectionary campaigns and anti-​state political violence in South Africa. But this changed from September 1984 onwards, after protests over rent increases in the Vaal Triangle (an area 60 kilometres south of Johannesburg containing several African townships) led to clashes with police.16 This resistance soon spread across much of the country, sparking an unprecedented period of mass insurrection, the primary agents of which were ‘ordinary’ township residents who were not members of MK and often had little to no military training. These ‘comrades’ were a heterogeneous group primarily made up of school students and unemployed and working youths, and included politically astute activists, opportunistic criminals, and many young people in between. Their methods of political action often blurred the boundaries between non-​violent protest and violent insurgency, as they enforced various boycotts, confronted state security forces with stones, petrol bombed the houses of local collaborators, attacked symbols of white capital, and sought out and punished members of their own communities deemed to be jeopardizing the liberation struggle. In response to escalating township protest, the apartheid state intensified its counter-​insurgency tactics. Armed patrols entered the townships and rounded up suspected comrades and political ringleaders. Between the declaration of a state of emergency in July 1985 and February 1990, over 50,000 people were detained in the country—​many of whom were also tortured and interrogated in police and prison cells. The township uprisings developed independently of the ANC and MK-​in-​exile and were largely driven by the localized grievances of people within the country’s townships. Yet the 14  For the historiographical debate about the ‘turn to armed struggle’ in South Africa, see Saul Dubow, ‘Were There Political Alternatives in the Wake of the Sharpeville-​Langa Violence in South Africa, 1960?’, The Journal of African History, 56/​1 (2015), 119–​142; Paul S. Landau, ‘The ANC, MK, and “The Turn to Violence” (1960–​1962)’, South African Historical Journal, 64/​3 (2012), 538–​563; Stephen Ellis, ‘The Genesis of the ANC’s Armed Struggle in South Africa 1948–​1961’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37/​4 (2011), 657–​676. 15  Gay Seidman, ‘Guerrillas in Their Midst: Armed Struggle in the South African Anti-​ Apartheid Movement’, Mobilization, 6/​2 (2001), 111; Janet Cherry, Spear of the Nation (Umkhonto weSizwe): South Africa’s Liberation Army, 1960s–​1990s (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2012). 16 Franziska Rueedi, The Vaal Uprising of 1984 & the Struggle for Freedom in South Africa (Oxford: James Currey, 2021).

370   Emily Bridger ANC responded to and capitalized on this resistance, calling for a ‘people’s war’ and asking those within the country to ‘render South Africa ungovernable’. This message found particular traction amongst the townships’ young comrades, who found inspiration in MK and adopted much of its militarized culture through their dress, marches, slogans, and songs. While some of these youths did eventually receive military training from MK cadres, and were recruited into more formal underground guerrilla networks, many operated on their own accord, interpreting the ANC’s instructions from exile as best they could and engaging with the enemy using handmade, rudimentary weapons.17 Including the South African case study within comparative histories of colonial insurgency is important precisely because of its defiance of any neat typology. Its protracted liberation struggle challenges the distinctions between ‘old’ ideological and nationalist conflicts and the ‘new’ wars of informal and decentralized violence set out by Mary Kaldor.18 It temporally expands the chronology of late colonial insurgencies and rebellions against settler colonialism into the 1980s and 1990s. It also helps to blur the lines between social movements and political activism on the one hand and insurgency and civil war on the other, providing evidence of the grey space that can exist in between. While the comrades’ strategies drew on older forms of non-​violent protest, such as boycotting, launching stayaways, and leafleting, they simultaneously developed new forms of violent confrontation. Violent and non-​violent strategies overlapped during these years, with the line between them not necessarily clear to either those in leadership positions or those on the ground.19 Furthermore, while many scholars may not include South Africa in a list of classic twentieth-​century insurgencies, the apartheid state fully understood the political conflict as such, deploying a range of increasingly violent and coercive counter-​insurgency measures over three decades.

Mobilization and Recruitment It is impossible to know how many young men and women were mobilized during South Africa’s townships uprisings. Given the oppressive nature of the apartheid state, there was little incentive for student or youth organizations to keep lists of their membership, and very few state archival documents from this period remain.20 Gill Straker, a psychologist working with young people displaced by the violence, argues that youths who did not participate in the uprisings were the exception.21 However, this claim has since been questioned. While most young people’s lives were deeply affected by escalating violence and state repression in the mid-​1980s, it was the minority who became committed activists and engaged in strategic

17  Thula

Simpson, ‘“Umkhonto We Sizwe, We Are Waiting for You”: The ANC and the Township Uprising, September 1984—​September 1985’, South African Historical Journal, 61/​1 (2009), 158–​177. 18  Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 19 Franziska Rueedi, ‘“Siyayinyova!”: Patterns of Violence in the African Townships of the Vaal Triangle, South Africa, 1980–​86’, Africa, 85/​3 (2015), 399. 20  Verne Harris, ‘“They Should Have Destroyed More”: The Destruction of Public Records by the South African State in the Final Years of Apartheid, 1990–​94’, Transformation, 42 (2000), 29–​56. 21  Gill Straker, Faces in the Revolution: The Psychological Effects of Violence on Township Youth in South Africa (Cape Town: David Philip, 1992), 19.

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency    371 uses of political violence.22 The comrades discussed here generally first joined the liberation struggle through student or youth organizations aligned to the ANC, such as the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) or South African Youth Congress (SAYCO). These were non-​violent groups which campaigned around specific issues affecting young people, but which also became involved in wider township campaigns. As COSAS came to represent the majority of discontented students from 1984 onwards, it successfully linked students’ educational demands to wider national political grievances. In many townships, these student and youth organizations were the motors of rebellion, helping to persuade other groups and older residents into action. Members of COSAS worked alongside trade unions and other civic organizations, participating in rent boycotts, stayaways, and other forms of community protest.23 Any young person who committed themselves to the liberation struggle during these years exposed themselves to serious hardship and significant risk. Becoming a comrade necessitated them to spend long periods sleeping away from their homes to avoid police detection, brought increased danger to their parents and siblings through police raids, and often led to their own detention, interrogation, and torture by the apartheid state. South Africa’s young comrades were ‘millenarian’ in their belief that their actions would bring about the end of apartheid and usher in a new, utopian democratic era.24 Yet the benefits of democratization would have been available to all township dwellers, not just those who risked their lives by joining the struggle. In contradiction to the ‘selective incentives’ theory proposed by Mancur Olson, which posits that individuals are more likely to join insurgencies if they are offered rewards in exchange for their participation, South Africa’s young comrades were offered little economic gain and no promise of future power or privilege in return for the sacrifices they made.25 ‘Greed’ or desire for material goods seem to have mattered little in animating the participation of dedicated comrades (although it did encourage some criminals to act under the cloak of ‘comrades’ for their own gain).26 Although some comrades were as young as 12 or 13 years old, few seem to have been forcibly recruited into the struggle as young combatants have been in many other African contexts, instead choosing to fight ‘with their eyes open’ and proudly defending their choice to do so.27 Seeking to understand why young people joined the liberation struggle in such large numbers during these years, South African historians initially turned to structural explanations. By the mid-​1980s, shifting demographics, economic decline, and the

22  Jeremy Seekings, ‘Beyond Heroes and Villains: The Rediscovery of the Ordinary in the Study of Childhood and Adolescence in South Africa’, Social Dynamics, 32/​1 (2006), 4; Clive Glaser, ‘Youth and Generation in South African History’, Safundi, 19/​2 (2018), 127; Rueedi, ‘Patterns of Violence’, 397–​398. 23  Jonathan Hyslop, ‘School Student Movements and State Education Policy, 1972–​ 87’, in William Cobbett and Robin Cohen (eds.), Popular Struggles in South Africa (London: James Currey, 1988), 183. 24  Belinda Bozzoli, ‘Why were the 1980s “Millenarian”? Style, Repertories, Space and Authority in South Africa’s Black Cities’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 13/​1 (2000), 80. 25 Olson, The Logic of Collective Action. 26  Such people were known as comtsotsis. For the ‘greed’ theory of mobilization, see Collier and Hoeffler, ‘Greed and Grievance in Civil War’. 27  Paul Richards and Krijn Peters, ‘“Why We Fight”: Voices of Youth Combatants in Sierra Leone’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 68/​2 (1998), 187; Stacey Hynd, ‘Small Warriors? Children and Youth in Colonial Insurgencies and Counterinsurgency, ca. 1945–​1960’, Comparative Studies in Society and History: An International Quarterly, 62/​4 (2020), 684–​7 13.

372   Emily Bridger expansion of secondary schooling combined to produce a new, larger cohort of township youth with shared experiences of oppression and deprivation. Young people were now better educated than previous generations but had little chance of finding stable employment. These shared political, educational, and economic grievances produced a new ‘social generation’ who were ready and willing to confront the apartheid state.28 Yet this argument alone cannot explain the mobilization of township youth for two key reasons: first, it is at risk of denying youth agency and failing to see young people as actors, ‘not simply the bearers of structural conditions’; and second, it cannot account for why only some students and youths decided to join the struggle while others sought to avoid politics and violence.29 More recent research has demonstrated that young people were drawn to the liberation struggle out of a diverse range of motivations—​many of which had more to do with local youth culture than with political ideology. As Belinda Bozzoli argues, the ‘combination of a tough street life, familiarity and contact with gang behaviour, unemployment, family hardship and violence, and social and educational decay and disruption bred a commonalty of young people able and willing to turn their social and political resentments into militancy’.30 This reflects Stathis Kalyvas’ wider argument that insurgents often have a range of private and political identities, with their involvement in insurgencies motivated by both ideological cleavages at the centre of conflicts and more local or private issues.31 Yet these existing explanations have, like so much of the literature on insurgencies, taken male participants as the default agents of activism and political violence. During the initial era of mass student and youth mobilization, from 1984 to mid-​1985, girls and young women generally made up between 10 and 40% of student and youth activists.32 Though rarely occupying leadership roles, female comrades campaigned for better school conditions and joined in protests and boycotts alongside young men. Alexis Henshaw argues that women are more likely to join political movements that offer them gender equality or advocate for women’s rights.33 Yet comrade groups, and organizations such as COSAS and SAYCO, did not explicitly promote gender equality; women’s concerns were always subordinate to the wider nationalist struggle for liberation.34 Until the concluding years of the struggle, the ANC largely believed that fighting specifically for women’s rights was divisive, and that women’s oppression would be naturally eliminated as part of the transition to democracy.35 28  Colin Bundy, ‘Street Sociology and Pavement Politics: Aspects of Youth and Student Resistance in Cape Town, 1985’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 13/​3 (1987), 310; for wider research on grievance and insurgency, see Humphreys and Weinstein, ‘Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War’. 29  Jeremy Seekings, Heroes or Villains? Youth Politics in the 1980s (Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1993), 16; Glaser, ‘Youth and Generation in South African History’, 127. 30  Belinda Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004), 97. 31  Kalyvas, ‘The Ontology of Political Violence’, 475–​476. 32  Charles Carter, ‘ “We Are the Progressives”: Alexandra Youth Congress Activists and the Freedom Charter, 1983–​85’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 17/​2 (1991), 215; Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics’, 81; Bridger, ‘Soweto’s Female Comrades’, 560. 33  Alexis Leanna Henshaw, ‘Why Women Rebel: Greed, Grievance, and Women in Armed Rebel Groups’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 1/​3 (2016), 207. 34 Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid, 95–​126. 35  Jo Beall, Shireen Hassim, and Alison Todes, ‘“A Bit on the Side”?: Gender Struggles in the Politics of Transformation in South Africa’, Feminist Review, 33 (1989), 30–​32; Gay W. Seidman, ‘“No Freedom without the Women”: Mobilization and Gender in South Africa, 1970–​1992’, Signs, 18/​2 (1993), 291–​320.

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency    373 COSAS did work to recruit female members and made some (albeit at times contradictory and lukewarm) attempts to address gender issues in schools and township communities. Nevertheless, the comrade movement never practised true gender equality. It was a young man’s world which may have tolerated, and occasionally encouraged, young women’s participation, but predominantly on men’s terms. It was male activists who led meetings, gave orders, and largely controlled the ideological and strategic direction of the movement. Despite the lip-​service some male members paid to gender equality, the movement was marred by casual sexism and discrimination towards its female members. One male activist interviewed in Pietermaritzburg even ‘scoffed at the idea of women participating in fighting or strategic planning, and dismissively said that women’s role was to attend to food and look after kids’.36 In much of the wider work on social movements and insurgencies there is an assumption that when women join political struggles, they do so out of feminist motivations or in pursuit of gendered causes. Yet such research takes women’s gender as their primary identity. In making this assumption, scholars often neglect to explore women’s own motivations for joining social movement or insurgent groups, which may or may not be gendered. South Africa’s female comrades all insisted that they saw themselves as comrades first, and girls or women second. They wanted to participate in the struggle alongside boys and young men rather than separately from them, eschewing women’s organizations in favour of student and youth groups. From interviews, it becomes clear that young men and women shared many similar reasons for joining the liberation struggle. As young Africans growing up in often crowded township homes, attending dilapidated and poorly funded schools, and regularly witnessing state repression, they experienced similar grievances. Both men and women centred their narratives of mobilization around distinct moments in their adolescence when these grievances became suddenly stark and developed into a wider sense of injustice. One man described how he was regularly corporally punished at school for tiny infractions beyond his control—​such as having a ripped school uniform when he could not afford a new one. Over time his frustration with being beaten became ‘too much’, as he described, leading him to join COSAS.37 A female comrade explained her mobilization in simple terms: ‘I got interested [in politics] because I could feel I was not happy the way I was treated at school, and the education that I was getting’.38 Young people were also drawn to the struggle in search of adventure or a sense of belonging. Being a comrade could be immensely seductive to young township residents; it offered feelings of camaraderie and a new sense of purpose for young people who otherwise had few opportunities for social advancement.39 Speaking about the first time she attended a political rally, a female comrade described, ‘It was nice, people were singing revolutionary songs . . . that’s what I enjoyed’.40 When specifically asked why they joined COSAS, many female comrades provided what at first appeared to be vague and idealistic reasons. One female comrade responded, ‘because I wanted a better life . . . I was joining the struggle because of my heart and commitment that I was having, and the . . . way we were treated when 36 

Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics’, 82. Interview with Sello, Diepkloof, 14 May 2014. 38  Interview with Beatrice, Pimville, 23 May 2015. 39 Seekings, Heroes or Villains, 63–​64. 40  Interview with Stompie, Naturena, 29 May 2015. 37 

374   Emily Bridger we were growing up’.41 Narrating her decision with similar broad, ambitious motivations, another woman recalled, ‘We were young, the blood was boiling, and we wanted change . . . We just want to liberate our country, we want to go to exile, we want Mandela to be free. That was in our head, nothing else’.42 These emotional appeals of being a comrade, and interviewees’ elusive yet idealistic explanations of why they joined the liberation movement, can be better understood through Elisabeth Jean Wood’s term ‘pleasure of agency’. Young men and women experienced certain emotional benefits from participating in the struggle, including camaraderie, joy, excitement, and pride. Drawing on her research in El Salvador, Wood describes how such emotional gains speak to the importance of the assertion of agency itself for those who join insurgencies. She writes that ‘the key to the logic of insurgent collective action . . . is the assertion of dignity and defiance through the act of rebelling’.43 In both male and female comrades’ narratives, these feelings of pride and accomplishment are clearly expressed. As one female interviewee explained, ‘I’m proud of participating. I’m proud of risking my life and my family’s life for this freedom’.44 Thus, comrades were mobilized into the struggle out of a combination of both push and pull factors; the racial and educational grievances they experienced compelled many to join political organizations, while the enjoyment and affirmation many found through rebelling helped to attract them to and keep them participating in the liberation movement. Female comrades thus need to be seen and understood as part of the broader youth movement, and not only as girls and young women. Yet when female comrades’ narratives are examined more closely, it becomes clear that both these grievances and the ‘pleasure of agency’ they consequently experienced were felt in particularly gendered ways. To understand this, it is necessary to briefly sketch the societal positions occupied by girls and young women in South Africa’s townships during the late apartheid period. Townships were dangerous spaces for girls during these years, as reported rates of sexual violence escalated from the late 1970s onwards. Increasingly, girls’ lives were dictated by their fears of and attempts to mitigate this violence, with schoolgirls often being the primary targets of marauding gangsters. As one Soweto woman commentated: When you leave your child alone in the home she is not safe. And in the street, she is not safe. And in the school she is not safe. There is nowhere that she can walk and be safe. Girls are afraid somebody in a car will stop them and say ‘get in’. When they walk in the street they are raped by men with guns. Sexual abuse happens so much that some students stop going to school.45

Such high rates of gender-​based violence, combined with the patriarchal nature of South African society, meant that township spaces were distinctly gendered. Outside of school, boys were generally free to play and hang about on township streets, whereas girls were 41 

Interview with Thobile, Diepkloof, 12 April 2014. Interview with Ntsiki, Diepkloof, 5 April 2015. 43  Elisabeth Jean Wood, ‘The Emotional Benefits of Insurgency in El Salvador’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (eds.), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 268. 44  Interview with Sissy, Diepkloof, 18 April 2015. 45  Diana E.H. Russell and Mary Mabaso, ‘Rape and Child Sexual Abuse in Soweto: An Interview with Community Leader Mary Mabaso’, South African Sociological Review, 3/​2 (1991), 65. 42 

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency    375 predominantly restricted to the home. This was not only due to concerns about girls’ vulnerability, but also to their uneven burden of domestic work. After school, girls were expected to come home and help prepare food, clean the house, and look after younger siblings. Furthermore, parents sought to protect their daughters’ respectability; a ‘good’ girl was one who attended school and church, helped with chores and caring for other children, and who was chaste and obedient.46 Such confinement to the home caused young women to feel inferior to young men, and instilled in them a distinct sense of being the ‘weaker sex’.47 Yet female comrades themselves insisted that they did not join political organizations out of a primary desire to bring about women’s liberation. One woman explained how comrades ‘don’t care’ about gender, they ‘just want to see our country liberated’.48 Yet many women’s accounts of the specific grievances that motivated them to join the struggle were distinctly gendered. One clear example of this is in their discussions of violence used by teachers at school. Like the male comrade discussed above, female comrades were discontented by the continued use of corporal punishment at school. Yet as girls and young women, this punishment upset them in different ways. Speaking about what motivated her to join the struggle, one woman described how if a classroom was dirty, only female students would be beaten by the teacher. She protested, ‘We don’t clean the class with our breasts. Because everybody is making the class dirty, we should all clean. He was not beating the boys . . . The only difference between boys and girls is the breasts, otherwise we all have hands, we all have feet. Why can’t they clean?’.49 Another woman recounted the particularly gendered shame she felt when, during beatings by male teachers at school, girls’ skirts would fly up, exposing their backsides to the class.50 In their work on gender and education in South Africa, Robert Morrell and Relebohile Moletsane describe how for girls, ‘corporal punishment is woven into a femininity that accepts the right of authority figures, especially men, to dominate and assert their power’.51 Thus, while both young men and women protested against violence in schools, female students had particularly gendered reasons for doing so as this enabled them to rebel against gendered divisions of labour in the school, and challenge expectations of girls’ submissiveness in the face of male power. Likewise, the ‘pleasure of agency’ and the joy in rebelling that drew many young people to the struggle was also experienced in gendered ways. The gendered geographies of township life and young women’s general confinement to the home perhaps would have made their involvement in protest and rebellion even more exciting and adventurous that it was for young men.

46  Catherine Campbell, ‘Identity and Gender in a Changing Society: The Social Identity of South African Township Youth’, PhD dissertation, University of Bristol, 1992), 126. 47 ‘Women’s Department’, undated, AL2423: B6.5, South African Youth Congress, South African History Archive, Johannesburg. 48  Interview with Ntsiki, Diepkloof, 5 April 2015. 49  Interview with Amahle, Jabavu, 10 June 2015. 50  Interview with Vicky, Diepkloof, 14 May 2014. 51 Robert Morrell and Relebohile Moletsane, ‘Inequality and Fear: Learning and Working inside Bantu Education Schools’, in Peter Kallaway (ed.), History of Education under Apartheid, 1948–​1994: The Doors of Learning and Culture Shall be Opened (Cape Town: Peter Lang, 2002), 235. Morrell and Moletsane, ‘Inequality and Fear’, 235. Elisabeth Jean Wood, ‘The Emotional Benefits of Insurgency in El Salvador’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta (eds.), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 268.

376   Emily Bridger That joining the struggle was more of a contravention for female youth in part explains why student and youth groups were dominated by men. Yet this also helps to explain why, more so than men, women interviewed tended to recount their mobilization with palpable zeal and even nostalgia. They described this period in their lives as one of excitement and awakening. One woman labelled her mobilization as ‘eye opening’ and a ‘relief ’, as she could finally engage in the political debates and activities that she had previously been shielded from in her home.52 Previous research into female insurgents elsewhere has similarly demonstrated how girls and young women’s experiences of exclusion, inequality, and violence can lead them to join political groups and take up arms. In Latin America, younger women who joined insurgent forces did so for different reasons than older women: ‘Angry about the multiple inequalities that they had to confront on a daily basis, they tended to see participation in the guerrilla forces as an opportunity as much as an obligation’. Teenage girls in Nicaragua saw joining fighting forces as a means of creating immediate opportunities, as ‘the guerrillas allowed many of them to escape the tedium of their homes, to join another sort of family, to start life anew’.53

Engaging in Political Violence In addition to their activism at school and within their communities, all of the former comrades interviewed also engaged to some extent in political violence.54 While the comrades’ strategies drew on older forms of non-​violent protest, such as boycotting, launching stayaways, and leafleting, they simultaneously developed new forms of violent confrontation.55 Despite its historically complicated stance on the use of violence, the ANC increasingly endorsed armed struggle in its rhetoric during these years, calling on the ‘people’—​rather than just MK agents—​to bring about ‘ungovernability’ and ‘people’s war’. Heeding such calls, comrades took on the role of community defenders and engaged with armoured police vehicles by erecting barricades and using rudimentary weapons such as stones and petrol bombs. The targets of their violence also included local councillors perceived to be sell-​outs to the apartheid regime, symbols of white capital within their communities such as liquor stores and transportation companies, and township residents who defied political boycotts on shopping at white-​owned premises or using white-​owned bus services. Many comrades came to see themselves as the moral as well as physical defenders of their communities and also launched attacks against local gangsters, criminals, and wayward fellow comrades. From mid-​1985 onwards, the ANC amplified its attempts to connect with young township insurgents, and increasingly recruited comrades into official

52 

Interview with Florence, Diepkloof, 8 May 2014.

53 Kampwirth, Women and Guerrilla Movements, 9.

54 For more on use of political violence in township struggles, see Monique Marks, Young Warriors: Youth Politics, Identity and Violence in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001); Bozzoli, Theatres of Struggle; Rueedi, ‘Patterns of Violence’. 55 Janet Cherry, ‘The Intersection of Violent and Non-​ Violent Strategies in the South African Liberation Struggle’, in Hilary Sapire and Chris Saunders (eds.) Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives (Cape Town: UCT Press, 2012), 156.

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency    377 underground guerrilla units, providing them with military training and arming them with grenades and automatic weapons. Previous research has argued that as youth politics grew increasingly confrontational, girls and young women were demobilized and largely excluded from the front lines of local conflict.56 Yet much of this research, like so much of that on insurgencies more broadly, was based on sources drawn predominantly from the perspectives of men. When young township women themselves have been interviewed, they ‘repudiated the notion of themselves as inherently more peace-​loving than their male counterparts’ and attested to being involved in various forms of political violence.57 Female comrades narrate their escalation from activism to violence as a necessary and natural development. The increased presence of troops and armoured vehicles in township streets and schools following the state of emergency in July 1985 was taken by many young people as a declaration of war. When discussing their initial involvement in low-​level insurgency, such as confronting security force vehicles with stones or barricades, female comrades posit their actions as a warranted and defensive reaction to the state’s intrusion into the townships. As one woman commented, ‘You’ll find that you are sitting in the class, the police are shooting—​they used to shoot even the kids that are walking around. The police are busy shooting them outside. We are sitting in the class. Who’s going to fight for those students or the kids?’.58 Soon, this woman attested, she learned to always walk around the townships with her pockets full of stones ready to throw at police. But female comrades did more than just throw stones—​which were not always the most effective tool for combating the military might of the apartheid state. Still speaking about defending herself and her fellow students, this same female comrade continued, ‘Sometimes, maybe we’ve got matches and all that. Then when they come and attack us, we have to attack back with petrol bombs and all that, throwing all those things to them’.59 Female comrades were also involved in the policing and punishing of township residents. They recall with pride times in which they destroyed the groceries of and even beat those who defied the consumer boycott, or sought out and violently punished suspected state informers. A select few young women in Soweto were also recruited into more formal underground networks run by MK agents and were provided training in how to use firearms. In interviews, these women recalled their involvement in political violence openly, and at times with a palpable sense of joy and nostalgia. In explaining why young women participated in political violence, there are again many similarities between them and their male comrades. Both groups saw their involvement in violence as a response to the calls made by the ANC and as an important way in which they could contribute to the wider liberation struggle. Political violence was used by both young men and women to prove their capabilities as loyal and willing soldiers of the ANC. As one woman explained, ‘Remember in 1985 the president Oliver Tambo initiated to make the country ungovernable. Whatever that he says we must accept’.60 Male and female comrades alike also saw violence as a necessary defensive measure to protect themselves and their

56 

Seekings, ‘Gender Ideology and Township Politics’, 83.

57 Marks, Young Warriors, 104; Bridger, Young Women against Apartheid. 58 

Group interview with female comrades from Diepkloof, Diepkloof, 27 June 2015. Interview with Lucy, Fleurhof, 7 April 2014. 60  Interview with Stompie, Naturena, 29 May 2015. 59 

378   Emily Bridger communities. Multiple women presented a clear choice: either be the victim of state violence, or the agent of defensive violence. Yet previous literature on the comrades has also stressed the importance of male gender identities to this period of political insurgency. At a time when young men were better educated than the previous generation, but finding it increasingly difficult to find work, get married, or establish a household of their own, being a comrade and engaging in conflict could provide men with status and authority. Catherine Campbell argues that ‘violence and masculinity were closely intertwined in the macho culture of resistance’ in South Africa, with violence being seen as ‘the prototypical male activity’.61 However, from interviewee testimony it is clear that engaging in insurgency was important to female comrades’ gendered sense of selves too. Partaking in political violence in township streets was an important means by which these young women performed resistance, not only against the state, but also against dominant gender norms which confined them to the home and made them feel inferior to young men. Both male and female comrades sought to prove their capabilities as brave, willing soldiers. Yet for female comrades this held particular importance. Male activists were often dismissive of young women’s political potential and tended to see girls as ill-​suited to the struggle; they were frivolous, unreliable, over-​emotional, scared, and physically weak.62 But by engaging in political violence, female comrades performed the opposite of these stereotyped feminine characteristics, and in their narratives emphasize their bravery, strength, and willingness to use violence. As one woman recalled, ‘Most of the women were scared, but I was not (laughs) . . . I was not even scared of the gun. I would hold it; it was easy for me’.63 In these ways, female comrades also used violence as a social leveller; their involvement in attacking targets proved that they were not so different from their male counterparts. By becoming ‘soldiers’, they insisted, they shed the weakness or subordination associated with girlhood. As one woman stated, ‘We were like soldiers, there’s not special treatment per se . . . It’s once in a while that they [male comrades] would remember that amongst them there is a female comrade. Because then they look at you as a fellow comrade. If they are throwing stones, you must also throw a stone’.64 Furthermore, comrades’ desire to defend and protect their communities, both physically and morally, also held a gendered dimension. While both male and female comrades engaged in the policing and punishment of a range of local deviants who were deemed to be jeopardizing the struggle, there was one group who were particularly targeted by female comrades: men (often gangsters) who were suspected rapists.65 Once they became comrades, young women took a keen interest in challenging the most notorious perpetrators of sexual violence in their communities. Rapists were targeted by the comrades as a whole, as their actions were seen as contrary to the utopian vision these young activists held for their future, liberated societies. But female comrades would often be placed in the forefront of such attacks. Women narrated these events with particular zeal, often laughing or shouting 61  Catherine Campbell, ‘Learning to Kill? Masculinity, the Family and Violence in Natal’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18/​3 (1992), 624. 62  Campbell, ‘Identity and Gender in a Changing Society’, 322–​323; Marks, Young Warriors, 105. 63  Interview with Beatrice, Pimville, 23 May 2015. 64  Interview with Penelope, Jabavu, 12 June 2015. 65  See Bridger, ‘Soweto’s Female Comrades’.

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency    379 as they told detailed stories of men they punished. Such actions demonstrate how female comrades also used the wider political struggle to address their own grievances and agendas, confronting the injustices and victimization they faced specifically as young women growing up in South Africa’s townships.66 Overall, joining the liberation movement and engaging in political violence brought South Africa’s female comrades feelings of agency, potency, and pride that are noticeably expressed in their interviews. These women were often animated when recalling their involvement in collective action, with many describing their participation in enforcing boycotts, using petrol bombs, or punishing gangsters as engaging and gratifying. Recalling the time they were first taught how to construct and use petrol bombs, a group of women exclaimed, Woman 1: Yoh! I was so excited! I wanted to do it! Woman 2: Ya, it was exciting! It was exciting! Woman 3: Eh, we were very excited! Eh, it was very nice . . . Though it was so painful this thing, but we used to like it!67

For most female comrades, the occasion to exercise collective violence provided them with feelings of freedom, independence, and power which were a clear departure from the subservience and victimization that marked their earlier lives. Whereas for men engaging in political violence provided a means of asserting their masculinity, for female comrades it allowed them to, even if briefly, challenge and overcome their adolescent experiences of vulnerability and inequality. Again, similarities can be seen here to young women in other insurgencies. In Sri Lanka, young female fighters joined the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a means of breaking gender taboos and out of their fear and anger over sexual violence. By engaging in violence, they ‘[destroyed] the stultifying straightjacket of conformity and subservience traditionally imposed upon them by a rigidly and self-​righteously patriarchal society’.68 In their cross-​country study of young soldiers, Rachel Brett and Irma Specht found that many girls became soldiers to assert their equality with boys. Whereas boys tended to join to conform to dominant notions of masculinity, or to prove their manliness, girls joined to contravene or contest the gendered expectations placed on them.69 Reflecting on their involvement in the struggle thirty years later, South Africa’s former female comrades believe that their participation brought them some selective benefits that were less available to non-​politicized girls and young women: a political education otherwise unattainable for African youths in apartheid schools; a marked level of self-​discipline and control over their lives; and a sense of empowerment against gender inequality, abuse, or sexual violence. As one woman proclaimed, ‘No man can touch me here on the street again. I know my rights . . . being in the struggle made me know my rights’.70 Young women 66 

There is no evidence that such attacks were acts of personal revenge by female comrades who themselves had been victimized by rapists, although female comrades did speak of their fear of sexual violence growing up as girls and teenagers in Soweto. 67  Group interview with female comrades from Diepkloof, Diepkloof, 27 June 2015. 68  Sumantra Bose, States, Nations, Sovereignty: Sri Lanka, India and the Tamil Eelam Movement (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1994), 111; Alison, ‘Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’, 42–​43. 69  Rachel Brett and Irma Specht, Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight (Boulder, Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004), 91. 70  Interview with Ntebaleng, Diepkloof, 15 April 2014.

380   Emily Bridger engaged in other nationalist insurgencies have likewise reported feelings of lasting empowerment from their political involvement. In Ethiopia, women who fought for the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front described feeling stronger, more confident, and more capable of problem solving. They believe their involvement changed them for the better, especially when compared to other women who were not fighters.71 Young women in the LTTE similarly stated that they were more self-​assured and assertive than other women in their communities, whereas in Mozambique young female fighters were found by one researcher to have a level of self-​confidence that was ‘unprecedented’ in the country.72 Yet it is important to not paint too rosy a picture of these women’s empowerment through insurgency. While these women today recall their gender transgressions with enthusiasm, their narratives likely silence the less empowering consequences of their involvement: the lasting stigma many of them faced; their experiences of detention and interrogation; and any pushback they may have received from male comrades. As female comrades’ involvement in the township uprisings has been continuously neglected from historical narratives, their own memories may have responded by stressing agency over victimization and physical strength over weakness.

Conclusion Scholars have long sought to explain why people join insurgencies, and there is now a large body of literature exploring both the push and pull factors that drive people to participate in conflict. However, much of this research takes male experience as normative, and does not adequately incorporate gender into analyses of why people participate in political movements. On the other hand, assumptions remain that when women do join insurgencies, they do so primarily as women mobilized by feminist motivations, or out of a desire to bring about gender equality. Consequently, we are often blind to the ways in which men and women share many motivations for engaging in political violence. However, we simultaneously need to understand how even these shared motivations are influenced by and experienced through one’s gender for both male and female combatants. In South Africa, both male and female comrades engaged in activism and political violence for numerous reasons: to contribute to the wider goals of the liberation movement and the ANC’s call for ‘ungovernability’; to prove their capabilities as brave soldiers; and to address a range of racial inequalities. Yet, for female comrades, many of these motivations held particularly gendered meanings. For them, engaging in collective action provided a means of contesting their inequality and victimization, by both publicly challenging expected gender norms through their engagement in protest and violence, and, in particular cases, of directly targeting some of those most responsible for their gendered physical insecurity in the townships. Participating in the liberation struggle alongside young men helped them to feel a sense of equality with male comrades, while taking up arms against the state

71  Angela Veale, From Child Soldier to Ex-​fighter: Female Fighters, Demobilisation and Reintegration in Ethiopia (Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2003), 50–​51. 72  Alison, ‘Cogs in the Wheel’, 48; West, ‘Girls with Guns’, 185.

Gender, Mobilization, and Insurgency    381 was a clear departure from the subservience and victimization that typically marked young women’s lives at this time. The South African case study demonstrates the importance of prioritizing the voices of ordinary men and women to understanding mobilization and recruitment. Using oral history allows us to better understand individual participants’ motivations for joining, and to move beyond the macro-​level approaches that tend to dominate studies of insurgency. It also enables us to see a fuller range of the type of people who participate in insurgencies, including the young women analysed here, who are otherwise largely invisible in archival sources or the recollections of male leadership.

Select Bibliography Alison, Miranda, Women and Political Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-​National Conflict (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009). Bozzoli, Belinda, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004). Bridger, Emily, Young Women against Apartheid: Gender, Youth & South Africa’s Liberation Struggle (Oxford: James Currey, 2021). Coulter, Chris, Miriam Persson, and Mats Utas, Young Female Fighters in African Wars (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2008). Henshaw, Alexis Leanna, ‘Why Women Rebel: Greed, Grievance, and Women in Armed Rebel Groups’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 1/​3 (2016), 204–​219. Kampwirth, Karen, Women and Guerrilla Movements: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chiapas, Cuba (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). Marks, Monique, Young Warriors: Youth Politics, Identity and Violence in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001). Seekings, Jeremy, Heroes or Villains? Youth Politics in the 1980s (Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1993). Simpson, Thula, ‘“Umkhonto We Sizwe, We Are Waiting for You”: The ANC and the Township Uprising, September 1984–​September 1985’, South African Historical Journal, 61/​1 (2009), 158–​177. Viterna, Jocelyn, Women in War: The Micro-​ processes of Mobilization in El Salvador (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Wood, Elisabeth Jean, ‘The Emotional Benefits of Insurgency in El Salvador’, in Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta, eds., Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 267–​281.

Chapter 20

Guns, Grain , a nd G ol d The Peasant Base of Algerian Guerrilla Logistics, c.1954–​1957 Neil Macmaster One of the central themes of historical and political science research over the last century has been the nature of peasant insurrection, from the ‘classic’ French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, to the post-​Second World War anti-​colonial or liberation struggles in China, Cuba, Kenya, Rhodesia, Vietnam, Algeria, and elsewhere.1 In terms of wars of decolonization, with which I am concerned here, a key theoretical and comparative issue has been the study of the processes by which vanguard, revolutionary organizations that had developed first in urban, industrial societies made the strategic decision to ‘go to the mountains’, to launch armed revolt by embedding guerrilla forces in isolated rural zones.2 The predominant model during the 1960s, often following in the tracks of Mao Tse-​tung, was of a first stage of revolutionary warfare in which a relatively small rebel vanguard retreated from urban centres and the economically advanced plains to establish a base among isolated populations in mountains, forests, and swamps. From there insurgents would construct, with the support of the indigenous population, what Régis Debray called a ‘foco’, a secure bastion, and then after consolidation expand outwards in concentric waves to reconquer the plains and towns, finally capturing the apparatus of the central state.3 This chapter is focused, mainly through a case study of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–​1962), on the early stages of vanguard insertion into the interior when small guerrilla forces formed in urban society were injected into the midst of what contemporaries often perceived as ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ peoples living in archaic conditions relatively unaffected by economic modernity. In preparing for ‘D-​Day’, the first synchronized armed 1  I have borrowed the formulation for the title of this chapter from Tariq Tell, ‘Guns, Gold, and Grain: War and Food Supply in the Making of Transjordan’, in Steven Heydemann (ed.), War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 33–​58. 2  Typically, the Algerian nationalist movement headed by Messali Hadj had first developed among migrant workers in Paris and the industrial regions of metropolitan France in the 1920s before ‘returning’ to Algerian urban centres during the 1930s and the eventual penetration into rural society from the 1940s. 3  Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968).

Guns, Grain, and Gold    383 revolt in the mountains, some theorists of guerrilla warfare recognized that if the vanguard was to stand any chance of organizing a strong base they would need to understand and adapt their practice, rather as ethnologists might, to the cultural and social universe of the peasantry. A senior Comintern agent, André Ferrat, sent on a mission to Algeria in February 1934, warned that the communists would never succeed in achieving a revolution as long as European workers, who dominated the urban party, had no links to the peasantry ‘numerically by far the most important engine of the revolution’.4 Likewise, Hocine Aït Ahmed, leader of the paramilitary Organisation Spéciale, in an important report of December 1948 to the Central Committee of the Parti du people algérien (PPA) on preparation for insurrection, noted the failure of the urban-​centred and ‘petite-​bourgeoise’ party to penetrate the rural masses that ‘constituted the driving force of the war of liberation’.5 Aït Ahmed suggested the future deployment of militants of rural origin, those who would respect and work along the grain of traditional rural structures and customs, to propagandize the countryside.6 But such a position remained marginalized, as international communism from 1936 onwards abandoned the doctrine of anti-​colonial insurrection and fell back onto the ‘orthodox’ Marxist position that global revolution could only come about through a primary stage of proletarian liberation in the heartlands of industrial capitalism.7 Peasants, in this perspective, embedded in a backward, subsistence economy and ‘feudal’ relations, were incapable of developing a political consciousness and could not understand the nature of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Revolt initiated in rural society could only remain bloody but primitive jacqueries in which peasants armed with clubs and axes were rapidly crushed by modern security forces. Many guerrilla leaders, as well as academics wedded to a Marxist perspective, clung to the idea that backward peasants, while providing a physical mass of foot soldiers, mule transporters, cooks, and provisioners, could only be formed into a revolutionary movement by a vanguard that had introduced the yeast of revolutionary nationalism and ideology from the city. Such an interpretation, that often concealed a teleological framework of history as a necessary sequence of stages, was to be challenged by new currents in rural social history that in exploring the internal world of peasants began to uncover the extent to which they possessed a high degree of self-​organization and autonomy.8 The application of such theorization to the field of insurgency and counter-​insurgency has in recent years begun to take a new direction through what some have termed ‘rebel governance’, the idea that rebel groups competed with the state apparatus for control of civilian populations by engaging in a degree of governance, ranging from popular assemblies, systems of justice, 4 André Ferrat, ‘La question de la revolution en Algérie et l’ideologie colonialiste’, Cahiers du bolchévisme (1935), 754. 5 Hocine Aït Ahmed report in Mohammed Harbi (ed.), Les archives de la revolution algérienne (Algiers: Éditions Dahlab, 2010), 15–​49. 6  The leading FLN ideologue, Frantz Fanon, shared this perspective in The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1967), chap. 2, ‘Spontaneity: Its Strength and Weakness’, 85–​118. 7  On Marx and the peasantry, see Esther Kingston-​Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (Oxford: OUP, 1983). 8  A number of academic currents coalesced, from the British Marxists of Past and Present (Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson), to the Annales school (Maurice Agulhon, Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, Alain Corbin), Asian Subaltern Studies, and associated scholars rooted in anthropology, sociology, and field work (James C. Scott, Natalie Zemon Davies, Charles Tilly, Ernest Gellner, Fanny Colonna, Stathis N. Kalyvas).

384   Neil Macmaster and welfare, to taxation and agrarian reform.9 A number of researchers, backed by detailed case studies, have concluded that how insurgents organized and cohered depended crucially on the pre-​war social and political universe in which they were grounded.10 This study sets out to explore, through the Algerian case, how a vanguard of urban rebels on first arriving in the mountains, far from stamping their own organizational logic on malleable peasants, were forced to adapt to pre-​existing rural structures and to enter into a form of dialogue before achieving a new synthesis. The emphasis here is less on the political organization of the FLN than on the key material base of insurrection, the vital supply of weapons, food, and finances. When the FLN launched its revolt on 1 November 1954, it was poorly armed, and many operations were aborted in a panic. The militant Ali Kafi, later to become commander of wilaya 2, wisely refused to join the insurrection because of the lack of preparation, which he described as an ‘adventure’ in which ‘funds were laughable, as were weapons, clothing and food!’.11 An enduring nationalist myth of the Armée de liberation nationale (ALN) maquis, one supported by the Maoist image of the guerrilla as a ‘fish in water’, is that the long-​ oppressed mountain peasants welcomed the young fighters with open arms, and heroically provided assistance, including a generous supply of food from their scant resources. Little could have been further from the reality: Algerian peasants, as with rural populations around the world, tended to be deeply suspicious or hostile towards intrusive ‘outsiders’ and knew, from bitter experience, that guerrilla activity invariably unleashed a savage wave of military destruction of houses, livestock and crops, torture and massacre.12 Rémy Madoui, who joined a maquis in the Ouarsenis mountains in early 1955, recounts how vulnerable they were, a small, badly armed and equipped group that faced interminable night marches, and barely survived on meagre rations of flat-​bread, tinned sardines, boiled eggs and onions. There was ‘ . . . a lack of money, no arms, no fighting units, no food, and little support from the people . . . We only survived . . . It was a period of heart-​breaking isolation, of immeasurable discouragement: the people that we wanted to liberate wanted nothing to do with us’.13 But survive they did, and the ALN not only withstood the French army that unleashed a violent onslaught on the early epicentres of revolt in the Aurès and Kabyles mountains, but succeeded in advancing into, and consolidating its grip across, the entire highland terrain of northern Algeria, the vast mountainous Tell stretching from Morocco in the west to Tunisia 9 Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mampilly (eds.), Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge: CUP, 2015). 10  Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion. Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 9, concludes from a comparative study of Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Sri Lanka: ‘Insurgent groups are built by mobilising pre-​war politicized social networks’; likewise, Arjona et al. (eds.), Rebel Governance, 228; rebels must ‘tap into and even co-​opt pre-​existing institutions and networks of power’. 11 Ali Kafi, Du militant politique au dirigeant militaire. Mémoires (1946–​ 1962) (Algiers: Casbah Éditions, 2004), 43, 50; see also Mohammed Harbi, Le FLN, Mirage et Réalité des origines à la prise du pouvoir (1945–​1962) (Paris: Les Éditions J.A, 1985 edition), 122–​123; ‘Financial resources were derisory. Weapons lacking’. 12  See, for example, the hostile response of the Ixil mountain people to the arrival of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) in their midst: David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 66–​67. 13 Rémy Madoui, J’ai été fellagha, officer français et déserteur. Du FLN à l’OAS (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 43–​44.

Guns, Grain, and Gold    385 in the east.14 The geographic spread and stabilization of the small, fragile guerrilla forces in under two years in the face of a huge modern army and police force was extraordinary and, to date, historians have paid little close attention to what made this possible. The infant ALN achieved this objective through a strategy that involved the rapid incursion, one by one, into the hundreds of small communities or fractions that had for almost a century constituted the bottom tier of the apparatus of colonial government. The insurgents, far from simply attacking and destroying the state organizations and personnel at the grass roots and replacing them with new revolutionary structures, chose rather to take over or adapt them as the basis of rebel governance. Until recently historians of modern Algeria have emphasized the extent to which post-​ 1830 military conquest, land seizure, and socio-​cultural hegemony led to the violent destruction, dislocation, or déracinement of tribes and rural society. However, this is to overlook the extent to which small, micro-​communities of two to five hundred individuals remained intact, face-​to-​face communities bound together by common descent from a real or mythical ancestor. Strong solidarity was maintained through reciprocal exchanges, endogamous marriage, religious and symbolic rituals, and village assemblies (djemâas) that managed internal affairs, from conflict resolution to control of the commons.15 From the 1860s onwards the colonial government developed a three-​tier structure for the indirect rule of the mountainous interior: at the top stood the commune mixte, run by a French administrator and a small team of officers, interpreters, and cavalry. These vast territories, often covering an area the size of a French department, were subdivided into douars of two to eight thousand inhabitants, controlled by a caïd. The douar was then further subdivided into small fractions under a headman (kebir or amin), who played a key role in the state apparatus by reporting to the caïd on all issues relating to civil registration, taxation, conscription, corvée labour, crime, and general ‘intelligence’. The key strategy of the early ALN was to take over control of each fraction one by one. After gathering intelligence on a target community and its leaders, a small, armed guerrilla unit would invest the fraction, call all the inhabitants together, and basically convert the existing djemâa, and, if possible, the kebirs, to provide the cell or building-​block of a new revolutionary organization, the nizam or OPA (organisation politico-​administrative). The guerrilla vanguard, on first arrival in the douars, certainly introduced from outside a body of knowledge and expertise on partisan warfare: some, for example, had received training in the paramilitary Organisation spéciale (OS), while others were ex-​soldiers who may have had experience of counter-​insurgency operations in Morocco, Vietnam, Madagascar, and elsewhere. But the small units were embedded among tens of thousands of peasants that brought to guerrilla warfare a sophisticated body of knowledge, a savoir faire, 14  On this early phase of the war, see Martin Thomas, ‘Order before Reform: The Spread of French Military Operations in Algeria, 1954–​1956’, in David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.), Guardians of Empire, chap. 10 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Guy Pervillé, Atlas de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2003), 18–​21 provides an excellent map of the territorial expansion of the ALN, and of the sophisticated, hierarchical structure put in place by late 1956–​1957. 15  Neil MacMaster, ‘The Roots of Insurrection: The Role of the Algerian Village Assembly (Djemâa) in Peasant Resistance, 1863–​1962’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52/​2 (2013), 419–​447; Mounira M. Charrad and Daniel Jaster, ‘Limits of Empire: The French Colonial State and Local Patrimonialism in North Africa’, in Mounira M. Charrad and Julia Adams (eds.), Patrimonialism, Capitalism and Empire (Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, 2015), 63–​89.

386   Neil Macmaster and a long experience of anti-​state resistance. Social historians have begun to uncover evidence of the ability of tightly-​knit rural communities, bound together by primary loyalty to the patriarchal family and fraction, to offer an almost impenetrable wall of silence to agents of the state who felt frustrated by their inability to gain basic intelligence and to impose their authority on peasants embedded in a culture of dissidence that bordered on a form of permanent low-​intensity warfare. During the first half of the twentieth century, apart from a few exceptions like the brief revolt at Margueritte in 1901, the peasant community generally avoided open, armed revolt since this was known, from bitter experience, to invite a huge and destructive state repression, a disproportionate counter-​violence that set out to ‘teach a lesson’ by punitive action against the entire local population, often involving destruction of houses, seizure of land, and crippling fines. However, the peasantry possessed a whole gamut of techniques, what James. C. Scott has called the ‘weapons of the weak’, to protect themselves from, or to mobilize against, what appeared to be an all-​powerful colonial authority.16 The djemâa of the douar Beni Urjin, for example, sustained a monumental legal battle that lasted from 1889 to 1913 to defend their commons, as did the Beni Dergoun from 1900 to 1923.17 Much every-​ day resistance contested the draconian codes and armed guards that excluded the agro-​ pastoralists from the forests that were so vital to their subsistence, an opposition that took the form of illegal grazing, timber cutting, charcoal burning, and poaching. Such delinquent acts were not the work of rogue individuals, but of extended family and kin groups that provided strong community support and omertà in the face of frustrated guards, gendarmes, and administrators. The influential work of Eric Hobsbawm has tended to buttress the Marxist position that archaic peasant societies, and ‘social bandits’ in particular, could not achieve a revolutionary political consciousness.18 But recent investigations have thrown doubt on such a teleology. Historians of Algeria have long been interested in the question of how far mountain-​based bandit groups, that were often active in areas like the Aurès in which the FLN guerrilla first appeared, were directly linked.19 In some instances the transition was direct, as in the case of Ben Boulaid, who between 1948 and 1955 went from ‘bandit’ to FLN commander,20 but more significant is the research of Antonin Plarier that has revealed for an earlier period (1871–​ 1920) widespread forms of outlaw organization that were identical to those adopted by the ALN guerrillas some thirty to forty years later.21 Bands of ten to forty outlaws, in ‘taking to 16  James

C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 17 Didier Guignard, ‘L’affaire Beni Urjin: un cas de résistance à la mainmise foncière en Algérie coloniale’, Insaniyat, 25/​6 (2004), 101–​122; Christian Phéline, ‘Deux cas locaux de résistance paysanne à l’extension des terres de colonization: la révolte de Margueritte (1901) et l’affaire des Beni-​Dergoun (1895–​ 1923)’, in Didier Guignard (ed.), Propriété et société en Algérie contemporaine. Quelles approaches? (Aix-​ en-​Provence: IREMAM, 2017), 207–​225. 18 E.J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971). 19 For a guide to the literature, see Neil MacMaster, War in the Mountains. Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–​1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 46–​47. 20  Jean Morizot, L’Aurès ou le mythe de la montagne rebelle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1991), 267–​271. 21  Antonin Plarier, ‘Le Banditisme rural en Algérie à la période colonial (1871–​années 1920)’, dissertation (history), University Paris 1, 2020 [available on HAL archives-​ouvertes.fr].

Guns, Grain, and Gold    387 the hills’ where they were constantly tracked by gendarme units and military forces, had, like the later ALN, to survive for years on end in a difficult, mountainous terrain, and in doing so they developed sophisticated strategies that were virtually identical. Space does not allow a full comparison here, but such knowledge went beyond the skills known to most peasants—​the location of caves, of concealed tracks, springs, food resources, and general survival skills—​to include partisan fighting tactics. For example, bands would in general avoid confrontation with modern armed forces, and when large sweep operations were mounted against particular redoubts they would usually rapidly retreat from the zone through forced marches, often escaping pursuit by crossing communes mixtes or other administrative boundaries or over the border into Tunisia and Morocco. Once a big army operation was over, they would regroup and return to resume life in their ‘home’ region.22 After 1954 the ALN did not have to study Mao Tse-​tung to learn how to evade counter-​insurgency operations, but adopted peasants’ long experience of similar operations in a specific geography and terrain, within which they moved with confidence. The remaining part is focused on the first phase of guerrilla formation from November 1954 to early 1957, a period during which, because of the difficulty of communication over a vast geographical space, the ALN was highly decentralized under the six regional (wilaya) commands. This meant that local leaders enjoyed a high level of autonomy as to how they organized pragmatically in relation to local conditions. The second phase, explored in greater detail in Saphia Arezki’s chapter in this volume, began to emerge with the important conference of wilaya heads at Soummam in August 1956 that put in place a sophisticated framework for the entire FLN organization and was followed, after the flight abroad from Algiers of the executive Comité de coordination et d’exécution (CCE), by the internationalization of the FLN. The political and organizational centre of gravity shifted from the ‘interior’ wilayas to the ‘external’ Provisional Government (GPRA) and État-​Major of the armed forces based in Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco.23 During this second phase the FLN-​ALN was less dependent for logistics, with which we are concerned, on internal resources than on the financial and material support of foreign governments and the FLN Federation in Western Europe that smuggled modern weapons, equipment, and capital across the border. Ali Kafi, perhaps the most skilled of the wilaya commanders, emphasized the extent to which the ALN was saved from the initial lack of organization, the anarchic and confused situation that reined immediately after 1 November, by the extent to which it could adapt to the long-​established traditions of rural resistance and clandestine opposition to the colonial state.24 As we have noted, the ALN was able to survive the initial fragile and exposed situation of late 1954 to expand rapidly throughout the Tell by grounding its new organization, the nizam, in the pre-​existing, basic cells of rural society composed of the extended family, the fraction, and the djemâa. In the early months the guerrilla forces were confronted by a desperate shortage of basic weaponry, equipment, and funds, and I look at each of these three aspects in turn to explore the way that the ALN sought solutions to these key logistic issues by skilfully building on the existing resources of peasant society, while also taking them in a new direction.

22 

A. Plarier, ‘Le Banditisme rural’, 217, 221, 444–​446, 492. The best overview is Gilbert Meynier, Histoire Intérieure du FLN, 1954–​1962 (Paris: Fayard, 2002). 24 Kafi, Du militant, 44–​53. 23 

388   Neil Macmaster

The Problem of Arms Supply First phase ALN guerrilla forces, like many anti-​colonial insurrections, invariably faced a severe, if not desperate, shortage of basic small arms and ammunition.25 Until the FLN could establish long-​distance delivery of modern, imported arms smuggled in by boat or across the Moroccan and Tunisian borders, the guerrillas could only seek out weapons and ammunition, what were termed ‘armes de récupération’, as best they could locally, using every form of appropriation. Algeria, like other colonial states, had since the nineteenth century closely regulated the access of indigenous populations to potential weapons, and this made the ALN task of seizing shotguns and other small arms particularly difficult. Each time a tribal revolt flared up, or banditry and small scale jacqueries occurred like that of Margueritte in 1901, the authorities tightened the administrative and police regulations to ensure the strict control, possession, manufacture, or sale of weapons, ammunition, and gunpowder.26 A discriminatory system allowed Europeans, and their trusted Algerian henchmen, ready access to modern ‘armes de guerre’, while only those conservative peasants that had shown loyalty to France and the colonial regime were allowed to own shotguns under a strict system of registration.27 Such controls were politically driven by the high level of permanent insecurity and fear among Europeans that lived on isolated farms. Outnumbered by thousands of Algerian peasants, these rural settlers were terrified by the prospect of being ‘over-​run’ by the ‘primitive’ masses. The ALN guerrillas initially procured arms in four ways: through long-​established, trans-​ Saharan clandestine trade; voluntary or forced seizure from better-​off peasants and farmers; recuperation of army weapons through theft, desertion, and ambush; and, lastly, theft of explosives from mines and quarries. Access to arms was a permanent preoccupation of the peasantry, as urban militants discovered when rural populations intimated, as early as the 1930s, that they were ready to engage in anti-​colonial revolt, but only if they could receive guarantees about the supply of weapons. However, in a society in which personal possession of a gun was a status symbol, the illicit trade in arms continued to run strong. At the end of the Second World War, the Maghreb was awash with clandestine arms of Allied, German, and Italian origin that were traded by nomads moving from Libya and Tunisia through the

25  On the comparative situation in Kenya, see Waruhiu Itote (General China), ‘Mau Mau’ General (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), 48–​57: ‘all of us were conscious of the urgent need for weapons; there could be no substitute for fire power’. In August 1952, when Itote formed and trained a guerrilla unit of forty men in the Mount Kenya Forest, he possessed the only gun, a pistol, and twenty bullets. Ammunition was so scarce that none could be used during shooting practice. 26  On the policing of low-​ level violence in French North Africa by the para-​military gendarmes, see Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order. Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 4, 89–​111; Neil MacMaster, ‘Administration et police locale face à l’insécurité dans le massif de l’Ouarsenis. Du crime rural aux premières guérillas, 1945–​1958’, in Aurélien Lignereux (ed.), Ordre, Sécurité et Secours en Montagne. Police et territoire (XIXe–​XXI siècle) (Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble, 2016), 87–​104. 27  Emile Larcher, Traité élémentaire de legislation algérienne, Vol. 3, 3rd ed. (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1923), 549–​564.

Guns, Grain, and Gold    389 Sahara northward into the mountains of the Tell.28 Algerian gunsmiths, experts in the renovation of aged firearms and gunpowder manufacture, played a key part in this highly lucrative business, and were recruited into the FLN.29 A second, and probably the most important, source was the levying of shotguns and other weapons from the peasantry. The colonial administration attempted, not always with success, to prevent guns falling ‘into the wrong hands’, through a licensing system, but in addition, when the gendarmerie and army intervened to suppress any imminent or emerging banditry and unrest in a particular area, they invariably sought to choke revolt by rapid sweep operations to search farmhouses and impound all guns.30 During the massive repression during the Sétif insurrection of 1945, the scale of such ‘cleaning’ operations was revealed by the statistics of over 11,000 guns that were taken from peasant combatants or during searches.31 The ALN and communist groups knew from experience in 1954–​1955 that they would have to act fast to pre-​empt such operations by reaching the guns first. In May 1955, the ALN in wilaya 2 (north Constantinois), in a desperate race against the clock with the gendarmes, accelerated operations to compel peasants to hand over their licensed hunting guns, a tactic that was repeated a year later by the communist maquis of Zitoufi near Ténès.32 Such operations often proved difficult and met with resistance from elders for whom ownership of a gun was a source of pride, a symbol of virility and honour that was often displayed during festivals, the traditional salvos of the fantasia. A third important source of ordinance, and here the guerrilla forces proved particularly skilful in deploying a number of strategies, was to seize materials from the enemy.33 Again this was not an entirely new phenomenon. During the great famine and unrest of 1920, for example, peasant forces, often led by ex-​soldiers that had recently returned from the trenches, attacked barracks and isolated gendarmerie posts to seize weapons. After 1954 the ALN guerrillas carefully gathered intelligence on the arms potential of isolated military posts or convoys before launching attacks or ambushes. On 28 February 1957, for instance, a convoy 28  On the history of Saharan smuggling, see Judith Scheele, Smugglers and Saints of the Sahara. Regional Connectivity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 29 Kafi, Du militant, 47–​48; the first ALN group that Ali Kafi joined in 1955 was led by the gunsmith and clandestine arms dealer Derradji Laïb. The history of the clandestine trade in weapons across the Maghreb requires further research, but see the remarkable study of the First World War Moroccan networks in Francesco Correale, La Grande Guerre des Trafiquants. Le front colonial de l’Occident maghrébin (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014). 30  A. Plarier, ‘Le Banditisme rural’, 455; details of the recovery in 1919 of a carabine, shotgun, two revolvers, and ammunition concealed in a cache of the suspect bandit Bensedira Hanachi. 31  J.-​L.Planche, Sétif 1945, 179; army statistics on 8 June listed 11,078 weapons (8,628 shotguns, 891 ancient firearms, 356 modern army guns, 1,200 revolvers, and three machine guns); Martin Thomas, ‘Colonial Violence in Algeria and the Distorted Logic of State Retribution: The Sétif Uprising of 1945’, The Journal of Military History, 75 (January 2011), 523–​556, from an army source of 18 June, lists 15,169 weapons. 32 Kafi, Du militant, 56–​57; MacMaster, War in the Mountains, chap. 13. 33  This was a source not to be neglected, in particular since the ALN could seize, as opposed to old shotguns, state of the art modern weapons. M. Harbi and G. Meynier (eds.), Le FLN, 800–​1. The Chinese authorities, in rejecting the request of an FLN delegation in November 1959 to supply arms by parachute drop or submarine, replied that arms should be recuperated from the enemy: ‘This is what we did in our revolutionary war. Before 1949 [Independence] we received no external aid—​even from the USSR’. See Timothy P. Wickham-​Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 89; an estimated 80% of rebel arms in Guatemala came from the army.

390   Neil Macmaster of fifteen vehicles returning from the weekly supply of the isolated post at Bouyamène in the Dahra was decimated, with thirty-​one dead, including a pilot, and thirteen wounded. The object of such attacks was not only to inflict serious, morale-​sapping damage on the French forces, but also to seize as many weapons and as much equipment as possible, including, as on this occasion, a heavy machine gun and radio transmitter. The FLN also engaged in the systematic penetration of the armed forces through propaganda and agents, with the object of persuading soldiers or Algerian auxiliaries (harkis) to supply ammunition or to desert, along with their weapons. Army officers of the Section administrative spécialisée (SAS), which combined social welfare and developmental and intelligence work in rural posts, often alone in charge of a harka, were particularly vulnerable to assassination, desertion, and the theft of weapons, and often so distrusted their own men that they resorted to chaining up rifles at night.34 There was an almost constant ‘leakage’ of arms and ammunition from the military and police to the FLN. On occasions the guerrilla forces were able to pull off the most spectacular actions against the army, among them the hijack on 4 April 1956 by the junior officer Henri Maillot of a lorry consignment of 132 sub-​ machine guns, 140 revolvers, and fifty-​seven rifles. Equally humiliating for the French army was an elaborate FLN deception by the Iflissen tribe that pretended to rally to the French side and, after 300 men had been issued with modern arms, drew thirty-​four soldiers into a deadly ambush, before escaping into the interior.35 A final local source of ordinance came from the theft of explosives from the numerous mines that dotted the mountainous interior, hot-​beds of trade union and communist activists that were skilled in the arts of demolition of bridges and pylons and the fabrication of explosive devices.36 FLN expertise in explosives was to be demonstrated with dramatic effect in metropolitan France during August 1958 when, on opening a ‘second front’, numerous strategic installations were attacked, including a huge oil depot at Mourepiane near Marseille that burned for ten days.37 As the early maquis began to form in the Ouarsenis during 1955, the authorities became increasingly concerned by the vulnerability of the explosives store at Bou Caid and the regular road convoys of explosives from the railway at Orleansville. The security forces were aware of the fact that explosive stores had been a prime target of FLN guerrillas from the first day of the insurrection in November 1954. Their anxiety deepened after the bloody insurrection of 20 August 1955 in the northern Constantinois when peasant forces, led by the FLN, had attacked the small mining centre of El Alia in order to capture the stored explosives, and massacred thirty-​four Europeans.38

34  Grégor Mathias, Les sections administratives spécialisées en Algérie. Entre idéal et réalité (1955–​1962) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 142–​143. 35  Camille Lacoste-​Dujardin, Opération Oiseau Bleu, des Kabyles, des Ethnologues et la Guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 1997). 36  What today would be called Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) were not a twenty-​first century invention of the Taliban. Rebel forces in Morocco during the First World War were already adapting unexploded bombs and grenades as mines: see F. Correale, La Grande Guerre, 326. 37  Benjamin Stora, Ils Venaient d’Algérie. L’immigration algérienne en France, 1912–​1992 (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 339–​340, on the procurement and types of explosive used. 38  Claire Mauss-​Copeaux, Algérie, 20 août 1955. Insurrection, répression, massacres (Paris: Payot, 2011). One of the targets of the FLN insurrection on the night of 1–​2 November 1954 was the lead mine of

Guns, Grain, and Gold    391 The full extent of the miners’ clandestine networks became fully apparent during April to June 1957 as the secret service (DST), working with the police and gendarmes, uncovered extensive organizations based in the Zaccar and Rouina mines. In April the security services arrested a network of fifty-​three miners, headed by Abdelkader Benamara, that over a period of five months had managed to steal three tons of explosives, detonators, and Bickford fuses from the Zaccar mine. During June 1957 the intelligence services investigated a second network in the Rouina mine that led to the arrest of a further twenty-​six men that had, in addition to theft of explosives, carried out assassinations, attacked and burned farmhouses, and sabotaged the railway line.39 Eventually the FLN was able to make the transformation from poorly armed bands armed mainly with shotguns to much larger, regular fighting units of about a hundred men, the katibas. These larger units were dependent on a more regular supply of standardized, modern weaponry, and their training and formation in FLN army bases in Morocco and Tunisia was often combined with their return across the border into Algeria carrying with them the new weaponry and equipment. Increasingly the FLN relied upon large consignments of modern arms and ammunition that were supplied by foreign powers, from Egypt and Iraq to the USSR and Yugoslavia, that were smuggled by ship into the northern literal or across the Moroccan and Tunisian borders. The French reply to this was to construct a formidable, electrified barrage along the Moroccan and Tunisian borders, that succeeded in starving the ‘interior’ guerrilla of weapons –​a process discussed further in Saphia Arezki’s chapter.40 Throughout the long Algerian War, the development of both insurgent and counter-​ insurgent strategies can be read as a constant reaction and inventive response to the new or unexpected methods of the enemy, and on this occasion the response of the FLN to the almost impregnable barrage was to establish a system of import-​export front companies in France and elsewhere that smuggled weapons concealed in tanker lorries, as well as by the creation of a secret weapons factory in Morocco.41Although the ‘internal’ ALN continued to face serious shortages of arms throughout the Algerian War, the French army, despite the huge Challe offensives into the mountains, never succeeded in closing off the cross-​border weapons supply.

Ichmoul in the Constantinois where the objective was to seize 1,500 pounds of dynamite: Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace. Algeria 1954–​1962 (London: Macmillan, 1987 ed.), 91. 39 Archives Nationales d’Outre-​ mer (AOM), Algérie 9140/​ 78, fortnightly reports of prefect of Orleansville on ‘Operation Pilote, 13–​24 May, 13–​29 June 1957. 40  Jacques Vernet, ‘Les Barrages pendant la Guerre d’Algérie’, in Jean-​Charles Jauffret and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), Militaires et guérilla dans la guerre d’Algérie (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2001), 253–​268. The invention of barbed wire led colonial regimes to experiment with physical barriers to contain highly mobile rebels and their supply lines, as in the Boer War and the Italian fencing of the Libyan-​Egyptian border in 1931 during the Sanussi revolt. The British in Kenya used forced labour to construct a huge ditch system to seal off the Mau Mau guerrillas embedded in the mountain forests: see David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged. Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005), 268; Ian Henderson, The Hunt for Kimarthi (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958). 41  Ali Haroun, La 7e Wilaya. La Guerre du FLN en France 1954–​1962 (Paris: Seuil, 1986), 215–​219.

392   Neil Macmaster

The Supply of Food and Equipment Two widely held misperceptions of insurgencies are that guerrillas, following the Maoist image of the ‘fish in water’, were crucially supplied with foodstuffs by the rural population, and secondly, that the peasant subsistence economy remained largely autarkic so that rebels could remain secure in their mountain bastions free from military interception of external supply routes. The Algerian peasant economy had always been dependent on regular trading links to urban centres and weekly markets, and likewise the ALN relied on a constant flow of vital foodstuffs like flour and tinned goods, coffee, tea, sugar, batteries, pharmaceuticals, and clothing. The ALN fighters, many of them from a peasant background, were aware of the terrible poverty and constant near-​famine conditions in the mountains, and any attempt to ‘live off the land’ risked a catastrophic alienation of those whom they were hoping to win over.42 The early phase of maquis planning consisted of the location of a system of underground stores or caches (the merkez) that were placed either in well-​concealed natural caves known to local shepherds or in specially constructed silos. The tradition of storing grain in underground silos (matmores), both for security reasons and to conceal grain from the taxman, was intact, and peasants, the masters of concealment, assisted the ALN in the construction of caches for weapons and foodstuffs, and as boltholes for fighters when surrounded by military sweep and search operations.43 The merkez were strategically placed in a network so that ALN units, which were constantly mobile and often engaged in long, night-​time forced marches, were able to travel light and locate their food supplies at the destination. To some extent the guerrillas were therefore partially independent from the peasantry in terms of provisions, and this pattern was reinforced by the ALN using money or credit to pay peasants for any supplies they provided and to acquire stocks through commercial markets in the neighbouring towns.44 Peasants had a long tradition of clandestine movement of grain, charcoal, and other products by mule-​train that, to avoid forest guards, tax collectors, and the police, descended by hidden tracks to the markets, a system that was quickly deployed by the ALN. Since the 1930s the nationalist underground had penetrated from the towns into the interior by using commercial lorries, buses, taxis, and travelling salesmen to deliver radical newspapers, leaflets, weapons, and instructions into the mountains. The ALN skilfully expanded these networks, and recruited agents in urban pharmacies, groceries, and specialized stores to source grain, medicine, radio batteries, boots, and tinned food, that were transported by mule or lorry into the mountains. 42 

Commandant Azzedine, On Nous Appelait Fellaghas in Carrière, Jean-​Claude and Azzedine, Cétait la guerre. Algérie 1954–​1962 (Paris: Plon, 1993), 206: ‘The ALN never wanted to be a burden for the people with whom they live in symbiosis’. 43 Similar methods were used by guerrilla forces in Guatemala that stored rice and equipment in underground clay jars: David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 107. The destruction of matmores, tribal food reserves, had been a standard element of the French military scorched-​earth strategies during the conquest of Algeria. 44 Azzedine, C’Était la Guerre, 206 : ALN regulations obliged combat units ‘to pay the peasants for the food and clothing provided to them’.

Guns, Grain, and Gold    393 The police and French army, which had long experience of colonial warfare against mountain tribes in Morocco, Syria, and elsewhere, resorted to the standard COIN methods of sealing off the supply routes, mounting check-​points, closing markets, and imposing a certificate (titre de mouvement) or declaration of goods on all shopkeepers and traders travelling into rural areas.45 Ever inventive, the FLN provided funds for rural militants to establish their own small businesses, Arab cafés, and grocery stores that, under the cover of official certificates, moved goods into the interior as part of the maquis supply chain.46 The ALN also increased food supplies by engaging in the age-​old traditions of cattle rustling (the bechara) and, when night-​time raiding parties attacked settlers’ farms in the plain, destroying vines, orchards, barns, and equipment, driving away livestock on the hoof or by lorry. The animals were slaughtered whenever a large batallion arrived in the sector, and fresh or sun-​dried meat (kheligh) was distributed to the population.47 Where the ALN was able to dominate extensive ‘fortress’ zones, as in the Ouarsenis and Dahra, they also attempted to establish an agrarian reform that would redistribute land and resources to the poor, started cultivation of so-​called ALN gardens producing lettuces, lentils, chick peas, and fruit, and developed an extensive trade exchange between wilayas in surplus goods like grain, olive oil, and semolina.48 Unable to cut the ALN urban–​rural trade links, the army turned to the traditional strategies of colonial counter-​insurgency to effect a more radical solution, one that involved virtually starving out the mountain population through the creation of zones interdites, free-​fire zones in which the army was given clearance to destroy farm houses and to fire on, bomb, and strafe inhabitants, as many of the French commanders in Algeria had done in the Moroccan Rif and Atlas during the 1920s and 1930s. Eventually the army resorted to the most destructive programme of all, the forced evacuation of peasants from the mountains and relocation (regroupements) into military camps that was intended to leave the guerrilla fighters, like fish exhausted in the mud of a drained lake, cut off from their support base in the local population.49 The enormous attention given by historians to the ‘Battle of Algiers’, a confrontation immortalized by Gillo Pontecorvo’s influential film of the same name, has tended to obscure the fact that French counter-​insurgent specialists knew that it was easier to track down and uproot terrorist organizations in urban centres than in mountainous or forest terrain. General Jacques Massu planned the 1957 ‘Battle’ in two parts: a first stage set out to destroy the FLN urban networks, followed by a rapid extension into the surrounding rural zones and mountains. This inversion of the guerrilla ‘foco’ strategy sought to reconquer the bled from the town and to disrupt the flow of cash and materials to the maquis through a prior destruction or asphyxiation of the urban FLN.50 On 22 March 1957, ‘Operation Pilote’ was launched with a synchronized operation in which battalions invested all the towns of the 45 Mathias,

Les sections administratives, 109–​110. The British used identical methods against the Mau Mau, prohibiting markets and removing licences from suspect traders. See Anderson, Histories, 254. 46  Abderrahmane Krimi (Captain Si Mourad), Mémoires (Algiers: Dar el Oumma, 2006), 41. 47 Azzedine, C’Était la Guerre, 210, 323–​324. 48  Ibid., 209. 49 See the classic work of Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le Déracinement, la crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964), and Michel Cornaton, Les regroupements de la décolonisation en Algérie (Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 1967). 50  On a similar strategy in Kenya, see ‘Operation Anvil’ in Nairobi, Anderson, Histories, 200–​224.

394   Neil Macmaster Chelif region, including Orleansville, Miliana, Affreville, Cherchell, Ténès, Duperré, and the Attafs and applied the techniques developed in Algiers, including the rounding up of thousands of men, interrogations, a population census, and identification and location of every potential ‘terrorist’. Within two months, the élite 11th parachutist brigade had totally destroyed the FLN networks in Orleansville, succeeded in identifying and eliminating the market traders, grocers, collectors, and others that supplied the guerrilla forces and, through ‘opérations centrifuges’, expanded actions outwards into the surrounding douars, having disrupted the supply lines that connected urban cells to the maquis. Did such strategies of starving out the peasantry, regroupements, and the disruption of urban supply lines succeed in crushing the ALN guerrilla forces, as has often been claimed? Certainly by 1958 the ALN faced major setbacks and huge mortality rates through the repressive operations of the Challe offensives, the installation of the electrified border fences, the use of helicopters, and the deployment of hunt commandos that tracked guerrillas into the mountains, but the ALN showed extraordinary endurance and resilience in the face of this challenge. The ALN developed strategies that made it less dependent on the population through a sophisticated logistics network in which most supplies were bought through credit arrangements with urban traders or farmers, and stored in the merkez network of underground silos and caves, enabling units that were constantly mobile to move from one depôt to another, without having to make contact with villages.51 In late 1957 the ALN also began to break up large and vulnerable fighting units like the katibas into smaller, highly mobile groups that could move constantly through the mountains and quickly escape through the sieve of French sweep operations.52 Some ALN officers shrugged off the mass regroupements of the peasantry, intended by the French military to cut away their support base, and described it as a blessing in disguise since they were no longer encumbered by responsibility for the supply and protection of desperate and hungry rural populations.53 The dispersed settlement patterns that were the norm in rural Algeria favoured the guerrilla forces, since their main point of contact with the peasantry was rarely with nucleated village settlements, but dispersed farmhouses (mechtas), each surrounded by its own gardens and fields and protected behind thick barriers of cactus and bush. When small ALN units, couriers, and transports crossed the mountains on a grid of mule tracks, they moved through a network of secure farmhouses in which they could find food and rest, protected within the stockaded and windowless mechta from potential informers.54 51  Harbi and Meynier (eds.), Le FLN, 624, military instructions for wilaya 1 in November 1957 stated, ‘Company commanders or heads of section must above all chose a place distant from the houses as a location for its fighters . . . It is forbidden for combattants to receive clothing or food supplies not supplied by the [ALN] organisation’. 52 Elisabeth E. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in San Salvador, Vol. 28 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 134–​135, notes a similar strategy in El Salvador where guerrilla forces, in response to the growing capacity of government troops to deploy rapidly by helicopter, to bomb controlled zones, and to wreak violence on the population, responded by breaking up large battalion-​sized forces. The strategy was successful, notes Wood, but has been misread by historians, as in the Algerian case, as a sign of guerrilla failure or collapse. 53 Cornaton, Les regroupements, 61–​62. 54  As the war progressed, the ALN maquis developed ever more sophisticated specialized logistics that were formalized at the Soummam conference, including commissions that were in charge of

Guns, Grain, and Gold    395 Once the French had ‘pacified’ a particular douar or region, they would install their own political assemblies, a parallel to the ALN nizam, and armed auto-​defence units (GAD, groupe d’autodéfense), but these ‘liberated’ enclaves often worked in collaboration with the guerrilla forces to pass on weapons, medicines, and other materials received from the French.55

Money: The Sinews of War The third theme of ALN logistics relates to what was the most important: the flow of money into the guerrilla coffers, since financial resources underpinned everything else, from weapons and equipment procurement, to fighters’ wages and family benefits.56 The speed of the ALN advance into the mountainous interior during 1955 and 1956 meant that it found itself virtually ruling over tens of thousands of poor peasants and having to regulate everything from the rural economy and food supplies to schooling, welfare, and justice. The purpose of rebel governance was to completely displace the colonial administration and to demonstrate that it could support newly liberated citizens, over whom it claimed authority as a sovereign state in the making, and that it could relieve them of the worst abuses of the detested colonial system. A key role of the ALN village councils, the Organisation politico-​ administrative (OPA), was to replace the existing French taxation system with its own progressive or graduated income tax under which relatively well-​to-​do farmers and shopkeepers paid about 10% of income, and the poorer peasants under 5% or nothing at all. It was virtually impossible for the ALN fighters, most of them illiterate and constantly on the move, to undertake the formidable bureaucratic task of carrying out a tax assessment that depended on an annual update of the basic income, the crop yield, livestock, and wages of every household dispersed over a vast, mountainous landscape. This is why the ALN, on first advancing into a new zone, far from assassinating all the agents or ‘collaborators’ of the colonial state, the caïds, forest guards, and village headmen (kebirs), first attempted, as far as possible, to integrate them into the OPA, since they knew how to manage the French system of tax collection. The ALN also recruited into its own administrative system hundreds of young, educated students from the townships who had, along with their fathers, first-​hand experience of employment in the local administration, the town halls, commune mixte, and caïd offices, and knew from inside how the colonial system worked.57 French intelligence officers often acquisition, storage, and distribution of materials, the keeping of registers, and monthly reports and accounts: see Kafi, Du militant, 88–​90. 55 

Georges Buis, Les Fanfares Perdus, entretiens avec Jean Lacouture (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 205. Colin-​Jeanvoine and Stéphanie Derozier, Le financement du FLN pendant la guerre d’Algérie 1954–​1962 (Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2008). 57  A key role in FLN finances was played by Mahmoud Abdoun, an accountant who worked in the Inland Review during the 1930s and acted as chief treasurer to the Messalist PPA and later the FLN. He worked with Ben Khedda (in 1961 to become president of the provisional government of the FLN) in 1955 on how to organize a system of collection based on the existing colonial taxation system: see Benjamin Stora, Dictionnaire Biographiques de Militants Nationalistes Algériens, 1926–​1954 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), 267–​268. 56  Emmanuelle

396   Neil Macmaster uncovered, with a sense of shock, what was called a ‘noyautage’ or saturation, by which ALN networks penetrated from the countryside directly into the heart of the colonial police and administration. The ALN is usually portrayed as attempting to destroy the colonial apparatus through terrorism, but equally important, although often invisible, was the penetration, manipulation, and adaptation of the colonial administration. The unexpected symbiosis of the FLN with the colonial order that it was seeking to destroy or displace was also to be found in another major source of rebel finances: the levying of considerable sums from the wealthiest Algerian and European farmers and businessmen, most of them political supporters of the French regime. This operated much on the lines of the mafia system of ‘protection money’, a traditional form of extraction that was well known to Algerian peasants through the system of the bechara in which livestock taken by so-​called bandits was returned to the owner on payment of a ransom. In a first stage the ALN demonstrated to estate owners the economic damage they could inflict by night raids that destroyed standing crops, vineyards, fruit-​trees, barns, tractors, and equipment, before a second stage in which secret negotiations took place in which the rebels offered to halt future attacks in exchange for ‘insurance’ money. In September 1956, many of the biggest Algerian and European landowners in the Chelif region paid millions of francs, including the reactionary Corsican mayor of Orleansville, Ange Bisambiglia, who handed over nine million in protection money. A third important source of ALN finances derived from the expatriate community of migrant workers in France who were either taxed by the FLN or sent remittance money back to their families. Since each factory worker in France, although on a minimum wage, had a regular and higher income than the average peasant, their capacity to contribute to FLN coffers was considerable and the French Federation contributed an estimated 80% of the global finances of the GPRA after 1958.58 The FLN, unable to raise much revenue from the great mass of rural poor in Algeria, became increasingly dependent on the French Federation and foreign governments for financial assistance.

Conclusion A social history from ‘below’ of maquis formation shows the extent to which this can be understood less as a ‘clean break’ initiative by an urban vanguard than as an ongoing process embedded in the pre-​insurrectionary social, economic, and political organizations of rural society. However, this is not to claim that the guerrilla forces remained bound by tradition, since they built upon and extended these processes in a dynamic and innovative way as the war progressed. Such an approach, especially in a situation of decentralized rebel initiatives, provides some unexpected insights. In particular, as the French army exerted growing pressure on the rural population through massive destruction, economic strangulation, and regroupements, the ALN survived through a logistics that enabled it to operate more independently from the peasant society and economy.

58  A. Haroun, La 7e Wilaya, 307; Stora, Ils Venaient, 163–​169, between 1956 and early 1962 the police seized over 11 million (New francs) from the FLN in metropolitan France.

Guns, Grain, and Gold    397 How did guerrilla formation in Algeria compare with other wars of decolonization? This is a field open to further research. Ethnologists and historians have revealed the extent to which dynamic, small communities that were a universal feature of peasant and nomadic societies defended communal landownership and retained a high level of solidarity, cooperation, and village government.59 Such micro-​communities showed an extraordinary resilience and an ability to endure the onslaught of colonial conquest, destruction, and dispossession, to adapt to modernity, and to provide a later base for insurgents, as they did under Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. There is a growing awareness among historians, in part stemming from the dramatic failure of US and NATO forces to defeat the supposedly archaic tribal resistance in Afghanistan, of the need to reassess the perceived backwardness of indigenous fighters, stereotypically portrayed in films like Zulu and boys’ comics as primitive, spear-​shaking hordes mowed down by the Gatling gun. The historian John Chalcraft has re-​examined the extraordinary number and strength of major anti-​colonial insurrections in the Middle East between the two World Wars.60 During the second Italo-​Sanussi war of 1923–​1932, the nomadic forces of Omar al-​Mukhatar constructed a proto-​state that was able to raise taxes and organize international food and equipment supplies and tied down the Italian army for a decade. Likewise, Abd El-​Krim in 1921 crushed the Spanish army at Anual in the Rif and created a sophisticated counter-​state that organized a modern logistics, including its own field telephone system.61 Despite eventual defeat by combined Spanish and French forces in 1926, Abd-​el-​Krim later escaped to Cairo where in 1948 he founded the Comité de libération du Maghreb arabe that supported the insurrection in Algeria. Finally, a brief word on the comparative geo-​politics. In his 1948 report on preparation for a future partisan war, Aït Ahmed provided a lucid analysis of the geographical or spatial scale of insurrection, including access to external sanctuaries. Algeria, he noted, lacked the immense spaces and dense populations that enabled Mao Tse-​tung to carve out a liberated, free zone and to create a veritable state apparatus, along with its own banking system, printed money, and industries that could sustain a regular army. Aït Ahmed was prescient in his 1948 analysis: Algerians would not be able to win a war of independence alone, but would need to ‘scale up’ into an all-​Maghrebi resistance, a position that was partly achieved when Morocco and Tunisia gained independence in 1956 and provided a secure, trans-​border base for the FLN provisional government and military. But he was also aware that, despite the extensive areas of rugged mountains and desert, Algeria lacked the internal geographic scale to carve out a permanent free zone with a stable central command, field hospitals, and logistics base that was permanently secure from French attack.62 59  The literature is vast: see Jerome Blum, ‘The Internal Structure and Polity of the European Village Community from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Century’, The Journal of Modern History, 43/​4 (1971), 541–​576; Eric R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). 60  John Chalcraft, Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 61 C.R. Pennell, A Country with a Government and a Flag. The Rif War in Morocco 1921–​ 1926 (Wisbech: Menas Press, 1986), 141–​143. 62  On this see Neil MacMaster, ‘Constitution d’une base paysanne: comparaison des guérillas au Vietnam et en Algérie, entre 1942 et 1962’, in Christopher Goscher and Sylvie Thénault (eds.), ‘Maghreb-​ Indochine, comparaisons imperials, Monde(s), histoire, espaces, relations’, 12 (November 2017), 121–​140. Insurgents skilfully adapted peasant village assemblies as well as colonial local government structures.

398   Neil Macmaster However, it was a remarkable testament to the skill and endurance of the ALN that it was able to survive down to the end of the war. Despite the scale of the murderous Challe rolling offensives, the French were never able to ‘clean out’ the mountains as they intended or claimed. Here the situation in Kenya provides an interesting contrast, where the Mau Mau insurgents were cooped up in a relatively small area of forested mountains (perhaps under a fifth of the terrain occupied by the ALN), had no access to external sanctuaries or logistic supplies, and were definitively eliminated by the British army far more comprehensively within four years. The wider geography of logistics was thus crucial to the eventual outcome of insurrections.

Select Bibliography Aït Ahmed, Hocine, Mémoires d’un combatant. L’esprit d’indépendance 1942–​1952 (Paris: Sylvie Messinger, 1983). Arjona, Ana, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mamilly (eds.), Rebel Governance in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2015). Chalcraft, John, Popular Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Jauffret, Jean-​Charles, and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), Militaires et guérilla dans la guerre d’Algérie (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 2001). Kalyvas, Stathis N., The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). MacMaster, Neil, War in the Mountains. Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–​1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Maoui, Rémy, J’ai été fellagha, officier français et déserteur. Du FLN à l’OAS (Paris: Seuil, 2004). Meynier, Gilbert, Histoire Intérieure du FLN, 1954–​1962 (Paris: Fayard, 2002). Plarier, Antonin, Le Banditisme rural en Algérie à la période colonial, dissertation, University Paris 1, 2020 (forthcoming book). Staniland, Paul, Networks of Rebellion. Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). Thomas, Martin, Violence and Colonial Order. Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Wickham-​ Crowley, Timothy P., Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Wood, Elisabeth E., Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Chapter 21

T he Insurgent St rat e g i e s of the ALN in A l g e ria ( 1954 –​1 9 62 ) Saphia Arezki The Algerian War of Independence began in the early hours of 1 November 1954, but we need to go back further to understand its genesis.* During 1947–​1948, the consolidation of a Special Organization (OS) signified the adoption of the principle of revolutionary guerrilla warfare by an emergent new generation of Algerian nationalist leaders.1 The OS was a clandestine paramilitary group, the armed wing of the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Freedoms party (MTLD). Most of its members were between 25 and 30 years of age and had more formal schooling than most of their Algerian peers. The proportion of urbanites within the OS was also disproportionately high.2 By the start of 1950, membership of this organization ranged from between 1,000 to 1,500 men, about 500 in the Algiers region, 300 in the eastern region of Constantine, and 200 in the western region of Oran.3 These sections set about preparing their first operations, which could be described as proto-​ insurrectional. The most famous of these was the attack on the Oran central post office on 5 April 1949 organized by Hocine Aït Ahmed, who headed the OS after the death of its first leader, Mohamed Belouizdad.4 This operation allowed the attackers to seize some three *  The author would like to thank Natalya Vince, Martin Thomas, and Huw Bennett for their generous help and advice in the writing of this chapter. Background research was supported by the Fondation des Treilles, a charitable organization created by Anne Gruner Schlumberger, whose mission is to foster dialogue between the sciences and the arts in order to creativity and inter-disciplinary research: www.les-treilles.com. 1  Neil MacMaster, ‘Constitution d’une base paysanne: comparaison des guérillas au Vietnam et en Algérie, entre 1940 et 1962,’ Monde(s), 12/​2 (2017), 122. 2 For a fine-​ grained description of the sociology of OS members see: Gilbert Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 83. 3   Benyoucef Benkhedda, Les origines du 1er novembre (Algiers: Dahlab, 1989), 150. 4   Born in 1926 in Kabylie, he became active in nationalist party politics from 1942 onwards. Convicted for involvement in the OS, he left for Cairo. A founding member of the FLN, he held various political functions during the war. However, he was arrested with other FLN leaders in the French Army’s October 1956 hijack of an airplane and thus spent a large part of the war in prison. After 1962, he opposed the regime of Ahmed Ben Bella (first Algerian president, from 1962 to 1965) and led an armed revolt from 1963 onwards. He was arrested in 1964 and sentenced to death, but then pardoned. He escaped from prison in 1966 and went into exile in Europe.

400   Saphia Arezki million old French francs, but it was a false dawn. The OS was quickly dismantled in the following year, with several of its members arrested and imprisoned. Those who escaped capture left the cities, taking to Algeria’s highland interior in a nascent maquis. It was during this period of forced reorganization that reflections on revolutionary war began to emerge amongst Algerian nationalists. Hocine Aït Ahmed, one of the so-​called nine ‘historic’ leaders of the original Front de Libération Nationale (FLN),5 wrote an extensive report on insurgent strategy.6 He studied several recent conflicts, notably those in China, Vietnam, and Ireland. He quickly understood the importance of the rural masses in guerrilla warfare and that effective insurgency demanded meticulous national coordination. The next challenge was to reorganize the party ‘on new bases in response to the need to prioritize setting up in traditional rural bastions’. Hocine Aït Ahmed also indicated that ‘the form that the revolution will take will be neither a “mass uprising” nor “generalized terrorism” nor “the creation of a free Zone” ’, a prediction which, while prescient, would soon be superseded. Controlling the local population, rather than seeking to conquer territory, is at the heart of revolutionary warfare, and Algerian revolutionaries understood the importance of being ‘a fish in water’, to use Mao’s famous metaphor. The FLN’s founding statement of 1 November 1954 stipulated that it was necessary to proceed to the ‘gathering and [the] organization of all the healthy energies of the Algerian people for the liquidation of the colonial system’.7 Focused on the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale’s (FLN) armed wing, the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN), this chapter examines the insurgent strategies it devised. Several questions will be addressed. How did ALN strategies evolve during the conflict? Where did violence fit into the FLN-​ALN strategy to secure the allegiance of local populations? What forms did such violence take? And how did the progressive internationalization of the Algerian War affect ALN tactics and prospects, particularly as French security forces locked down Algeria’s cities and land frontiers?8 Winning global support was always a high priority for the FLN leadership; indeed, the 1 November 1954 declaration announcing the FLN’s commitment to fight a war of independence identified the movement’s first external goal as the ‘Internationalization of the Algerian problem’.9 What might be further explored is the way in which this objective affected the actions and objectives of both FLN politics and ALN operations. The chapter highlights the ALN’s strategies that remain a blind spot in academic research, agreeing with Martin Thomas’ observation that ‘the study of wars of decolonization, in the West at least, still tends to focus on the actions of colonial state functionaries and

5  There

were initially six so-​called historical leaders of the FLN: Mostefa Ben Boulaïd, Didouche Mourad, Rabah Bitat, Mohamed Boudiaf, Belkacem Krim and Larbi Ben’M’hidi. To these we must add Mohamed Khider, Hocine Aït Ahmed, and Ahmed Ben Bella. 6 ‘Comment Hocine Aït Ahmed a pensé la Révolution Algérienne (1948)’, El Watan, 29–​ 30 December, 2015. 7  http://​w ww.prem​ier-​minis​tre.gov.dz/​res​s our​ces/​f ront/​files/​p df/​texts-​fonda​ment​aux/​procla​mati​ onno​v54.pdf. 8  The importance of internationalization was highlighted by Matthew Connelly’s landmark work, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 9  http://​w ww.prem​ier-​minis​tre.gov.dz/​res​s our​ces/​f ront/​files/​p df/​texts-​fonda​ment​aux/​procla​mati​ onno​v54.pdf.

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    401 the impact of such conflicts on the metropolitan power rather than concentrating first and foremost on anti-​colonial resistance and its bedrock within indigenous colonial societies’.10 While French military strategies have been the subject of intensive research, those of the ALN have not attracted the same breadth of analysis.11 Martin S. Alexander and J.F.V. Keiger acknowledged the gap twenty years ago in a collection of essays exploring French counter-​ insurgent strategy in Algeria. They commented that ‘the FLN-​ALN side of the war demands far more sustained research than has yet occurred’, lamenting that, at the time of writing in 2002—​forty years after the war’s end—​‘there are few accounts or evaluations of ALN military activities’.12 Although written some two decades ago, it bears emphasis that, with some notable exceptions, the situation has not changed significantly since then. In regard to those exceptions, the strategies developed in the Northern Constantine area have been brought to light thanks to the work of Algerian historian Daho Djerbal.13 That said, the history of other regions remains little known; the military and insurrectional history of western Algeria, for instance, remains largely to be written, as do multiple other aspects of Algerians’ lived experience of the conflict. This chapter focuses on the insurgent strategies implemented by the ALN throughout the war but recognizes the need for more locally focused studies to fill the gap between strategic planning and fighters’ everyday experience. Analysing the insurgent strategies of the FLN’s ALN requires explaining the different challenges the insurgents faced in the Algerian War’s different phases. Indeed, the strategies developed by the ALN were intrinsically linked to each of these phases’ distinct social, political, and spatial aspects. In addition, it should be pointed out that talking about strategy in the singular does not really make sense in the early years of the conflict when there was never one but, rather, several ALNs. We can schematically identify three distinct phases of the war, each of which will be analysed in this chapter. The sections below focus, first, on the initial two years of the conflict, during which the ALN mounted its earliest operations. In this opening phase, securing public support for the fight and thus winning over local populations was the primordial objective. Second, the chapter examines the years 1956–​1957, when the ALN reached its peak and the struggle spread from Algeria’s rural interior to the cities, in particular through terrorist actions against European military and civilian targets. This phase culminated in what became known as the Battle of Algiers, fought to its climax in 1957. It should be noted in this context that the Soummam Congress took place a year earlier, in August 1956, marking the first 10 Martin Thomas, ‘Insurgent Intelligence: Information Gathering and Anti-​ Colonial Rebellion’, Intelligence and National Security, 22/​1 (2007), 156. 11 See: Lieutenant-​ Colonel Claude Carré, ‘Aspects opérationnels du conflit algérien, 1954–​1960’, Revue Historique des Armées [hereafter RHA], 166/​1 (1987), 82–​91; Patrick Facon, ‘L’Algérie et la politique générale de l’Armée de l’Air,’ 1954–​1958’, RHA, 187 (1992), 76–​85; Martin Thomas, ‘Policing Algeria’s Borders 1956–​1960: Arms Supplies, Frontier Defences and the Sakiet Affair’, War and Society, 13/​1, (1995), 81–​99; Martin Thomas, ‘Order Before Reform: the Spread of French Military Operations in Algeria, 1954–​1958’, in David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.) Guardians of Empire (Manchester University Press, 1999), 198–​220; Jean-​Charles Jauffret and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), Militaires et guérilla dans la guerre d’Algérie (Brussels: Complexe, 2001). 12  Martin S. Alexander and John F. Keiger, ‘France and the Algerian War: Strategy, Operations and Diplomacy’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 25/​2 (2002), 21–​22. 13  Daho Djerbal, ‘Les maquis du Nord-​ Constantinois face aux grandes opérations de ratissage du plan Challe (1959–​1960)’, in Jauffret and Vaïsse (eds.), Militaires, 195–​217; ‘Mounadiline et mousebbiline. Les forces auxiliaires de l’ALN du nord-​constantinois’, in Jean-​Charles Jauffret (ed.), Des hommes et des femmes en guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Autrement, 2003), 282–​296.

402   Saphia Arezki attempt by the FLN leadership to organize the independence movement on a national scale—​a subject to which we will return in more detail in the second part of this chapter. The chapter’s final section concentrates on the final phase, the years 1958–​1962, during which the internal maquis were in an irresistible decline while more regular military formations—​which would become the basis of Algeria’s post-​independence People’s National Army (in French, ANP)—​ were being consolidated across the country’s land borders in Morocco and Tunisia following the 1958 creation of the military operational committees (COM) east and west and, in 1960, of a dedicated Algerian General staff (État-​major général, EMG).

1954–​1955: The Early Years The war’s early years were marked by improvisation and disorganization, a consequence of the way the conflict began: ‘the decision to launch the armed struggle was in a way a decision taken . . . almost at the last minute’,14 explained a former ANP officer who joined the ranks of the ALN very early on. In a 1960 conference of senior FLN figures in Tunis, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal15 stated that ‘the only possible outcome for the Algerian people was to commence the armed stage of the revolution without waiting for a careful and precise study to be undertaken, and without waiting until a complete action programme and coordination at all levels had been drawn up. The “group of 22” had two options: organize first and then [pull the] trigger or [pull the] trigger first and then organize . . . We were forced to choose the second option’.16 The haste with which the war was launched is partly explained by the international context. The end of the Indochina War six months earlier in May 1954, and subsequent negotiations to end the French protectorates in Morocco and Tunisia, gave rise to fears of an unprecedented concentration of French military capability on Algerian territory. In this first phase the preliminary requirement was to see how the struggle developed in order to determine what strategies should be put in place in order to rally the population to the struggle before focusing on the signal event of the war’s first year: the insurrection of 20 August 1955.

Extending the Struggle, Reaching the Population The two elements described in this subtitle were interdependent. The extension of the struggle made it possible to demonstrate to rural populations in particular the strength of 14 

Interview with a former ANP officer, Algiers, 16 January 2014. Born in 1923 into a landowning family in Mila in the north-​east of the country, Lakhdar Ben Tobbal became a member of the Algerian People’s Party (PPA) in 1940. In 1947 he joined the OS before being forced into hiding in the Aurès region. During the war he was assistant to Zighoud Youssef in wilaya II (North Constantine) before becoming its commander for six months. He was Minister of the Interior of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) from 1958 to 1961, then Minister of State. He participated in the Evian independence negotiations but had no political role after Algerian independence in 1962. 16  Quoted in Mohammed Harbi, Le FLN, mirage et réalité. Des origines à la prise de pouvoir (1945–​ 1962) (Paris: Edition Jeune Afrique, 1980), 122. 15 

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    403 the insurgent movement, whilst securing the support of the local population allowed fighters to find sanctuary and shelter. At the outbreak of the war, the principle of a decentralized ALN structure was preferred because, in the words of a decisive ALN figure, Mohamed Boudiaf, ‘given the expanse of the national territory, it was impossible for any centralized organism to lead the struggle; that is why it was decided to let each wilaya have complete freedom of action’.17 Thus, the conflict’s opening phase was characterized by lack of coordination at the national level. When the war broke out on the night of All Saints’ Day 1954, fewer than a thousand men, most of them concentrated in the east, in the highland regions of the Aurès mountains and in Kabylia, and armed with only a few hundred small arms (principally shotguns), rose up against the French presence in Algeria. Some thirty attacks were mounted throughout the country, although most were concentrated in the east. This was the first time that such a coordinated and synchronized insurgent action had been attempted throughout Algeria. However, in the months that followed, the groups of fighters involved remained largely autonomous. At this point, there was no liaison service capable of sustaining contacts between the groups operating in different zones of the country. Thus, each area leader was relatively free to pursue the strategy he believed was best adapted to pursuing the struggle at local level. From the initial hotspots of rebel activity, the insurrection then spread more widely through the north of the territory. Very quickly, three key issues emerged in connection with the core objective of expanding the fight. First, additional recruits were needed to supplement the ranks of this disparate army to compensate for the losses suffered. Second, essential weapons and munitions for the fighters were yet to be secured. Third, it remained vital to find ways to rally the population to the struggle. Despite the lack of colony-​wide coordination, local ALN actions were essentially comparable and in continuity with those of the OS. Early ALN directives warned against engagement in major military actions, attaching priority to links with remote rural communities, the prelude to establishing viable units in the Algerian interior. At the same time, launching sporadic operations, in which maquis fighters would appear and then disappear, spread local knowledge of an insurrectional presence. The idea was to make plain the ALN’s operational presence without revealing its location or movements. The targets of violence were selected because of their symbolic importance: representatives of the oppressive colonial order (including the assassination of caïds and attacks on rural gendarmes and military barracks) plus the sabotage of economic infrastructure (electricity sub-​stations, gas plants, petrol depots, railway lines, and bridges). Such attacks sought to spread insecurity throughout the country, hindering the movement of French troops and, where possible, seizing weapons during ambushes and attackingbarracks with the ultimate aim of establishing liberated zones beyond the control of the French army. This last objective did not, in fact, materialize. Estimates suggest that, by the end of 1955, the ALN, although still in the process of augmenting its ranks, could field about 6,000 fighters. Units remained widely dispersed and poorly organized at the national level. It was a ‘movement composed of decentralized networks’.18 FLN activists and former OS members such as Abdelhafid Boussouf held most

17 

Mohamed Boudiaf, ‘La préparation du 1er novembre’, quoted in Harbi, Le FLN, mirage et réalité. 123. Harbi, ‘L’implosion du FLN’, in Gilbert Meynier, L’Algérie contemporaine, bilans et solutions pour sortir de la crise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 32. 18  Mohammed

404   Saphia Arezki leadership positions.19 This was the sense in which there was not one but several ALNs, most of which experienced numerous internal struggles. Typical was wilaya I, which was already in the grip of a lethal power struggle following the death of its first leader, Mostefa Ben Boulaïd. At the outset and contrary to the official line, ALN cadres struggled to fulfil the Maoist dictum of moving like ‘fish in water’. The future chief of staff of the Algerian army, Tahar Zbiri, admitted as much in his memoirs, writing that ‘Among the Algerians, there were very few who had heard the call of the revolution during the first days of the outbreak and had willingly supported the moudjahidine without having been forced to do so’.20 Perhaps not surprisingly, it was in mountainous regions where the local population lived in endemic poverty that the maquis began to take root.21 Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, former member of the OS, in charge of the armed struggle in the Constantine region, confirmed as much: ‘Staying two days somewhere was a lot at the time; three days was even better; four days was almost unexpected. We lived like this on a day-​to-​day basis and we had to take into account the fact that we were short of money. We lived with the locals but the people in the countryside were not rich enough to feed about twenty people at a time . . . It was only after the initial insurrection that we realized all the logistical problems’.22 Persuading the civilian population to embrace the struggle was therefore immensely challenging during the first few months of the conflict. Local communities knew next to nothing about this handful of men who had just unleashed an insurgency against the colonial power. They were understandably suspicious, and it was only thanks to a few militants scattered in the douars and mechtas that the earliest ALN units were able to survive during the war’s first months.23 In response, ALN commanders tried to compel local communities to join the struggle, involving them in compromising actions such as acts of sabotage, crop burnings, and arson attacks on settler-​owned farms. To encourage this civilian involvement, they exploited popular resentment against France, a sentiment that mounted in reaction to the security force violence Algerians faced, which ranged from aerial bombardments to arbitrary arrests. In the east of the country, one ALN leader organized an operation whose objective was definitively to shift the population to the side of armed struggle. The action in question took place on 20 August 1955 and is considered a major turning point in the war’s initial phase, owing to its catalytic effect in mobilizing the rural population.

19  Born in 1926 in Mila in an outlying branch of a large landowner family, Abdelhafid Boussouf joined the PPA at the age of sixteen and later became a member of the OS, where he served as one of its executives. He was assistant head in the Oranie region after 1 November 1954 before taking over as leader of wilaya V in 1956. In 1957, he was put in charge of liaison and communications before becoming head of the GPRA’s Ministry of General Liaison and Communications (MLGC), renamed two years later as the Ministry of Armaments and General Liaison (MALG). As part of his duties, he set up the ALN’s intelligence arm. At independence, he withdrew from Algerian political life. 20  Tahar Zbiri, Mémoires du dernier chef historique des Aurès (1929–​1962) (Algiers: ANEP, 2010), 68. 21  Due to the extensive French military presence, the ALN was never able to establish permanent fixed bases within Algerian territory, unlike the Viet Minh, for example. 22  Quoted by Daho Djerbal, ‘Mounadiline et mousebbiline. Les forces auxiliaires de l’ALN du nord-​ constantinois’, 285. 23  Mohammed Harbi even relates that in Oranie, peasants handed over fighters to the gendarmerie: see Harbi, Le FLN, mirage et réalité, 127.

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    405

Map 1   20 August 1955 Principal urban locations of the insurrection

The Insurrection of 20 August 1955 The insurrection of 20 August 1955 was led by Zighoud Youssef.24 He was newly appointed as chief of Zone 2 after his predecessor Didouche Mourad’s death a few months earlier. Zighoud Youssef spent three months preparing the operation. The first terrorist operations had, by that point, been carried out in nearby Skikda and in the port city of Annaba during spring 1955. Soon afterwards, a bomb exploded at Constantine’s city-​centre casino on the tenth anniversary of the 8 May 1945 nationalist uprising. In 1945 thousands of Algerians had perished in the subsequent wave of repressive violence directed by security forces and settler vigilantes across the Constantinois.25 A decade later the French military crackdown in response to the spring 1955 attacks was also violent and indiscriminate. Zighoud Youssef decided to respond in kind, tackling the wait-​and-​see attitude of much of the Algerian population by setting up an operation that would implicate local communities, leaving people with no choice but to come over to the ALN side. Making optimum use of his 200 to 300 fighters and taking advantage of the favourable situation created by the collective reprisals

24 Zighoud (sometimes spelled Zighout) Youssef was a blacksmith. He was born in 1921 in the Constantinois. Holder of the primary school certificate, he was arrested for membership of the OS in 1950. He then escaped and went into hiding. He took part in the outbreak of war in Zone 2 (North Constantinois) but died in a skirmish with French troops in 1956. 25 On the Sétif uprising, see: Anthony Clayton, ‘The Sétif Uprising of May 1945’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 3/​1 (1992), 1–​21; Jean-​Louis Planche, ‘La répression civile du soulèvement nord-​ constantinois, mai-​juin 1945’, in Daniel Rivet et al. (eds.), La Guerre d’Algérie au miroir des décolonisations françaises (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-​Mer, 2000), 111–​128; Martin Thomas, ‘Colonial Violence in Algeria and the Distorted Logic of State Retribution: the Sétif uprising of 1945’, Journal of Military History, 75/​1 (2011), 125–​157.

406   Saphia Arezki carried out by French troops since May, Zighoud developed a strategy aimed, in part, at mobilizing the region’s civilian population and, in part, devised as a model to be replicated elsewhere, notably in the other epicentres of the initial rebellion, the Aurès and Kabylia. In practice a breakdown in communication and the consequent internal disorganization of the planned operation rendered this impossible. The goals of Zighoud’s planned offensive could be summarized thus: •​ To concentrate attacks on military positions: barracks, police stations, and gendarmerie posts as well as economic centres; •​ To conduct the operation in broad daylight so that the people could see their djounoud (ALN soldiers) and identify with them; •​ To sustain the operation over three days; •​ To break the French army’s stranglehold on Zone 1 (Aurès area) in the mountains by forcing army units to redeploy to defend towns; •​ To stimulate other regions to take action so that the fight could be extended to the entire national territory; •​ To demonstrate solidarity with the Moroccan people on what was a symbolic date (20 August) that marked the French deposition of Sultan Mohammed V exactly two years earlier; •​ Finally, to raise awareness of the Algerian struggle on the international stage.26 The operation was scheduled to begin on Saturday, 20 August 1955, at 12 noon precisely. Late in the morning on the appointed date, a series of attacks began in the area between the cities of Skikda (Philippeville), Constantine, Guelma, and Azzaba (Jemmapes).27 Thousands of peasants, accompanied by women and children, armed with rudimentary weapons such as sticks, axes, sickles, and other tools, launched concerted attacks on European civilians and military and administrative targets. In Skikda, thousands of men entered the city to seize the police station. At the El Halia pyrite mineworks, hundreds of Algerian men carried out acts of violence against European families, massacring civilians and killing thirty-​four people in total, among them ten children. The attacks continued over the following two days, 21 and 22 August, making this what Abdelmadjid Merdaci describes as ‘the first major military operation of the FLN-​ALN against the colonial state and its supporters since the outbreak of the insurrection’. Perhaps reflecting on what was to come, he also noted that the movement ‘would not experience anything similar thereafter’.28 The total death toll was 123, including seventy-​one Europeans, twenty-​one Algerians, and thirty-​one law enforcement officers. French retribution was swift and harsh. While the balance sheet is difficult to establish, it appears that a broad estimate of 10,000 Algerian victims is credible. The repression was of a magnitude comparable to that which affected the region ten years earlier, after the Sétif uprising of May 1945. Despite the severity of the 26 These goals are explained in detail by Ali Kafi, Du Militant politique au dirigeant militaire (Algiers: Casbah, 2002). 27  See the map above. 28 Abdelmadjid Merdaci, Constantine au cœur de l’histoire, Novembre 1954—​ novembre 1955 (Constantine: Les éditions du champ libre, 2009), 53.

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    407 crackdown—​indeed, because of it—​Zighoud Youssef and certain FLN leaders, such as Lakhdar Ben Tobbal, judged the operation a success, at least symbolically. Thanks to it, any middle ground was gone. ‘The people were now in solidarity with an ALN whose prestige had increased’.29 The ALN had proved that it was capable of mentoring and leading thousands of people into insurgent actions with only the most rudimentary weapons. In this view, the August operations ‘gave birth to what could be called the “People’s Army” ’.30 The severity of security force repression across the region led inhabitants of the Constantinois to rally to the maquis in unprecedented numbers. This operation inverted the relationship that had previously existed between the people and the ALN’s fighters. The burden of feeding, hiding, clothing, and providing basic medical care no longer fell on the surrounding civilian population as it had in the first months of the war. Instead, in the words of historian Daho Djerbal, it now fell to ‘ALN units to take care of refugees from the plains and piedmonts who “ascended” into the maquis to find protection but also food’.31 In the North Constantine region, after August 1955 the relationship between fighters and mountain populations changed from one of ALN dependence on local goodwill to popular support for an armed movement that offered some measure of protection. During autumn 1955, the population of eastern Algeria became more deeply involved in ALN insurgency as a result. Finally, on an international level, the operation signified a key victory because the Algerian question would, for the first time, be inscribed onto the agenda of the UN General Assembly debates scheduled for 30 September, in defiance of loud French official objections.32 From that year onwards, the Algerian question would be debated every year on the floor of the UN General Assembly. It should be noted that whilst this operation can be perceived as a symbolic victory and a strategic turning point, it was far from being unanimously accepted as such within the ranks of the FLN-​ALN. First of all, in organizing a mass uprising, Zighoud Youssef violated the rules laid down by Hocine Aït Ahmed in his 1948 report. The leader of Zone 1, Bachir Chihani, decried the action as a suicidal operation in view of the repression it unleashed and the wider escalation of violence it provoked. The fact that the attack targeted European civilians also drew criticism. At the Soummam Congress in August 1956, Zighoud Youssef would be strongly reprimanded for attacking civilians, for provoking massive repression against the surrounding population, and for acting alone without consulting the FLN leadership. Looking back, it seems evident that the years 1954–​1955 marked the ALN’s rise to power. It managed to establish itself throughout the north of the territory. But to become a successful insurgency, the ALN required tighter organization and coordinated national action.

1956–​1957: The ALN Apogee The Soummam Congress culminated on 20 August 1956, a year to the day after the Constantine massacres. It was the first attempt to codify the ALN’s organizational structure (and would 29 Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN, 281. 30 

Djerbal, ‘Le 20 aout dans le Nord-​Constantinois. L’évènement et sa portée’. Daho Djerbal, ‘Le 20 aout 1955, matrice des combats à venir’, Les journaux de guerre, 5 (2018). 32 Merdaci, Constantine au cœur, 58. 31 

408   Saphia Arezki similarly delineate the political structures of the FLN, a topic that falls outside the scope of this chapter). A common ALN organizational pattern was laid down, prefiguring the formation of a ‘modern’ army.33 The six operational zones, which had been established at the outbreak of the war, became wilayas, in addition to an Autonomous Algiers Zone (French acronym, ZAA). These wilayas were themselves subdivided into smaller zones (mintaqa), which were, in turn, divided into regions (nahiyya), within which there were district sectors (qism). At the head of each district was a committee of three people: the military commander (RM), the intelligence liaison officer (RLR), and the political commissioner (CP), each of whom was placed under the authority of a single civil-​military commander (RCM). This structure broadly replicated the internal hierarchy of the OS. Each organizational level had its own ranks, the most important being that of colonel, a rank given to the head of each wilaya. This decision did not go uncontested. Aside from the hierarchical structure, the introduction of ranks introduced a distinction between civilian and military personnel that had not existed until then. Prior to the Soummam Congress, the fighters were typically described as armed militants. Henceforth, ALN units were also organized into battalions called katiba, which were themselves subdivided. These were the operational units responsible for launching attacks and ambushes on the ground. During the Soummam meeting, the possibility of mounting violent operations in cities was also raised, probably because the attack on Thebes Street (see below) in the Casbah neighborhood of Algiers had only happened some ten days earlier, leaving a deep impression on people’s minds. The idea of responding to the terrorism of European settler ultras with Algerian nationalist terrorism began to take shape. 1956 was in this sense a key year. Aside from marking the ALN’s transition to a formal military organization, the year would also see the first attacks mounted by large units of about thirty men and sometimes more. Finally, connections were at last made between the wilayas. Fighting throughout the year was incessant, and the ALN increasingly held the initiative. French army intelligence assessments struck a pessimistic tone: The increasing pace of attacks (about ten assassinations a day), the establishment of a solid political framework (village militias, political committees, clandestine courts, secret tax collectors, etc.), the aggressiveness of rebel gangs that are mainly looking for sources of weapons, the extensive infiltration of our own North African troop units, the unusual scale of some sabotage (a 100-​metre metal bridge was destroyed in the Nemours [Ghazaouet] region) reflects a marked worsening of the situation in these regions and may give rise to fears of localized uprisings where the rural masses may be driven to violence by the existence of a political infrastructure.34 This assessment reflected deepening French fears of a new mass uprising similar to that of 20 August 1955. The development of the FLN’s political-​administrative organization throughout the country heightened French official anxiety that the movement was exerting a tighter grip on local populations, which might lead, in turn, to more widespread violence.

The final months of 1956 and the first weeks of 1957 marked the highpoint of the ALN’s actions. According to another French military evaluation, ‘The number of these actions—​ attacks, ambushes, assaults, sabotage—​recorded by the French army, which were running at only 200 per month in spring 1955, reached 1000 in December, rising to 2624 in March 1956, 33  On the construction of the Algerian army, see: Saphia Arezki, De l’ALN à l’ANP, la construction de l’armée algérienne, 1954–​1991 (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2022). 34  Report of the French army cited by Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN, 291.

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    409 2924 in October, 3069 in December and peaking at 3988 in January 1957. But the monthly average for 1957 (2074) was already lower than that of 1956 (2537)’.35 The intensity of its rural operations having markedly increased, it was also at this time that the scope of ALN operations spread from the countryside to Algeria’s urban centres. Although urban terrorism began as early as 1955, such actions were, at this early stage, essentially spontaneous since, as we have seen, military action was not yet coordinated throughout the country. From mid-​1956 onwards, ALN activities developed more widely, nowhere more so than in Algiers. After having established itself in the countryside where most of the fighting took place, the ALN hoped to expand into urban centres, its presumption being that, if the cities also became spaces of insurrectionary violence, a general insurgency would finally take shape. Added to this expectation was the reasoning that higher-​profile operations might register a strong impact on the international stage. From 1956 bomb-​manufacturing networks were organized, explosive materials having been covertly imported from Morocco. While most initial attacks were usually conducted with firearms, the number of bombings in public places began to rise. At the start of the year, one of the FLN leaders, Abane Ramdane, who had long opposed attacks on civilians, changed his position, citing the fate of FLN detainees by way of justification: ‘if the French government guillotined those sentenced to death, terrible reprisals would fall on the European civilian population’.36 Thus, Abane Ramdane not only threatened the French State with reprisals if it carried out its threatened executions of Algerian prisoners on death row, but shifted responsibility for this widening of violence against civilians to the French colonial authorities. Although the Governor had power of reprieve, on 19 June 1956 the first two Algerian death row prisoners, Ahmed Zabana and Abdelkader Ferradj, were guillotined, causing fury among the Algerian population. These executions marked a turning point in the escalation of urban violence. Several attacks followed. According to official statistics, the monthly death toll from terrorism almost tripled: twenty-​six dead and wounded in May and seventy-​four in June. European retaliatory attacks would then hit Algerian districts, such as on 10 August 1956, when a bomb exploded on Thebes Street in the densely populated Algiers Casbah. The high death toll, estimated at about sixty, caused further revulsion amongst Algerians and, in turn, reinforced the willingness among FLN leaders to target civilians.37 In response, the FLN-​ALN mounted several attacks. The best known such operations were the bombings of two cafés, the Milk Bar and the Cafeteria, each of them frequented by Europeans. Conducted by two women,38 Zohra Drif and Samia Lakhdari, these two actions killed four people and wounded dozens more on 30 September 1956. After this point attacks became almost a daily occurrence. Fear and suspicion of Muslim residents gripped the European population, the war having been made viscerally real to Algeria’s urban settlers for the first time. In October 1956, Abane Ramdane rehearsed what was now a familiar FLN line in the party newspaper El Moudjahid: ‘Thus, with the current phase of struggle, we are 35 Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN, 295.

36  Guy Pervillé, ‘Le terrorisme urbain dans la guerre d’Algérie’ (Montpellier conference presentation, May 2000) [available online]. 37  Nedjib Sidi Moussa, ‘L’implantation du FLN à Alger’, Les journaux de guerre, 15 (2018). 38  Women played a very important role in the Battle of Algiers; according to historian Mohammed Harbi, ‘without them, urban terrorism would not have had the same intensity’. See: Harbi, Le FLN, mirage et réalité, 198.

410   Saphia Arezki entering a period of general insecurity, a prelude to the general insurrection that will forever rid us of French colonialism’.39 Facing the multiplication of attacks and determined to restore order in the capital, French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, leader of a Socialist-​led ‘Republican Front’ coalition, instructed Robert Lacoste, the Algerian Resident Minister (head of the colonial administration), to entrust full civil and military powers to the army, in the person of General Jacques Massu, commander of the 10th Parachute Division. Massu’s appointment heralded the beginning of the so-​called battle of Algiers. The so-​called battle was, in fact, a huge policing operation, which lasted for some ten months between January and October 1957, during which thousands were tortured and thousands more murdered and ‘disappeared’.40 Eager to demonstrate the broad base of its popular support, in January 1957 the FLN had called for an eight-​day general strike. This was intended to mark the end of a period characterized by numerous attacks and was timed to coincide with the opening of the next session of the UN General Assembly. This strike sought to demonstrate peacefully the Algerian people’s solidarity with the FLN, thereby proving that the movement was the only valid negotiating partner should Mollet’s long-​promised peace talks ever materialize. The ALN lost its strategic advantage soon afterwards, however. The general strike call gave Massu’s command the pretext to saturate the Algerian capital with troops, the prelude to dismantling the city’s FLN-​ALN networks. At the end of February, Larbi Ben M’hidi, one of the original FLN’s historic leaders, was arrested. He was murdered in army custody in early March. Confronted with such severe repression, the FLN executive, the CCE, was forced to flee Algerian territory, a landmark decision that opened the way to a division between the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ struggle between the nationalist movement’s political and military leaderships.41 The FLN’s organizational structures in Algiers were systematically uncovered and targeted, forcing those activists who managed to escape arrest to withdraw pell-​mell to the maquis as best they could. Militarily, the battle of Algiers was a defeat for the FLN-​ALN. The capital’s military organization was broken up, and many of its key organizers were arrested and imprisoned (including Yacef Saadi and Zohra Drif) or killed (among them, Larbi Ben M’hidi and Ali la Pointe). However, at the international and diplomatic levels, the strike movement launched by the FLN paid off. The Algerian question was again inscribed on the agenda of the UN General Assembly, which adopted Resolution 1012 on 15 February 1957: The General Assembly, Having heard the statements made by various delegations and discussed Algeria, Having regard to the situation in Algeria which is causing much suffering and loss of human lives, Expresses the hope that, in a spirit of co-​operation, a peaceful, democratic and just solution will be found, through appropriate means, in conformity with the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.42

39 

Sidi Moussa, ‘L’implantation du FLN à Alger’. For details, see: http://​100​0aut​res.org/​. 41  The Coordination and Implementation Committee (CCE) was the Executive Body of the FLN established at the Soummam Congress in July 1956. 42  Resolutions Adopted by The General Assembly During Its Eleventh Session, available online at https://​www.un.org/​docume​nts/​ga/​res/​11/​are​s11.html. 40 

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    411 The start of 1957 was thus marked by a military defeat with profound consequences for the future, which was offset by significant advances at the international level with the adoption by the United Nations of Resolution 1012 calling for a ‘peaceful, democratic and just solution’. It was not until December 1957, however, that concrete initiatives emerged via the UN. A General Assembly resolution was then adopted, which recommended the opening of talks with the FLN, indicating that these could be conducted with Tunisia and Morocco acting as mediators. 1957 was thus a pivotal year in terms of insurrectional struggle. The attempt to extend the uprising to urban centres failed in the face of a sustained French clampdown, but city populations confronting the daily experience of severe military repression came out more strongly in support of the FLN-​ALN. At the international level, decisive early progress was also being made. Meanwhile, as the battle of Algiers ground on, the ALN’s strategic position deteriorated further over the summer of 1957. The CCE recommended the implementation of a major military offensive, but its outcome amounted to little more than a few localized attacks. From a peak of nearly 20,000 fighters, the ALN went into steep numerical decline. 1957 was the year in which the attrition rate suffered by the ALN was highest. French military intelligence assessments recorded some 33,500 fighters lost. Arms became so difficult to obtain that some insurgents chose to avoid combat, even sometimes burying their weapons. The chief of wilaya III, Colonel Amirouche, gave the following warning to his men in September 1957: ‘Any warrant officer who does not carry out at least three ambushes per month will be severely punished. Any aspirant not participating in at least three ambushes will be demoted’.43 This order underscored the deterioration in the military situation to the point that senior commanders felt it necessary to threaten combatants with sanctions unless they carried out attacks against French targets. The construction of fortified fences along the Algeria–​Morocco and Algeria–​Tunisia borders only made matters worse, isolating ALN units inside Algeria from essential supplies, sanctuary, and, increasingly, political influence, across Algeria’s land frontiers. The maquis were heading towards inexorable decline whilst on the other side of these borders a real army was being prepared, one that would redirect ALN strategy.

1958–​1962: The Decline of the Interior and the Rise of the Border Army Two elements explain the decline of the interior maquis: the construction of electrified fences and the so-​called Challe offensive launched in 1959. These new elements forced the ALN to focus its efforts on weapons supply and evasion tactics for maquis units, which, more than ever, faced a struggle to survive. In March 1956, Morocco and Tunisia obtained their independence. The ALN then set up fixed bases in the border districts of both countries. Tunisia, a transit point for weapons from the Middle East via Libya, became the ALN’s principal sanctuary base. In Morocco,

43 

Quoted/​cited by Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN, 295.

412   Saphia Arezki meanwhile, the ALN established itself in the border towns of Oujda and Nador, receiving arms shipments brought into the country by sea. The French army, aware of the porosity of the borders and the problems that this caused, began in June 1956 to erect a network of barbed wire fencing along the Moroccan border in the west. The Pedron line, named after the general who commanded the Oran army corps, aimed to block cross-​border infiltration of weapons and reinforcements to the maquis. In a similar vein, the following year saw the construction of the Morice Line on Algeria’s eastern frontier with Tunisia, named after the Minister of Defence who sponsored its creation. In October 1958, this electrified fence was backed by a second line: the Challe line, named after the new commander-​in-​chief of the French military forces in Algeria, Maurice Challe, successor to General Raoul Salan. These barriers ‘consisted of two, at some points even three, parallel lines of barbed wire fencing interspersed with manned block houses and a radar surveillance system installed by radar specialists of the army engineers’.44 These electrified barriers isolated the maquis in Algeria, preventing the supply of weapons and blocking the arrival of new recruits. The strategic importance of these defences explains why most ALN troops were concentrated at the frontiers from 1957 onwards and why these regions saw the heaviest armed encounters for the remainder of the war. Having isolated the ALN’s interior forces through the construction of these fences, the Challe Plan, which began in 1959, envisaged a series of major search-​and-​destroy operations, the aim being to shrink the ALN’s fighting capacity once and for all. A series of coordinated regional offensives, central elements of the Challe Plan, included Operation Couronne (Crown) in Oranie, which reduced ALN manpower in western Algeria by approximately 50%, alongside major seizures of ALN weapons and a large proportion of its communications equipment. The action dealt a huge blow to moudjahidin fighting capability. Operation Couronne was not alone: all wilayas were affected by similar operations, which forced the ALN to sub-​divide its units so that they could move more quickly but less visibly. In wilaya II, a directive reminded the fighters that ‘during the period of these operations, it is forbidden to engage militarily [with the French army] except in cases of force majeure’.45 Retreating ALN fighters took to isolated rural highlands once more. French operations to reconquer rebel-​held territory meanwhile decimated ALN structures within individual wilayas, the management of which was only partially restored. On the eve of the Challe offensive, the ALN could field about 120 katibas, each of 100 to 120 men; two years later it had only thirty-​five, typically with between forty and 100 men in their ranks. Large-​scale assaults such as those that had been feasible during the early years of the war were now impossible. According to some estimates, there were only 8,000 fighters still operating within Algeria by mid-​1960.46 The inexorable attrition of the ALN’s internal maquis was, however, matched by the enhancement of the strength and fighting capacity of the troops stationed beyond Algeria’s land frontiers. Not surprisingly, the focus of strategic attention shifted to these limitrophe areas where fighting became concentrated in the war’s latter stages. To illustrate the point, the final section of this chapter focuses on one battle in particular, the so-​called battle of the borders, also known as the battle of Souk-​Ahras. 44 

Thomas, ‘Policing Algeria’s Borders’, 89. Cited by Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN, 302. 46 Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN, 304. 45 

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    413

The Battle of the Borders Following the construction of the western and eastern border fences, several battles took place in proximity to them, although principally along the eastern frontier with Tunisia where Algerian troop strength was greatest. Preliminary articles from the 1990s studied these battles but focused on their French protagonists.47 The aim of this section is to look at those on the other side, using the testimonies of Algerian combatants who took part in order to show that this kind of historical material can be a precious source, shedding light on a history of the Algerian War ‘from below’.48 More precisely, this section focuses on a particular engagement, the battle of Souk-​Ahras, which took place in early 1958 and which was in reality a connected sequence of skirmishes and ambushes. Algerian insurgents took the initiative in launching the battle of the borders in January 1958, attempting to breach the fence defences in order to infiltrate troops to reinforce the interior ALN. Between 8 December 1957 and 5 January 1958, twenty-​four successful crossings were conducted, allowing the entry of approximately 2,000 men.49 The ensuing battle along this section of the Algeria–​Tunisia frontier continued until the month of May. Articles dealing with the issue of border engagements make reference to this battle, Charles Robert Ageron writing ‘that military authors sometimes consider it the most important of the Algerian war’.50 Yet none mention what appear to be its beginnings. To better understand the genesis of this battle, two sources are indispensable: the memoirs of Tahar Zbiri, which describe the origin of the first attacks by ALN fighters against the French army, and the testimony of Mohamed Maarfia, which is reproduced by Khaled Nezzar in his Récits de Combats.51 On 11 January 1958, Tahar Zbiri and his men, nearly 300 in all, ambushed a company of the 23rd Infantry Regiment stationed near the Tunisian border. Zbiri recorded that ‘the French army was not only making life impossible for Algerian refugees on the borders, but it was looting their property . . . Peoples’ complaints against the French raids, against the injustice and repression they faced were numerous’. Stating that it was necessary to put an end to what he described as ‘the barbarism of the French’, he went on to explain that, ‘after having thought carefully about the question, [he] took the serious decision to attack the garrison’. According to this testimony, this attack was therefore carried out in reaction to the predations of the 47 Thomas, ‘Policing Algeria’s Borders 1956–​ 1960’; General Jean Delmas, ‘Évolution générale des barrages frontaliers en Algérie. La bataille des frontières’, Revue internationale militaire (1997), 55–​68; Ageron, Charles-​Robert Ageron, ‘Un versant de la guerre d’Algérie: la bataille des frontières (1956–​1962)’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (April–​June 1999), 348–​359; Guy Pervillé, ‘La ligne Morice en Algérie, 1956–​1962’, Panoramiques, 67, 2ème trimestre (2004), online publication. 48  Khaled Nezzar, Récits de combats: guerre de libération nationale 1958–​1962 (Algiers: Chihab, 2002), 214; Zbiri, Mémoires, 365; Chadli Bendjedid, Mémoires, tome 1: 1929–​1979 (Algiers: Casbah édition, 2012), 332. 49  Ageron, ‘Un versant de la guerre d’Algérie’. 50 Ibid. 51  Tahar Zbiri participated in the war’s first actions on 1 November 1954 and was one of the few fighters who managed to cross the electrified frontier defences in 1960. After independence, he became Chief of Staff of the Army before mounting an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow President Houari Boumediene in December 1967.

414   Saphia Arezki French army. Although it is questionable whether living conditions of the local population really triggered this attack, the fact that the author singles out this contributory factor demonstrates once again the enduring attention within ALN strategy to issues of allegiance, or at least to the need to secure popular compliance. Three ALN units took part. One consisted of fighters concentrated in forested mountainous terrain where they could concentrate in strength as French troops passed through. According to Tahar Zbiri, this attack, which he calls the battle of Jebel Ouasta, cost the lives of more than ten French soldiers (sources differ about the actual number of French victims). This engagement deserves close attention for several reasons: on the one hand, because it occurred ten days before the date usually thought to mark the beginning of the battle of Souk-​Ahras—​namely, 21 January 1958. According to Mohamed Maarfia, the earlier attack was ‘the main trigger element of the Battle of Souk Ahras’. On the other hand, Zbiri’s account is significant because of the repercussions of this battle on the international scene. Crucially, it was in reprisal for the series of ALN attacks mounted against them in January, as well as for ALN success in shooting down a military aircraft on 30 January, that the French army launched its infamous bombardment of the Tunisian border settlement of Sakiet Sidi Youssef on 8 February, invoking what it claimed was a legitimate right of pursuit against these earlier ALN incursions. The French army accused the Tunisian government of openly supporting the ALN fighters and even of having participated in the 11 January operation through the involvement of its national guard. Thus, on the morning of 8 February, French air force bombs rained down on the Tunisian border village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, killing nearly seventy people, among them schoolchildren. This event produced widespread revulsion and unprecedented unequivocal condemnation of French actions, accelerating the conflict’s internationalization. A final factor elucidated by Tahar Zbiri (and confirmed by other combatants who did not take part in this battle) illuminates an aspect hitherto ignored in the articles already mentioned: the matter of four French army prisoners (or possibly five, although it is thought that one prisoner was probably dead).52 The issue of prisoners, their legal status, and their right to treatment under the Geneva Conventions as ‘Prisoners of War’ was highly politicized. Tahar Zbiri says relatively little about them; he just relates that he ensured that the French soldiers in question received medical attention.53 However, Raphaëlle Branche’s work provides more insight into the detention of these French troops. The men held by Zbiri’s forces were visited by International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) representatives and used for FLN propaganda, a stark contrast being drawn between the humane treatment they received at a time when France’s image was gravely damaged internationally following the deadly attack on Sakiet Sidi Youssef. A report by a German journalist in Paris Match showed them in good health and writing letters to their families. ‘The report showed an organized [Algerian] army, respecting its prisoners’. The episode confirms how adept the ALN had become at mobilizing international opinion as part of its broader strategy to discredit France and garner transnational support. Fighting continued along the Algerian–​Tunisian frontier over subsequent weeks. ALN troops again tried to enter Algerian territory to supply the maquis with weapons and

52  53 

Abderrezak Bouhara, Les viviers de la libération (Algiers: Casbah, 2001). Raphaëlle Branche, Prisonniers du FLN (Paris: Payot, 2014), 148.

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    415 fighters. The skirmishing climaxed in a larger encounter at the end of April in the Souk-​ Ahras region. ALN units deployed along the Morice Line joined forces in Tunisia in an effort to infiltrate several hundred men in a single night along the entire length of the fence. The aim was to saturate the French defences with multiple simultaneous incursions, allowing as many fighters as possible to secure entry to Algeria. The operation was launched during the night of 28–​29 April. Hundreds of insurgents took part. Tightly commanded, they were previously trained in the cross-​border bases in Morocco and Tunisia, as well as in other Middle Eastern states. One detachment made it through, crossing the fence south of the Souk-​Ahras sector. While the crossings at the end of April were successful, the numerous engagements that took place between January and May took a heavy toll on the ALN. It remains difficult though to provide an accurate numerical assessment because the available data is so variable. Estimates suggest that the scale of these losses ran to several thousand. There were no military encounters of such magnitude during the rest of the Algerian War. Admittedly, ALN troops continued to launch attacks on the electrified and land-​mined borders in order to pin down as many French troops as possible, thereby relieving the pressure on the internal maquis.54 Again, it is difficult to assess the impact of this strategy in practice. It seems clear that internal maquis bands were already ground down both by the Challe offensive and by the establishment of forced resettlement camps (camps de regroupement), which drastically reduced the opportunities to secure essential support from the civilian population. In addition to that, attempts at cross-​border infiltration were gradually wound down because they were so costly in terms of lives lost. Occasional victories were achieved, such as those of Tahar Zbiri, who would go on to direct independent Algeria’s Armée Nationale Populaire (ANP) General Staff until 1967. Also successful was a later incursion in 1960 led by Ahmed Benchérif, who would head the country’s gendarmerie after independence between 1962 and 1977. But fighting the battle of the frontiers was unsustainable even so. It should be noted here that all future senior officers of the ANP mention these events in their memoirs, although their actions do not appear to have been that critical to ALN strategy. Indeed, after 1962, these men would face accusations of having had little or no involvement in the struggle, thanks to their secure position in Tunisian territory. Evoking these frontier battles therefore signifies a means to legitimize their role a posteriori by demonstrating their active participation in the fight for independence.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to demonstrate that it makes no sense to talk in terms of a single ALN insurgent strategy. The strategies and tactics adopted were numerous and varied in time and space, especially during the first two years of the Algerian War. The initial ALN priority was to penetrate the territory in depth in order to build deeper contacts with the Algerian population and mobilize its support, popular backing being absolutely pivotal if the ALN was to survive and increase its fighting capacity. This objective took time, but 54 

At their peak, there were 80,000 troops stationed along the frontier lines.

416   Saphia Arezki gradually, by widening popular involvement in anti-​French activity, the ALN succeeded in bringing more people round to its side. From 1956 onwards, two major events guided the ALN’s strategy in depth. First was the material coordination between the different regions of Algeria achieved in the wake of the Soummam Congress. Second, the struggle then moved to urban centres where terrorist actions were launched. The onus placed on symbolic and spectacular actions was intended to draw international attention to the conflict. This marked an important element of continuity. Throughout the war, while strategies in the field were evolving and changing, the importance attached to global opinion remained constant. Indeed, as historian Matthew Connelly shows, the FLN’s victory was more political, and more precisely diplomatic, than military, since there was never to be an ‘Algerian Dien Bien Phu’.55 Furthermore, following the Battle of Algiers, the ALN’s military capability faced greater attrition, and went into sharp decline. The FLN-​ALN organization inside Algiers was systematically dismantled over the course of 1957. ALN forces then redeployed to sanctuary bases across Algeria’s land borders, where they found themselves increasingly isolated from the interior following French military construction of the fortified frontier barrages. Paradoxically, these same border fences would also protect the ALN units located just outside Algeria, allowing them to organize themselves along the lines of a more conventional modern army. Thus, from 1960, along the Tunisian border, a real army was being built under the leadership of the future Head of State Houari Boumediene (president between 1965 and 1978). This, the kernel of the future ANP, was the army that would seize power in the summer of 1962.

Select Bibliography Arezki, Saphia, De l’ALN à l’ANP, la construction de l’armée algérienne, 1954–​1991 (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2022). Branche, Raphaëlle, Prisonniers du FLN (Paris: Payot, 2014). Connelly, Matthew, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Harbi, Mohammed, Le FLN, mirage et réalité. Des origines à la prise de pouvoir (1945–​1962) (Paris: Edition Jeune Afrique, 1980). Jauffret, Jean-​ Charles (ed.), Des hommes et des femmes en guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Autrement, 2003). Jauffret, Jean-​Charles, and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), Militaires et guérilla dans la guerre d’Algérie (Brussels: Complexe, 2001). Merdaci, Abdelmadjid, Constantine au cœur de l’histoire, Novembre 1954—​novembre 1955 (Constantine: Les éditions du champ libre, 2009). Meynier, Gilbert, Histoire intérieure du FLN (Paris: Fayard, 2002). Nezzar, Khaled, Récits de combats: guerre de libération nationale 1958–​ 1962 (Algiers: Chihab, 2002). Rivet, Daniel et al., La Guerre d’Algérie au miroir des décolonisations françaises (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-​Mer, 2000)

55 Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution.

The Insurgent Strategies of the ALN    417 Thomas, Martin, ‘Colonial Violence in Algeria and the Distorted Logic of State Retribution: the Sétif uprising of 1945’, Journal of Military History, 75/​1 (2011), 125–​157. Thomas, Martin, ‘Policing Algeria’s Borders 1956–​1960: Arms Supplies, Frontier Defences and the Sakiet Affair’, War and Society 13/​1 (1995), 81–​99. Thomas, Martin, ‘Order Before Reform: The Spread of French Military Operations in Algeria, 1954–​1958’, in David Killingray and David Omissi, eds., Guardians of Empire (Manchester University Press, 1999), 198–​220. Zbiri, Tahar, Mémoires du dernier chef historique des Aurès (1929–​1962) (Algiers: ANEP, 2010).

Chapter 22

T he Aden Prot e c torat e Levies, C ou nt e r-​ Insurgency, a nd t h e L oyalist Ba rg a i n i n Sou th Arabia , 19 5 1–​1 9 5 7 Huw Bennett and Edward Burke

European powers depended upon indigenous collaboration to conquer new colonial territories and then to make their rule sustainable. As the seismic changes in global order brought about by the Second World War shifted the very basis of that rule, colonial powers were compelled to renegotiate the terms of collaboration. This chapter takes the West Aden Protectorate case to illuminate how the loyalist bargain was maintained, and why that process was so difficult. The episode shows that the colonial power in the form of the Aden and British governments, far from being master manipulators in the business of divide-​and-​rule, struggled to exercise control over a numerically insubstantial opponent. While most writing on indigenous collaboration, or loyalism, is concerned with the creation and maintenance of colonial orders in general, this chapter focuses on the implications of the relationship for violence. It centres upon the position of the local security forces, particularly the Aden Protectorate Levies (APL), as the primary intermediaries. It argues that the intensity of colonial violence towards a resistant population was diminished by the effective military tactics adopted by rebels, a growing reluctance by the APL soldiers to punish their own people, and the impotence of the only viable military alternative—​aerial bombardment. In combination, these three factors forced the civil and military authorities in Aden to halt their expansionism. However, the colonial administration in Aden was so determined to revive their offensive ‘forward policy’ that they won a bureaucratic battle to displace the Royal Air Force from controlling the local security forces, and several years later renewed the fighting in the West Aden Protectorate with British Army assistance instead.

The Aden Protectorate Levies    419

Perspectives on Collaboration, Loyalism, and Indigenous Security Forces Historians have long sought to understand the relationships between colonial rulers and their subjects, searching for the bases of the cooperation that coexisted with violent coercion. The debate has been framed around conceptions of collaboration, loyalty, indirect rule, and alliances.1 Perhaps the most influential model remains Ronald Robinson’s 1972 theory of collaboration. Robinson posited that imperial powers lacked the material resources to impose control throughout their newly acquired possessions: local collaborators proffered essential manpower and knowledge about alien societies. For indigenous elites, partnership with the invaders could be exploited to maintain or improve their own standing. The bargain struck between colonizers and collaborators implied a willingness to appreciate the wider demands placed on both parties by their constituencies—​be they metropolitan politics or indigenous societies. If either party to the bargain grew too powerful or dissatisfied, then collaboration could break down, necessitating a reconstruction on different terms and, potentially, with different participants.2 This model has been applied to contexts as diverse as the Rhodesian mining industry and the Indian Army in the First World War.3 Most colonies raised small formations of soldiers and policemen to uphold internal security, guard frontiers, and assist neighbouring colonies in an emergency.4 Military history and military sociology as sub-​disciplines have been accused of Eurocentrism.5 Though some studies concentrate on the British officer’s experience in colonial armies, a rich literature grounded in cultural and social histories has developed.6 Broadly speaking, these works address three principal concerns: recruitment, strategic logics, and the political consequences of military service. Writing on recruitment investigates the practices designed to encourage men to join up, the ideological assumptions underlying these policies, and the motivations expressed by indigenous personnel. The Indian Army after the 1857 uprising has been the case most intensively researched. Incentives included pay, healthcare provision, and opportunities for adventure.7 Timothy Stapleton’s book on colonial Zimbabwe demonstrates 1  Colin Newbury, ‘Patrons, Clients, and Empire: The Subordination of Indigenous Hierarchies in Asia and Africa’, Journal of World History, 11/​2 (2000), 227. 2 Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-​ European foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (eds.), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 117–​142. 3  Charles van Onselen, ‘The Role of Collaborators in the Rhodesian Mining Industry 1900–​ 1935’, African Affairs, 72/​289 (1973), 401–​418; George Morton Jack, ‘The Indian Army on the Western Front, 1914–​1915: A Portrait of Collaboration’, War in History, 13/​3 (2006), 329–​362. 4  David Killingray and David Omissi, Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–​1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 9–​11. 5  Tarak Barkawi, ‘Culture and Combat in the Colonies: The Indian Army in the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 41/​2 (2006), 325. 6  On British officers: Anthony Clayton and David Killingray, Khaki and Blue: Military and Police in British Colonial Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Center for International Studies, 1989). 7 David Omissi, The Sepoy and the Raj: The Indian Army, 1860–​ 1940 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994).

420    Huw Bennett and Edward Burke the equal importance of the prestige endowed on those who enlisted.8 Seeking predictably loyal armed servants, colonial authorities believed certain ethnic groups possessed special military attributes. In India the so-​called martial races included Nepalese Gurkhas, Punjabi Sikhs, and Muslims from the northern frontier.9 Heather Streets shows that these racial constructs owed as much to discourses within the imperial metropole as to organizational cultures in armies.10 Writing on colonial armies in wartime tends to derive either from a war and society perspective, or from military analysis. The latter approach sometimes descends into the listing of practical lessons for contemporary officers, ignoring historical context; the former can show scant interest in the fighting so intrinsic to war.11 The sharpest insights come from methodologies that integrate the two. Michelle Moyd’s penetrating work on German East Africa notes the surprising paucity of research on colonial soldiers at war. She argues that askaris in the locally raised Schutztruppe derived their war-​fighting methods in part from precolonial raiding practices.12 Tarak Barkawi’s book on the Indian and British armies in the Second World War places greater emphasis upon cohesion fostered among troops in battle. Pre-​war martial race ideas disintegrated as the Indian Army expanded rapidly in new demographic directions.13 Military effectiveness in wartime was maintained by three mechanisms. The welfare system upheld morale by giving soldiers rest, recreation, and medical care. Organizing personnel on regimental lines offered distinctive identities, often rooted in home locations, as a basis for pride, recognition, and competition with outsiders. Finally, military discipline, including possible punishment by courts-​martial, compelled obedience and thus task completion.14 Recent work on the British empire in the Second World War aims to break through national ‘bubbles’, analysing the integration of colonial armies into the higher strategic direction of the war. It also pays considerable attention to the final major strand in the historiography, an interest in the political implications of wartime service for colonial societies in the subsequent peace, or indeed into the post-​colonial era.15 Scholars have shown how

8 Timothy Stapleton, African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1923–​ 80 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2011), 16. 9  Gavin Rand and Kim A. Wagner, ‘Recruiting the “Martial Races”: Identities and Military Service in Colonial India’, Patterns of Prejudice, 46/​3–​4 (2012), 232–​254. 10  Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–​ 1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 11  Robert M. Cassidy, ‘The Long Small War: Indigenous Forces for Counterinsurgency’, Parameters (2006), 47–​62. 12  Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014), 15, 66. 13 Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 51, 159–​160. 14  Rob Johnson, True to Their Salt: Indigenous Personnel in Western Armed Forces (London: Hurst & Company, 2017), 18. 15  Ashley Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006); Douglas E. Delaney, The Imperial Army Project: Britain and the Land Forces of the Dominions and India, 1902–​1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Jonathan Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies in the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

The Aden Protectorate Levies    421 veterans leveraged their experiences to ensure their position in the post-​war political elite.16 In other cases, such as Greek Cypriots who informed for the British during the 1950s Cyprus conflict, or the harkis who fought alongside the French military in Algeria’s independence war, the consequences could be dire: death or, at best, permanent exile.17 Africanists such as Moyd and Stapleton employ lengthy periodizations to underscore continuities in regional military cultures, which transcend the exclusively colonial domain. However, such sensitivity to local factors can hinder an appreciation for transnational influences on colonial militaries. As the European empires reeled from the shock to white prestige inflicted by the Second World War, security forces recruited from indigenous populations appeared to add greater legitimacy to the colonial state. Militias, auxiliaries, and other irregular organizations grew in prominence alongside older regular units.18 David Anderson and Daniel Branch argue that the local forces engaged by the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese after 1945 shared sufficient similarities to be considered a coherent category, that of loyalists. In navigating the conjunctures between parochial circumstances and global, Cold War imperatives, these formations all fought for colonial regimes ‘in the face of the nationalist challenge’. The fundamental question, therefore, is how loyalist bargains were struck and, equally, why they broke down.19 Daniel Branch’s study on Kenya in the 1950s highlights just how important loyalism is for understanding decolonization violence. The Kenyan government’s expansion and employment of the Home Guard on population-​control tasks, principally under punitive compulsory villagization, drove deep divisions into Kikuyu society, intensifying the conflict’s violence.20 Political science studies on ‘pro-​government militias’ confirm Branch’s finding in associating them with longer and more intense civil wars.21 This chapter’s contribution is to suggest that loyalism could also function to restrain violence. It is argued the local military forces in Aden renegotiated their loyalist bargain mid-​ way through an insurgency. What is crucial here is not just that indigenous intermediaries exercised agency, but that the imperial patron listened, and responded. Most studies on colonial militaries or auxiliaries pay attention to failures in loyalty, especially mutinies. However, they generally do so with reference to military effectiveness at the tactical level. This is because in the conflicts most deeply researched, the world wars, military disloyalty did not

16 Timothy Parsons, The African Rank-​ and-​ file: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–​1964 (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); David Killingray, Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War (Oxford: James Currey, 2010); Myles Osborne, Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya: Loyalty and Martial Race among the Kamba, c. 1800 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 17 David French, ‘Toads and Informers: How the British Treated their Collaborators during the Cyprus Emergency, 1955–​9’, The International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 71–​88; Martin Evans, ‘Reprisal Violence and the Harkis in French Algeria, 1962’, The International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 89–​106. 18  Sibylle Scheipers, ‘Irregular Auxiliaries after 1945’, The International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 24. 19  David M. Anderson and Daniel Branch, ‘Allies at the End of Empire—​Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–​76’, The International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 2, 9. 20 Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 21 Luke Abbs, Govinda Clayton, and Andrew Thomson, ‘The Ties That Bind: Ethnicity, Pro-​ Government Militia, and the Dynamics of Violence in Civil War’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Online First version (12 November 2019), https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​00220​0271​9883​684

422    Huw Bennett and Edward Burke have further-​reaching strategic consequences.22 Micro-​political events had micro-​political effects. But in irregular wars, soldiers’ actions may directly influence high politics.23 Yigal Levy’s concept of ‘control from within’ is helpful here. It is ‘the intentional action taken by soldiers—​when tasked to implement politically sensitive missions with which they disagree—​in an attempt to affect the political performance of the military’.24 Only in a few instances has the agency of colonial soldiers or auxiliaries been analysed to explain the strategic consequences during wartime.25 In the decade following the events examined here, British power in the Middle East profoundly diminished, in part due to the shifting loyalties of armed allies.

British Strategy and Loyalist Security Forces in Aden Aden served Britain’s extensive global interests. After the UK and the sea lines of communication, the Middle East represented Britain’s third grand strategic priority. War plans written from 1948 expected a Soviet offensive to surge rapidly through Europe. The allied counter-​ stroke was to come from bombers in Britain, the Middle East, and Okinawa. However, the expansion of the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons capability, combined with demands from Egypt for the handover of strategic air bases, meant that the 1948 plans lost credibility.26 The 1952 Global Strategy Paper shifted defence policy towards nuclear deterrence. Subversion, propaganda, and insurgency were also identified as future trends. The paper confirmed the Middle East as fundamentally important to national security. In 1953 the wisdom of relying on Egyptian bases shrank further, when the USSR detonated a hydrogen bomb. Singularly valuable assets could be destroyed at a stroke. Dispersed facilities now became more important—​not least the port and airbase at Aden. In the same year, a protracted British attempt to get the US to formally commit to regional defence failed. President Eisenhower preferred a ‘Northern Tier’ of defence cooperation along the Zagros mountain range.27 Plans to defend the Northern Tier expected the Royal Air Force (RAF) to strike Soviet forces and bring in reinforcements.28 By the mid-​1950s, Khormaksar was the busiest RAF airfield in the 22  Kaushik Roy, ‘Military Loyalty in the Colonial Context: A Case Study of the Indian Army during World War II’, Journal of Military History, 73/​2 (2009), 497–​529. 23  Chiara Ruffa, Christopher Dandeker, and Pascal Vennesson, ‘Soldiers Drawn into Politics? The Influence of Tactics in Civil-​military Relations’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 24/​2 (2013), 322–​334. 24 Yagil Levy, ‘Control from Within: How Soldiers Control the Military’, European Journal of International Relations, 23/​1 (2017), 194. 25 Roel Frakking, ‘Collaboration is a Very Delicate Concept’: Alliance-​ formation and the Colonial Defence of Indonesia and Malaysia, 1945–​1957, PhD dissertation, European University Institute, 2017; David M. Anderson, ‘Making the Loyalist Bargain: Surrender, Amnesty and Impunity in Kenya’s Decolonization, 1952–​63’, The International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 48–​70. 26  Michael J. Cohen, Fighting World War Three from the Middle East: Allied Contingency Plans, 1945–​ 1954 (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 90, 124, 132, 161–​163. 27 David Devereux, The Formulation of British Defence Policy Towards the Middle East, 1948–​ 56 (London: Macmillan, 1990), 65, 114, 141, 153, 174. 28  Michael J. Cohen, Strategy and Politics in the Middle East, 1954–​1960: Defending the Northern Tier (London: Frank Cass, 2005), 34, 38.

The Aden Protectorate Levies    423 world, averaging 5,000 air movements a month.29 The erosion of British power in the Middle East necessitated reliance upon regional allies. Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and the UK held the Baghdad Pact’s first meeting in November 1955 to formalize the Northern Tier.30 British strategists had no choice but to consider the needs of allies, including colonial militaries. The British East India Company seized Aden in January 1839. From 1937 until 1963, Aden was a Crown Colony. Outside the port, British authority was diffuse. Around 800,000 people lived in the Aden Protectorates. Initially informal arrangements held sway between the governor and the tribes. Gradually the position became regularized in protective treaties, which prohibited the tribal ruler from concluding agreements with foreign powers. The Protectorates served as a buffer to block any Ottoman threat to Aden, and, after 1918, to protect against incursions from the Yemeni Imamate.31 Organized into Eastern and Western Protectorates, the former roughly four times the size of the latter but with a much smaller population, a resident advisor sat atop them to protect British interests.32 In 1934 the Aden government signed an agreement with Imam Yahya, the ruler of Yemen, in which Yahya consented, with some minor adjustments, to remove his forces from positions to the south of the former Anglo-​Ottoman frontier. However, the treaty did not amount to formal recognition, but rather a cessation of direct hostilities ‘pending a final decision’ on the border question.33 From 1937 the British started signing new advisory treaties granting the Aden government jurisdiction over domestic policy, most significantly the ability to topple state rulers. The last treaty with a major ruler, the thirtieth, was signed in April 1954.34 The Yemeni government protested that British expansion in the Western Protectorate violated the 1934 treaty.35 The death of Imam Yahya in 1948 and his succession by his son Ahmad led to renewed tensions on the Yemeni-​Protectorate frontier. In December 1952, Ahmad kidnapped the Sultan of Upper Yafa, a ruler under British protection, condemning him as ‘a foolish and tiresome fellow’. In response to increasing evidence of Yemeni intervention, the British authorities launched a series of covert operations to try and destabilize Yemen. Paying tribal leaders to mount raids over the border was the favoured method.36 Governors Sir Tom Hickinbotham (1951–​1956) and Sir William Luce (1956–​1960) advocated extending British influence in the Protectorates to reinforce Aden’s safety, known as the ‘forward policy’. Though the Foreign Office was not convinced, Prime Ministers Churchill, Eden, and Macmillan were content to allow the Colonial Office and its governors considerable latitude in local affairs. In January 1953, Hickinbotham sent forces to Nisab to compel the 29 

Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, ‘Aden Revisited’, Air Power, 6/​3 (1959), 180.

30 Cohen, Fighting World War Three from the Middle East, 189.

31  Simon C. Smith, ‘Rulers and Residents: British Relations with the Aden Protectorate, 1937–​ 59’, Middle Eastern Studies, 31/​3 (1995), 509–​523. 32 Spencer Mawby, ‘Britain’s Last Imperial Frontier: The Aden Protectorates, 1952–​ 59’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29/​2 (2001), 79. 33  Foreign Office memorandum, ‘British Policy in the Middle East’, 27 March 1944, cited in David Lee, Flight from The Middle East (London: Ministry of Defence, Air Historical Branch, 1978), 14. 34  British Library [hereafter BL]: IOR/​R/​20/​B/​2351: Aden intelligence summary for the period ending 31 March 1952. 35  Spencer Mawby, British Policy in Aden and the Protectorates 1955–​67 (London: Routledge, 2006), 29. 36  Spencer Mawby, ‘The Clandestine Defence of Empire: British Special Operations in Yemen 1951–​ 64’, Intelligence and National Security, 17/​3 (2002), 110–​113.

424    Huw Bennett and Edward Burke Upper Aulaqi Sultan to sign an advisory treaty, which he did. The Sultan was paid a stipend for his loyalty, and further forces arrived to pacify the area, in particular the Rabizi tribe, who opposed the construction of a road through their territory in the Wadi Hatib. Spencer Mawby argues that the offensive forward policy, of which this was but one example, was driven by colonial officials in Aden and the Protectorates, and met little opposition from London.37 We accept this analysis, but present a new argument about the policy’s adjustment, based on the reaction to problems with loyalty in the local security forces. The character of these security forces, and the ways that they were perceived by those who sought to exploit them, must be established before the conflict in the Upper Aulaqi Sultanate is discussed. Seeing these formations from the indigenous soldier’s perspective is almost impossible: in 1959 only about 20% were apparently literate, and oral histories are today ruled out by the ongoing Yemen conflict. A careful reading of colonial accounts is therefore essential. From 1928 an RAF officer, the Air Officer Commanding (AOC), commanded all British forces in Aden and the Protectorates, reflecting the reliance on air policing to secure the Middle East empire.38 Air policing involved tactics ranging from the dropping of warning leaflets to the bombing of ‘proscribed areas’, to killing the inhabitants and their livestock, and targeting crops and wells.39 In 1955 three RAF Regiment squadrons (143 airmen and six officers per squadron) were located in Aden. The Regiment was an auxiliary land component of the air force. Two squadrons were tasked with securing Aden Colony; the other was held in reserve, including for operations in the Protectorates.40 The rulers of the Protectorate states possessed their own Tribal Guards, and the Protectorate authorities commanded the Government Guards, a paramilitary police force.41 The Aden Protectorate Levies existed on a permanent basis from 1928 and were modelled on the Indian Army. The force’s main tasks were to secure the area immediately surrounding Aden, to mount ‘flag marches’ (a show of force to local rulers), and punitive expeditions against tribes in the Protectorates, normally accompanied by RAF bombing sorties.42 An operation in Dathina in early 1947 was later described as a typical mission. An assistant political adviser was shot at by tribesmen. Two squadrons of APL, reinforced by British armoured cars and a mortar section, were sent to destroy tribal fortifications and levy a fine on those considered responsible. RAF aircraft flew sorties over the area. Such an exemplary use of force was widely believed to have the desired effect—​fines were paid, hostages handed over—​ even if the APL often had to repeat these actions against the same tribes.43 In the 1950s, the

37 

Mawby, ‘Britain’s Last Imperial Frontier’, 76, 80–​81, 85–​86.

38 Mawby, British Policy in Aden and the Protectorates, 15. 39 

James Corum, ‘Air Power in Small Wars, 1913 to the Present’, in John Andreas Olsen (ed.), A History of Air Warfare (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2010), 330–​333. 40 TNA: CAB 129/​ 75/​47: Colonial Office memorandum, ‘Aden Protectorate: Relations with the Yemen’, 21 June 1955; Kingsley Oliver, Through Adversity: The History of the Royal Air Force Regiment (Rushden: Forces & Corporate Publishing Ltd, 1997), 7–​10. 41  The Government Guards had a strength of 914 all ranks including three British officers in mid-​ 1955. BL: IOR: R/​20/​B/​2475: Minute by Chief Secretary, Aden Government to the Governor, 13 June 1955; TNA: CAB 129/​75/​47: Colonial Office memorandum, ‘Aden Protectorate: Relations with the Yemen’, 21 June 1955. 42  Brigadier J.D. Lunt, ‘The Evolution of an Army—​I’, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, 110/​638 (1965), 158–​165. 43 Lee, Flight from The Middle East, 16–​17.

The Aden Protectorate Levies    425 APL’s duties expanded to helping guard the newly built air stations and ordnance depots in Aden and the Protectorates.44 By 1955 the APL comprised 1,193 Arab-​other ranks, forty-​ eight Arab officers, thirty-​four RAF Regiment officers, and 100 RAF Regiment other ranks. The Force Commander had his own headquarters and commanded two tactical wings, each made up of three squadrons (approximately 200 all ranks per squadron), and a hospital. APL squadrons were equipped with the same weaponry as RAF Regiment squadrons, but the latter had more mortars and Bren light machine guns.45 Locally recruited officers held a governor’s commission, but British officers retained all key administrative and operational posts. The first commanding officer, Lieutenant-​Colonel Morice Lake, favoured the Aulaqi and Audhali tribes. Lake and his successors admired these tribes’ perceived bellicosity, sense of honour, and independence.46 A British partiality towards ‘up-​country’ levies persisted throughout the APL’s history. The bulk of recruits came from tribes that lived in the mountainous regions of the Western Protectorate, especially the Aulaqi and Audhali.47 APL squadrons were recruited along tribal lines, the logic being that, if a dispute or rebellion broke out, then levies from particular squadrons could be excluded from carrying out punitive operations in their own territories. The APL’s official historian tried to present the levies as apolitical, by virtue of having stopped recruiting whole sections from one tribe in 1952, and promoting soldiers without regard to tribal politics.48 In reality this policy was not fully implemented. In 1955 the Force Commander reported that squadrons were still organized on a ‘tribal basis’.49 An officer who served with the APL from 1957 to 1959 recalled that some squadrons drew their recruits almost exclusively from one tribe, while others were mixed.50 Soldiers entered the APL with a sponsor, often a tribal ruler, who had the new recruit on his ‘face’ for the whole of his service. In cases of desertion members of a soldier’s family could be imprisoned until he handed himself and/​or his rifle over to the government.51 Levies, or gundi, were thought by their officers to be ‘unsophisticated’ and politically ignorant. Their Muslim faith was seen as a source of stability, preventing the usual soldierly problems over drink, though it did mean operations were best avoided during Ramadan.52 Gundi apparently valued officers with a sense of humour and formed a loyal bond with charismatic individuals, not simply obeying someone because they held a particular rank.53 Loyalty was 44 Cliff Lord and David Birtles, The Armed Forces of Aden and the Protectorate, 1839–​ 1967 (Solihull: Helion, 2011), 20. 45 TNA: CAB 129/​ 75/​47: Colonial Office memorandum, ‘Aden Protectorate: Relations with the Yemen’, 21 June 1955; Lord and Birtles, The Armed Forces of Aden, 24. 46  Lord Belhaven, The Uneven Road (London: John Murray, 1955), 78. 47  BL: IOR: R/​20/​B/​2475: Memorandum by Brigadier P.G. Boxhall, Commander, Aden Protectorate Levies, 8 February 1960; Frank Edwards, The Gaysh: A History of the Aden Protectorate Levies 1927–​61 and the Federal Regular Army of South Arabia 1961–​67 (Solihull: Helion and Company, 2004), 72; Lord and Birtles, The Armed Forces of Aden, 25. 48 Edwards, The Gaysh, 72, 74–​75. 49 TNA: AIR 2/​ 13564: Notes for Air Commodore on the Aden Protectorate Levies by the Force Commander, Group Captain A.J. Douglas, 20 June 1955. 50 Imperial War Museum Sound Archive: Bertram William Sydney Boucher-​ Myers, catalogue number 10785. 51  BL: IOR: R/​20/​B/​2475: Minute written for Chief Secretary by [illegible], 8 August 1955. 52 Edwards, The Gaysh, 44, 103, 114. 53  Squadron Leader C.M.G. Watson, ‘Field Intelligence Officers in the Aden Protectorate’, British Army Review, 9 (1959), 64.

426    Huw Bennett and Edward Burke interwoven with organizational, local, and international politics. In December 1947, the APL was mobilized during Arab–​Jewish violence in the Crater district of Aden following the United Nations vote to partition Palestine. Jewish leaders complained that levies had murdered civilians instead of protecting them. The AOC temporarily stood down the APL and confiscated their ammunition, replacing them with men from the Royal Navy. The British Army officer then commanding the APL, Lieutenant-​Colonel G.W. Jones, believed his levies had been wrongly punished.54 An official investigation into the riots disagreed, concluding that excessive force had been used. The APL had killed at least thirty-​one Adeni Jews, despite their not doing anything ‘unlawful . . . except possibly, in some instances, breaking curfew’.55 In the wake of the Aden riots, the government took steps to improve discipline. A closer relationship with a reinforced RAF Regiment was the solution. The RAF Regiment was given control over the APL and began training the levies. A few British Army officers who had served with the APL transferred to the RAF Regiment. Most left, including Lieutenant-​ Colonel Jones.56 The colonial authorities concluded that prolonged periods spent by the rural soldiers in towns, especially Aden, could lead to their politicization through exposure to subversive, anti-​colonial sentiments. Keeping the APL busy in the Protectorates would help to avoid future incidents of (nationalist) indiscipline in the future.57 At this stage, the filtration of modern ideological forces into the remote rural hinterland did not seem to be a pressing concern. In the second half of the 1950s defence, colonial and foreign policymakers became increasingly worried about anti-​colonial propaganda pouring forth from Egypt across the Middle East.58 But officials in Aden had yet to fully believe their locally recruited forces could be capable of absorbing anything more than local political influences.

Stretching the Loyalist Bargain in the Upper Aulaqi Sultanate Advisory treaties appeared to give the Aden government a mandate in the Protectorates. But such treaties ignored the lack of authority exercised by certain rulers. The Upper Aulaqi Sultan held little sway beyond his capital, Nisab. The Aden government’s most resilient opponent during the forward policy was the Shamsi section of the Rabizi tribe, whose territory lay in the mountainous region of Hatib in the Upper Aulaqi Sultanate. Their uprising, which began in 1953 with some support from the wider Ahl Rabiz and other local tribes, such as the Dammani, was in response to a decision by Aden to construct a road through the Wadi Hatib. This road derived directly from the forward policy, extending communications near the border with Yemen. The Hatib is one of the few fertile valleys and constant water sources 54 Edwards, The Gaysh, 93–​95. 55 

John Willis, ‘Colonial Policing in Aden, 1937–​1967’, The Arab Studies Journal, 5/​1 (1997), 70.

56 Edwards, The Gaysh, 89, 108; Lord and Birtles, The Armed Forces of Aden, 20. 57 Edwards,

The Gaysh, 99; BL: IOR: R/​20/​B/​2475: Aden Intelligence Centre memorandum, ‘Local Security Forces, Western Aden Protectorate Desertions’, 16 June 1956. 58 Robert McNamara, Britain, Nasser and the Balance of Power in the Middle East, 1952–​ 1967 (London: Frank Cass, 2003).

The Aden Protectorate Levies    427 in the region.59 The fort at Robat, the principal village in the wadi, was controlled by the leader of the Shamsi, Salim Ali Ma’wer.60 The Rabizi were not consulted in advance about the construction of the road. Now they feared losing all the customs revenue from the caravans that passed through the valley.61 Ali Ma’wer appealed to the Yemeni government for help, receiving small consignments of weapons and ammunition, including rifles. The road gangs in the Hatib were attacked in October and November 1953, and construction was suspended.62 On 17 November the Aden Protectorate Levies moved into the Wadi Hatib from two directions.63 The North Force of ‘Operation Nothing Venture’ quickly sustained casualties from Ali Ma’wer’s snipers. Pinned down, they called in bombing sorties by the RAF’s 8 Squadron to limited effect. The APL commander agreed a ceasefire with Ali Ma’wer in order to negotiate a political settlement. News of the ceasefire either never reached the APL South Force, or they decided to ignore it. On 6 December the South Force reached the area near Robat. They proceeded to Ali Ma’wer’s house, killing the Rabizi chief ’s aunt in the ensuing engagement. The AOC in Aden, Air Vice-​Marshal Sidney Bufton, later noted that ‘disciplinary action was taken against the pilot concerned’.64 Ali Ma’wer was convinced she had been murdered deliberately and claimed his properties had been looted.65 He asked for £15 and 300 rounds of ammunition in compensation, and an admission of guilt from the government, in return for peace.66 The request was refused. In the government’s view, admitting culpability implied an intolerable ‘loss of face’.67 Instead, a fort was constructed at Robat to allow the road-​building to continue. To add to Shamsi grievances, the Government Guards compound at Robat was built on the site of Ali Ma’wer’s own fort, which was ripped down and plundered for construction materials.68 Rabizi attacks on government forces increased during the spring of 1954. Getting to Robat Fort was extremely hazardous. Few convoys escaped without suffering casualties from snipers, despite preliminary and coterminous aerial bombardments. In a common colonial logic, fear of appearing weak, and thus becoming vulnerable to wider rebellion, inspired an urge to repress. The RAF and Government House in Aden thus formulated plans for ‘Operation West Bord’, replete with long prison sentences and hefty fines for those in revolt.69 In keeping with traditional air force practice, livestock, houses, and wells were targeted, in one of 8 Squadron’s biggest ever offensives. In June their Vampire jets discharged 316 500lb bombs, 350 60lb rockets, and 9,000 rounds of ammunition in the Wadi Hatib, a remarkable

59 Kennedy Trevaskis, The Deluge: A Personal View of The End of Empire in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 202. 60 Edwards, The Gaysh, 121. 61 Trevaskis, The Deluge, 219. 62 Ibid. 63  TNA: AIR 28/​1224: Khormaksar Operations Record Book, entry for November 1953. 64  BL: IOR/​R/​20/​B/​2667: Letter from the Air Officer Commanding, Aden, to the Deputy Governor, Aden, 1 July 1954; BL: IOR/​R/​20/​C/​2349: Operation Niggard, 1960: Political Background. 65  BL: IOR R/​20/​C/​2349: Letter from Salim Ali Ma’wer to British Agent, Western Aden Protectorate [hereafter BAWAP], September 1960. 66 Edwards, The Gaysh, 123. 67  BL: IOR R/​20/​C/​2349: Memorandum from BAWAP to the Chief Secretary, Aden, 18 May 1955. 68  BL: IOR/​R/​20/​B/​2667: Minute, 5 May 1954. 69  BL: IOR/​R/​20/​B/​2667: Memorandum from BAWAP to the Chief Secretary, Aden, 4 June 1954.

428    Huw Bennett and Edward Burke quantity in a sparsely populated area.70 Bufton’s scepticism lingered; he informed colonial officials that ‘ . . . the area was one of the most unpromising on which to exert air pressure’.71 As the offensive went on the APL began to fracture. An entire squadron, ‘influenced by anti-​British propaganda’, had to be withdrawn to Aden from Nisab, having laid down their arms at the end of May. The political adviser in Nisab believed that two other squadrons could not be relied upon and were also influenced by propaganda aimed against the ‘English coloniser’. Thirty-​eight soldiers were placed under close arrest; a large number of these were from Dathina state, bordering the Upper Aulaqi Sultanate.72 The men complained of the conditions of their service, including conducting operations during Ramadan, but colonial officials warned of the ‘adverse influence emanating from the suq at Nisab’, claiming the men’s objections were of a political nature.73 In November an attempt by the APL Force Commander to ‘use tribal squadron in own area [Wadi Hatib] resulted in twenty-​four desertions en route’.74 As well as causing disquiet within the APL, West Bord energized rather than dampened the Rabizi insurgency. In July Rabizi rebels launched fifty-​four attacks on the fort at Robat. Government Guard posts in Nisab (including the political officer’s house) and other locations outside the Wadi Hatib were also attacked.75 Others in the region were encouraged by such attacks; the Shamsi received recruits and assistance from different sections of Ahl Rabiz, as well as other tribes in the Sultanate.76 Reporting from Nisab in May 1955, political adviser George Henderson related that between October 1954 and April 1955 there had been 142 separate attacks on Robat Fort. He criticized the APL and their RAF Regiment officers, noting that significant desertions—​ eleven during a single operation—​indicated poor leadership and morale.77 On 18 May 1955, Kennedy Trevaskis, the most senior colonial official in the Western Protectorate, reported that 180 APL soldiers and Government Guards had deserted in the previous six months, including significant numbers from tribes outside the Aulaqi territories. Many APL soldiers were uneasy about their role enforcing the colonial writ within new areas.78 A report by the Air Ministry underlined the importance of the APL and the risk to its future efficacy, warning that their morale was rapidly crumbling as the campaign against the Rabizi escalated. APL wastage rates were reaching unsustainable levels—​706 levies serving in January 1954 were no longer available for service in June 1955.79 Studies on desertion in civil war propose various reasons why soldiers might risk the severe punishments normally reserved for such a betrayal. Action by ‘early movers’ can

70 Lee, Flight from The Middle East, 143. 71 

BL: IOR/​R/​20/​B/​2667: Notes of Meeting Held at Secretariat on 26 June 1954. BL: IOR/​R/​20/​C/​2281: Letter from Political Adviser, Nisab to BAWAP, 20 May 1954. 73  BL: IOR/​R/​20/​C/​2281: Aden Protectorate Levies: deserters, 1954. 74 TNA: AIR 2/​ 13564: Notes for Air Commodore on the Aden Protectorate Levies by the Force Commander, Group Captain A.J. Douglas, 20 June 1955. 75 Lee, Flight from The Middle East, 146; BL: IOR/​R/​20/​B/​2667: Air Action—​Robat Fort, c.May 1954. 76  BL: IOR/​R/​20/​B/​2667: Memorandum from BAWAP to Chief Secretary, Aden, 23 August 1954. 77  BL: IOR/​R/​20/​C/​2349: Memorandum from Assistant Adviser North East Area, Nisab to BAWAP, 20 February 1955. 78  BL: IOR R/​20/​C/​2349: Memorandum from BAWAP to the Chief Secretary, Aden, 18 May 1955. 79 TNA: AIR 2/​ 13564: Notes for Air Commodore on the Aden Protectorate Levies by the Force Commander, Group Captain A.J. Douglas, 20 June 1955; Report by D.Ops on Visit to Aden and Headquarters, Middle East Air Force to Study Current Operational Problems in the Aden Protectorate. 72 

The Aden Protectorate Levies    429 persuade others to follow, having seen that a sense of grievance is shared, and that the dangers involved in deserting can be surmounted. Soldiers from similar localities are arguably more likely to desert as their units are more socially homogenous.80 Opportunities to desert are clearly important in settings where fear compels soldiers to calculate how best to ensure their own personal safety.81 The depth of norms of cooperation within military units are also likely to affect whether desertion occurs.82 Unlike some recent studies, we cannot interview the APL deserters to find out what motivated them. Several contributory factors have already been mentioned: propaganda directed at the APL, kinship ties with those being attacked in the Protectorate, and poor leadership by British officers. Disentangling these from each other to identify a causal hierarchy is impossible on the existing evidence. Indeed, relying too heavily on British testimony about inter-​group relations within the Aden Protectorate Levies, groups they perhaps understood poorly, could be misleading. What is clear is that the Aden government, RAF, and British Army manipulated the presentation of the ‘true reasons’ for the desertions, to achieve their bureaucratic political objectives. Impugning the RAF’s leadership, Trevaskis believed the ‘dangerously subversive’ APL should be recalled to Aden, a suggestion rejected by their commander, Group Captain Douglas, and Air Vice-​Marshal Bufton.83 However, Douglas acknowledged in an internal air force report that he could only rely on four of his six APL squadrons to undertake operations in Wadi Hatib.84 Colonial officials, quick to point the finger at the APL and the RAF Regiment, were more restrained in their criticism of the Government Guards—​under the command of the Aden government—​who suffered more desertions relative to their size than the APL.85 Whilst a gradual falling off in local security force numbers could be ignored by those who fervently believed in the forward policy, a single dramatic event proved less easy to explain away.

Reconfiguring the Loyalist Bargain On 15 June an APL convoy led by Wing Commander Rodney Marshall, comprising 108 officers and men, set out to relieve the fort at Robat. Marshall received ‘maximum air support’ from six Venom aircraft in continuous pairs, and prearranged air strikes by three Vampire and four Venom aircraft on suspected rebel positions in the surrounding mountains.86 The convoy arrived in Robat around midday, unloaded supplies, and prepared for

80 Kevin Koehler, Dorothy Ohl, and Holger Albrecht, ‘From Disaffection to Desertion: How Networks Facilitate Military Insubordination in Civil Conflict’, Comparative Politics, 48/​4 (2016), 443. 81  Holger Albrecht and Kevin Koehler, ‘Going on the Run: What Drives Military Desertion in Civil War?’, Security Studies, 27/​2 (2018), 181. 82 Theodore McLauchlin, ‘Desertion and Collective Action in Civil Wars’, International Studies Quarterly, 59/​4 (2015), 669–​679. 83 Trevaskis, The Deluge, 225. 84 TNA: AIR 2/​ 13564: Notes for Air Commodore on the Aden Protectorate Levies by the Force Commander, Group Captain A.J. Douglas, 20 June 1955. 85  BL: IOR: R/​20/​B/​2475: Minute from Chief Secretary, Aden, to the Governor, 13 June 1955. 86  TNA: CAB 129/​75/​48: Note by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 20 June 1955.

430    Huw Bennett and Edward Burke the return journey that afternoon.87 Shortly after leaving the fort, Marshall and his men were ambushed. Flight Lieutenant John Lee was killed in the first moments of the well-​prepared ambush. Marshall and Mulazim Awal (First Lieutenant) Abdullah Quteibi were killed before they could evacuate the convoy from the kill zone. Five other ranks were killed and seven wounded. At a meeting at Government House on 18 June, Air Vice-​Marshal Bufton acknowledged the Rabizi rebels ‘ . . . do not appear to be afraid of air attack, against which they have learned to utilise to the full the protection afforded by the terrain’.88 APL headquarters had already concluded that picketing the mountains overhanging the Wadi Hatib during future convoy movements would require more than 700 APL levies if mountain warfare principles were to be applied. Meanwhile, morale deteriorated further. On 28 June, shortly after orders were issued for another convoy movement to Robat, another nineteen levies deserted.89 Of these, ten were from tribes from Dathina state, bordering the Upper Aulaqi to the south (in nine cases relatives of the deserters, who were believed to have fled to Yemen, were imprisoned).90 For the government in Aden, colonial prestige was a paramount consideration: a truce or peace deal with Ali Ma’wer was out of the question since two British officers had been killed.91 Attempts to contract out the punishment of the Shamsi to other tribal actors failed. The most senior branch of the Rabizi, the Hummeidi, refused a request (with financial inducements) to move into the Wadi Hatib and to garrison Robat fort.92 Nonetheless, government officials in Aden resisted a proposal by Bufton to withdraw from Robat. According to Kennedy Trevaskis, abandoning the fort under such conditions would have ‘an extremely adverse effect politically on the prestige of the Government in the protectorate as a whole’. It would also mean abandoning the road project, ‘thus conceding victory to the Yemeni policy’.93 The Air Ministry sent Air Commodore Dudley Radford to urgently assess the situation in South Arabia in the wake of the Robat ambush. Radford, a former commander of 8 Squadron at Khormaksar, rejected assertions by government ministers, echoing the views of colonial officials, that a lack of armoured cars was a critical shortcoming in the Hatib.94 Instead he concluded that ‘ . . . it is difficult to see how reinforcements could be used (armoured or otherwise) effectively . . . Only trained, indigenous guerrilla fighters can chase these tribesmen on their own ground’. Radford’s report acknowledged that the military strategy had failed and that proposed alternatives would fare no better. He was also highly critical of the performance of the Aden government in the Robat affair, concluding that ‘reconnaissance has shown that the construction of a road through this area would be barely practical and extremely

87 TNA:

AIR 2/​13564: Notes for Air Commodore on the Aden Protectorate Levies by the Force Commander, Group Captain A.J. Douglas, 20 June 1955; Edwards, The Gaysh, 129. 88  BL: IOR R/​20/​C/​2349: Note of a Meeting at Government House, 18 June 1955; TNA: WO 373/​125/​ 4: Recommendation for Award for Acting Squadron Leader A.A. Stewart. 89 Edwards, The Gaysh, 127, 129. 90  BL: IOR: R/​20/​B/​2475: Cypher from Acting Governor to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 30 June 1955; Minute for the Chief Secretary by [illegible], 10 August 1955. 91  TNA: AIR 28/​1224: Operation Order No. 11/​55, signed Group Captain J.R. Gordon-​Finlayson, 29 June 1955. 92  BL: IOR R/​20/​C/​2349: Note of a Meeting at Government House, 12 July 1955. 93  BL: IOR R/​20/​C/​2349: Rabizi Situation—​Robat Fort, Memorandum by BAWAP, 23 June 1955. 94  TNA: CO 1015/​841: Chiefs of Staff Committee. Minutes of Meeting held on 23 June 1955.

The Aden Protectorate Levies    431 costly. I doubt whether the original conception would stand searching examination’.95 An important plank of the forward policy—​the road through the Wadi Hatib—​was rotten. The advice of the RAF and the Air Ministry was unambiguous: the APL should not be sacrificed to pursue such a misguided policy. Withdrawal from Robat was required and should be implemented without delay. Air Vice-​Marshal Bufton pointed out the danger in blunt terms: ‘Robat has been our heaviest operational commitment and is the rock which threatens to destroy the strength of both Levies and Government guards . . . Robat is the worst wicket in the Protectorate and it is unwise to go on playing the Yemen on such ground’.96 Attempts by the governor to get the government in London to overrule the Air Ministry and Bufton, halting the withdrawal, were rejected.97 In Whitehall, defence policy was already making the intellectual journey towards the major review, whose results would be declared by Duncan Sandys in March 1957. The imperative was to rein in defence spending by taking a critical eye to both commitments and resources.98 Acceding to Aden’s demands over Robat when the armed forces were already stretched on operations in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus—​with tensions quickly mounting in Egypt—​was a fort too far. The operation in July 1955 to evacuate Robat was a show of force aimed at limiting a ‘loss of face’. Four APL squadrons, a Government Guards squadron, and two flights from the RAF Regiment were specially reinforced by 1st Seaforth Highlanders (minus one company), and an armoured squadron from the Life Guards.99 Shortly afterwards the empty fort was burned to the ground. Other forts in the region were also abandoned. Much of the Wadi Hatib was back in the hands of Ali Ma’wer.100 Even Kennedy Trevaskis conceded that the withdrawal from the Wadi Hatib led to a significant reduction in violence.101 With the withdrawal complete, Air Ministry officials turned to addressing other APL grievances. Both APL wings were removed from operations and given three months of rehabilitation and training. Air Vice-​ Marshal Bufton arranged for British Army reinforcements to remain in Aden until the spring of 1956, allowing for a phased APL return to operations.102 New rifles and light machine guns were distributed, and ammunition issues were increased. A new armoured car squadron (crewed by the RAF Regiment) was established as part of a third, new APL wing. A commitment was made not to send new recruits on major operations within the first year of their service and, most importantly, a planned increase in pay was expedited. Thanks to these measures and, of course, the withdrawal from the Wadi Hatib, morale and discipline slowly recovered in late 1955 and early 1956.103 As described by Levy’s ‘control from within’ concept, the APL soldiers had brought 95  TNA: AIR 2/​13564: Report by D.Ops on Visit to Aden and Headquarters, Middle East Air Force to Study Current Operational Problems in the Aden Protectorate. 96  TNA: CO 1015/​841: Signal from HQ B.F. Aden to HQ MEAF, 24 June 1955. 97  TNA: CO 1015/​841: Extract from Report by C.I.G.S. on visits to Turkey and Cyprus, 4–​11 July 1955. 98 David French, Army, Empire, and Cold War: The British Army and Military Policy, 1945–​ 1971 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 148–​171. 99  BL: IOR R/​20/​C/​2349: Operation Niggard, 1960: Operations. 100 BL: IOR R/​ 20/​ C/​ 2349: Memorandum from Deputy BAWAP to BAWAP, 24 October 1960; TNA: AIR 2/​ 13564: Notes for Air Commodore on the Aden Protectorate Levies by the Force Commander, Group Captain A.J. Douglas, 20 June 1955. 101  Kennedy Trevaskis, Shades of Amber: A South Arabian Episode (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 72. 102  TNA: AIR 2/​13564: Cable from Headquarters MEAF to Air Ministry, 2 October 1955. 103  TNA: AIR 2/​13564: Cable from Commander in Chief, Middle East Land Forces, to Chiefs of Staff, 24 September 1955; Lord and Birtles, The Armed Forces of Aden, 24.

432    Huw Bennett and Edward Burke a change in government policy to their satisfaction and also gained improvements in their conditions of service. While the Air Force concentrated on rebuilding the fractured loyalist bargain between levies and their officers, the Aden administration plotted a way to prevent the Air Ministry and the RAF from undermining their expansionist forward policy in the future. In this endeavour the colonial authorities skilfully manipulated long-​standing inter-​ service rivalries to their advantage. During the summer of 1955, the Aden government conspired with the War Office in London to blame RAF Regiment officers for the debacle at Robat and the problems in the APL, rather than the forward policy.104 Following his involvement in the evacuation, Major Diacre of the Life Guards received a confidential request from the War Office for ‘a report on how the RAF Regiment worked (or did not) and any other bad points that you noticed that can be used against them’. Major Diacre obliged, writing of the RAF Regiment’s ‘bad NCOs and mediocre officers’ attached to the APL—​an assessment that overlooked successive decorations for bravery and leadership, including two Military Crosses, awarded to British APL officers and NCOs during operations in the Wadi Hatib.105 Diacre’s report was instrumental in having the RAF Regiment replaced by the British Army in the Protectorates—​a reversal of the handover of 1948. The War Office request for ‘bad points’ was unorthodox, since it bypassed the normal chain of command. However, the Life Guards enjoyed a connection with the Secretary of State for War, Brigadier Antony Head, who had served from 1928 to 1946 as an officer in that regiment.106 In September 1955, an Army brigadier was appointed to take command of a new land forces headquarters in Aden. The Air Ministry hoped the appointment would be temporary and that the RAF Regiment would retain its lead role over land operations.107 Instead, the Army steadily increased its presence in South Arabia during the next five years, replacing the RAF as the service in command of the Aden Protectorate Levies in February 1957. This military opportunism was replicated by the Special Air Service in 1959, which exploited a successful mission in Oman to avoid abolition under the Sandys defence cuts.108 The Army’s build-​up in Aden and the Protectorates from 1955 offered another theatre of operations after the Anglo-​Egyptian agreement in 1954 closed bases in the Canal Zone and removed the stain of the takeover of the APL by the RAF Regiment in 1948. The Air Ministry and the RAF Regiment were out-​manoeuvred by the War Office, with assistance from the Life Guards. Blaming the RAF Regiment rather than the forward policy conveniently ignored the political reasons for the breakdown in colonial authority in the Western Protectorate. The RAF’s insistence on the withdrawal from Robat was an embarrassing admission of failure, but it had nonetheless saved the APL, the Protectorates’ most important loyalist institution, from irreparable damage.109 Instead of using the withdrawal from the

104 

TNA: CO 1015/​841: Minute from J.C. Morgan to Minister of State, 12 July 1955. Challengers and Chargers, 42; TNA: WO 373/​125/​4: Recommendation for Award for Acting Squadron Leader A.A. Stewart; TNA: WO 373/​125/​3: Recommendation for Award for Acting Squadron Leader P.E. Charlton; Edwards, The Gaysh, 113, 127. 106 Loyd, Challengers and Chargers, 42, 50. 107  TNA: AIR 2/​13564: Minute by Air Commodore J.H. Harris, HQ Middle East Air Force, 3 July 1955. 108 David French, The British Way in Counter-​ Insurgency, 1945–​1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 131. 109  BL: IOR/​R/​20/​C/​2349: Memorandum from Deputy BAWAP to BAWAP, 24 October 1960. 105 Loyd,

The Aden Protectorate Levies    433 Wadi Hatib as an opportunity to reflect on policy failure in the Protectorates, the government in London focused on exchanging one military service for another. The Army officers who replaced their RAF Regiment counterparts in the Aden Protectorate Levies from 1957 reconstructed the image of the loyalist bargain in essentially apolitical terms. Writing in the British Army Review of his experience on secondment, Lieutenant-​Colonel De Butts recounted how ‘The men are extremely cheerful and willing and once they get to know their British commander will do almost anything for him. In the conflict of loyalties between tribe and the ‘geish’ (army) the personality and leadership qualities of the British officer may well pay [sic] a decisive part’.110 The Army later pushed back into those positions given up in 1955. In October 1960 an even larger force than the one that had evacuated the fort at Robat entered the Wadi Hatib. The Shamsis reverted to the tactics they had employed five years earlier. By April 1961 the government, under regular attack, had run out of funds to build the road.111 Once again, the Rabizi steadily retook their territory. They subsequently resisted the entry of the Federal Regular Army (FRA) of South Arabia into the area in 1964. An FRA military intelligence officer later concluded that, instead of being a puppet of Yemen, Ali Ma’wer ‘ . . . would probably have been one of the first to engage any Yemeni force coming anywhere near his wadi’. Army officers came to the same conclusion as the RAF a decade earlier: the road through Wadi Hatib was not worth the price.112

Conclusion Bargains are struck and remoulded through many small gestures—​in the case of the Aden Protectorate Levies, over decades. If, as their officers supposed, the bargain depended largely upon leadership, then the multiple personal relationships cultivated within these units can be difficult to discern today. The desertions from the APL and the Government Guards in the months prior to (and in the immediate aftermath of) the Robat ambush in June 1955 stand out clearly from the remaining archival record, much of which is missing. Less dramatic expressions of discontent were also likely to have arisen: orders can be followed sharply or with a moment’s pause, rifles can be aimed a little wide of the mark. European officers often found themselves alone with their indigenous troops. Insensitivity to expressions of ‘control from within’ might be fatal. It was all very well for the Aden government and the senior Protectorate officials to demand the APL fight further into the Wadi Hatib. They did not have to live with the soldiers each day. The Upper Aulaqi case shows that further attention should be paid to the ways in which loyalist security forces might affect policy and violence during decolonization conflicts. Generally, they are supposed to have accentuated the violence. Of course, in many contexts local collaborators were deliberately deployed precisely to do the dirty work. Though the 110 Lieutenant Colonel F.M. De Butts, ‘The Aden Protectorate Levies’, British Army Review, 12 (1961), 20; Imperial War Museum Sound Archive: Bertram William Sydney Boucher-​Myers, catalogue number 10785. 111  BL: IOR R/​20/​C/​2349: Letter from Senior Assistant Adviser Eastern Area to BAWAP, 3 April 1961. 112 Edwards, The Gaysh, 129.

434    Huw Bennett and Edward Burke Aden Protectorate Levies exercised considerable political power in opposing the forward policy being rolled out into the Upper Aulaqi region, they only succeeded because rebel sniper and ambush tactics were so effective, and because the air force simply could not bomb the Rabizi into submission. These factors may have been absent in other conflicts where local security forces objected to the tasks assigned to them, thus rendering attempts to renegotiate the loyalist bargain null and void. The manner in which officials played clever Whitehall games to permit a second round of colonial expansionism also warrants broader consideration. How did rivalries between the armed forces serve to alter the dimensions of repression at the end of empire? Loyalists continued to fulfil important functions in British defence after the 1950s and, if we consider contemporary British Army reliance on recruitment from the Global South, could be said to continue still. In South Arabia, into the 1960s the loyalist bargain proceeded to be reforged over again. In April 1962 the British attempted to completely revivify their control by creating the notionally autonomous Federation of South Arabia, with its own security forces. Amidst a growing nationalist insurgency, supported by Egyptian intelligence and military personnel based in Yemen, in June 1967 a serious mutiny occurred, killing seventeen British soldiers. This incident, symbolizing the combustion of British credibility in the Middle East, is blamed on the Labour government’s announcement in 1966 that they intended to withdraw from the territory.113 What we have suggested in this chapter is that the undercurrents for disintegration within the South Arabian security forces began to swell at least eleven years beforehand. Rather than assuming people in Aden and its surrounding territories acted only within boundaries set by the British, we argue they absorbed ideas from multiple political directions and powerfully converted them into their own intended outcomes. Future research on decolonization violence must investigate further how European states were pushed out not simply by their enemies, or their own economic travails, but by the people they believed to be their loyal friends in uniform.

Select Bibliography Anderson, David M., and Daniel Branch, ‘Allies at the End of Empire—​Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–​76’, The International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 1–​13. Anderson, David M., ‘Making the Loyalist Bargain: Surrender, Amnesty and Impunity in Kenya’s Decolonization, 1952–​63’, The International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 48–​70. Branch, Daniel, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Edwards, Frank, The Gaysh: A History of the Aden Protectorate Levies 1927–​61 and the Federal Regular Army of South Arabia 1961–​67 (Solihull: Helion and Company, 2004). Frakking, Roel, ‘Collaboration is a Very Delicate Concept’: Alliance-​ formation and the Colonial Defence of Indonesia and Malaysia, 1945–​1957 (PhD thesis: European University Institute, 2017). 113  Aaron

Edwards, ‘“A Graveyard for the British”? Tactics, Military Operations, and the Paucity of Strategy in Aden, 1964–​1967’, in Robert Johnson and Timothy Clack (eds.), At the End of Military Intervention: Historical, Theoretical, and Applied Approaches to Transition, Handover, and Withdrawal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 137, 144.

The Aden Protectorate Levies    435 French, David, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 1945–​1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Killingray David, and David Omissi, Guardians of Empire: The Armed Forces of the Colonial Powers c. 1700–​1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). Levy, Yagil, ‘Control from Within: How Soldiers Control the Military’, European Journal of International Relations, 23/​1 (2017), 192–​216. Mawby, Spencer, British Policy in Aden and the Protectorates 1955–​67 (London: Routledge, 2006). Moyd, Michelle R., Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2014). Parsons, Timothy, The African Rank-​and-​file: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–​1964 (Oxford: James Currey, 1999). Robinson, Ronald, ‘Non-​European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), 117–​142. Roy, Kaushik, ‘Military Loyalty in the Colonial Context: A Case Study of the Indian Army during World War II’, Journal of Military History, 73/​2 (2009), 497–​529. Ruffa, Chiara, Christopher Dandeker, and Pascal Vennesson, ‘Soldiers Drawn into Politics? The Influence of Tactics in Civil-​military Relations’, Small Wars and Insurgencies, 24/​2 (2013), 322–​334. Scheipers, Sibylle, ‘Irregular Auxiliaries after 1945’, The International History Review, 39/​1 (2017), 14–​29.

DE V E L OP M E N T A N D P OP U L AT ION C ON T ROL

Chapter 23

Str ategic Reset t l e me nt Population Removal and Coercive Development in Late Colonial Counter-​Insurgency Moritz Feichtinger Introduction The enduring effects of forced relocation, the widespread use of this strategy in many instances of colonial repression, and the high number of people affected by it make it one of the most formative and paradigmatic elements of colonial counter-​insurgency.1 In order to incorporate the various applications of forced removal into a broader historical analysis of colonial counter-​insurgency, a definition of the phenomenon is required. The shortest and yet most comprehensive definition is this: Strategic Resettlement is an approach to anti-​guerrilla warfare that attempts to cut the insurgents from their popular base in rural areas. It is characterized by the forced removal of large segments of the civilian population into guarded encampments and villages, the formation of pro-​government militias, intense population control, economic inducements for segments of the resettled communities to support the government, and transformative interventions into the social, economic, and cultural life of the resettled populations.2 This chapter takes a closer look at some of the core functions and distinctive elements of Strategic Resettlement and discusses its predecessors. The chapter’s opening sections on forerunners focuses on the displacement of rural populations, the fortification of colonial 1 For a general overview see: Sibylle Scheipers, ‘The Use of Camps in Colonial Warfare’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 43/​4 (2015), 678–​698; Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013); Klaus Mühlhahn, ‘The Concentration Camp in Global Historical Perspective’, History Compass, 8/​6 (2010), 543–​561. 2 This definition is inspired by the one proposed by Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-​Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177.

440   Moritz Feichtinger outposts, and the recruitment of indigenous auxiliary troops. The second part of the chapter discusses the specifics of modern applications of Strategic Resettlement in the second half of the twentieth century. It deals particularly with the intertwining of physical control and psychological manipulation through disciplining and the introduction of new ways of habitation, production, and day-​to-​day living. To do so, the planning and implementation of economic transformation and interventions in the socio-​economic and domestic life of resettled communities are investigated. Finally, the chapter explores the long-​term effects of large-​scale resettlement campaigns, dwelling on how the people affected remember and recount their experiences.

Displacement in Colonial Conquest and Warfare Colonial troops fighting indigenous resistance often forcibly removed populations as part of the scorched-​earth strategies pursued during colonial conquest and after. While colonial armies exploited their technological superiority, anti-​colonial resistance movements had to take advantage of their knowledge of the terrain and the support of the civilian population. If the occupiers were unable to capture or kill the resistance fighters, they often took drastic measures against the entire population. Mass removal, systematic destruction of livelihoods, and collective punishments for local populations were a standard procedure in colonial conquest and counter-​insurgency. In addition, colonial conquest often involved the appropriation of land and natural resources. When settlers grabbed the most fertile areas of newly conquered regions, the expulsion of the indigenous population was a prerequisite.3 In order to create space for colonial settlement projects, colonial regimes relocated the displaced population to designated territories and reservations. Expulsion and forced resettlement were thus invariably both the condition of colonial conquest and a means of breaking indigenous resistance to it, a process euphemistically called ‘pacification’.4 Colonialists and conquerors either accepted massive death rates when removing resistant populations or even intended to empty the land of its indigenous population in order to make it ready for colonization. Historical examples of such genocidal policies of expulsion are the so-​called

3  Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen (eds.), Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005); Anthony Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2008); Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8/​4 (2006), 387–​409. 4 Aidan Forth and Jonas Kreienbaum, ‘A Shared Malady: Concentration Camps in the British, Spanish, American and German Empires’, Journal of Modern European History, 14/​2 (2016), 245–​267; Andreas Stucki, ‘“Frequent Deaths”: The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps Reconsidered, 1868–​1974’, Journal of Genocide Research, 20/​3 (2018), 305–​326; Iain R. Smith and Andreas Stucki, ‘The Colonial Development of Concentration Camps (1868–​ 1902)’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39/​3 (2011), 417–​437.

Strategic Resettlement   441 Indian Removal in North America in the 1830s and 1840s5 and the expulsion of the Herero and Nama from their lands between 1904 and 1907 by German troops in South West Africa.6 However, the first colonial concentration camps to which civilians were resettled for counter-​insurgency purposes were set up by Spanish troops in Cuba during the wars in 1869 and 1898. The Spanish counter-​insurgency strategy in Cuba included the physical separation of the civilian population and insurgents as its objective, a scorched-​earth tactic as its medium, and high death rates from hunger and disease as its result.7 Up to 170,000 Cubans lost their lives between 1895 and 1898 alone, many as a result of confinement in ill-​ equipped camps. Despite an international outcry and highly publicized condemnation in the United States and elsewhere of the Spanish policy and the brutality of the army’s leader, General Valeriano Wyler, the Spanish counter-​insurgency approach inspired subsequent applications of this strategy in the early twentieth century, including, ironically, the resettlement policy pursued during the American campaign in the Philippines from 1899 to 1903. In order to limit the guerrillas’ range of movement, US troops established free-​fire zones and resettled local inhabitants into camps, where they were also to be ‘modernized’ and ‘educated’. Poor sanitary conditions and the resultant spread of infectious diseases led to high death rates among the camps’ populations.8 Destruction of livelihoods is one of Strategic Resettlement’s core elements. Colonial armies confiscated the food supplies of rural communities as they relocated them. In addition, they often destroyed houses, farmlands, and crops to prevent guerrillas from finding shelter or supplies after evacuating the residents. Burning down settlements, granaries, and fields also had a signal effect far beyond the affected regions, and colonial counter-​insurgents thus hoped such actions would act as a deterrent for other communities. The protracted conquest of Algerian territory from 1830 to 1870 offers a particularly drastic example of the rationale and effects of scorched-​earth tactics. The French colonial army torched settlements and devastated entire regions in order to break local resistance and to send warnings to neighbouring communities.9 Such destruction of people’s economic base had long-​term consequences beyond temporary uprisings. Soil could become barren, the area uninhabitable, and local life irretrievably destroyed. In other cases, the devastation of remote homesteads was the prelude to the establishment and expansion of fortified settlements for auxiliary troops and loyal segments of the population.

5  Claudia

Haake, The State, Removal and Indigenous Peoples in the United States and Mexico, 1620–​ 2000 (Routledge, 2007); Jason Edward Black, American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016); Mark Stewart, The Indian Removal Act: Forced Relocation (Minneapolis: Compass Point Books, 2007). 6  Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2006); Jonas Kreienbaum, A Sad Fiasco: Colonial Concentration Camps in Southern Africa, 1900–​1908 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2019). 7  Andreas Stucki, Las Guerras de Cuba. Violencia y campos de concentracion (1868–​1898) (Madrid: La Esfera de los libros, 2017). 8  Stuart Creighton Miller, ‘Benevolent Assimilation’: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–​ 1903 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982); Paul A. Kramer, ‘Race-​Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-​American War as Race War’, Diplomatic History, 30/​2 (2006), 169–​210. 9  William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–​1902 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011).

442   Moritz Feichtinger The formation of local militias is another integral part of Strategic Resettlement. Colonial armies and regimes have always depended on alliances with local elites and on military support from auxiliary troops who were familiar with both the local terrain and its inhabitants. For some segments of colonized societies, on the other hand, partial collaboration with the colonial regime presented opportunities to gain advantages over rival groups or to establish trade privileges. Last but not least, service in colonial armies or administrations provided access to technology and knowledge. In the context of Strategic Resettlement, indigenous auxiliary troops mainly served as watch and ward groups. But the auxiliaries themselves needed protection against attacks and ambushes by guerrilla fighters. For this reason, Strategic Resettlement often included the establishment of fortified ‘self-​ defence villages’ to house militia members and their families. The blockhouse system from the South African War is the paradigmatic example. Parallel to the forced resettlement of insurgent Boer communities and large parts of the black civilian population, the British established a system of interconnected forts for colonial soldiers and allied auxiliary troops.10 The ambiguity of this phenomenon thus lies in the fact that resettlement camps and villages could be used to monitor and punish, but also to protect the resettled population. Indeed, one and the same resettlement site could serve both of these purposes consecutively or even be composed of loyalist groups and resistant communities in different compounds at the same time.

Population-​C entric Counter-​Insurgency and Strategic Resettlement Imperial powers resorted to Strategic Resettlement again in the conflicts over decolonization in the second half of the twentieth century and in proxy conflicts of the global Cold War, but this time on a much larger scale.11 The British resettled half a million rural civilians to some 400 ‘New Villages’ and moved 600,000 workers to closely surveyed ‘labour regroupments’ during the communist uprising in Malaya from 1948 to 1953.12 The British military transferred the strategy to Eastern Africa where they applied it in their fight against the anti-​colonial Mau Mau uprising in Central Kenya between 1952 and 1960. In this instance, just over one million civilians were resettled into 800 ‘Emergency villages’.13 Drawing

10 Elisabeth

Van Heyningen, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-​Boer War: A Social History (Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2013). 11 Christian Gerlach, ‘Sustainable Violence. Mass Resettlement, Strategic Villages, and Militias in Anti-​Guerrilla Warfare’, in Richard Bessel and Claudia B. Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 361–​393. 12  Karl Hack, ‘Detention, Deportation and Resettlement: British Counterinsurgency and Malaya’s Rural Chinese, 1948–​60’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 43/​4 (2015), 611–​640. 13  Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, (London: Pimlico, 2005), 233–​ 274; Alfonso Castro and Kreg Ettenger, ‘Counterinsurgency and Socioeconomic Change: The Mau Mau War in Kirinyaga, Kenya’, Research in Economic Anthropology, 15 (1994), 63–​101; Moritz Feichtinger, ‘“A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (February 2016), 45–​72.

Strategic Resettlement   443 from their experience in Indochina in the years from 1945 to 1954, the French army meanwhile resettled more than two million rural civilians into some 2,000 guarded ‘camps de regroupement’ in Algeria from 1954 to 1962.14 Inspired by the British and French examples, the Portuguese regime also used Strategic Resettlement in its attempt to curb anti-​colonial uprisings in its African colonies, resettling around one million people in Angola and another million in Mozambique.15 Displacement and resettlement of rural civilians was also an integral part of the counter-​insurgency strategy of the Southern Vietnamese government and its American ally in the long wars over Vietnam. Inspired by the Malayan example and following the advice of British counter-​insurgency experts, the South Vietnamese government sought to contain the influence of the Viet Cong in the countryside by setting up vast resettlement schemes which included self-​defence militias, land-​redistribution, and investment in local infrastructure.16 A first attempt at what was dubbed the ‘agroville’ programme failed, as did the later ‘Strategic Hamlet Programme’, which received American funding and support. Each was undone by the Saigon administration’s endemic corruption and by the flawed preparation of the policy.17 In many aspects late colonial resettlement policy mimicked practices developed in the nineteenth century such as the imposition of restricted areas, the creation of local militias, and the incentives promised for cooperation with the government, typically land and income. But late colonial resettlement programmes exceeded their nineteenth-​ century predecessors in terms of ambition, scale, and sophistication. Modern applications of Strategic Resettlement integrated approaches like community development, psychological warfare, economic aid, and social engineering into a comprehensive policy that had severe and long-​lasting consequences for the populations affected by it. These dimensions are examined in more detail in the following paragraphs.

14 Charles-​ Robert Ageron, ‘Une Dimension de la Guerre d’Algérie: Les “Regroupements” de Populations’, in Jean-​Charles Jauffret, Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), Militaires et Guérilla dans la Guerre d’Algérie (Brussels: André Versaille, 2001), 327–​362; Fabien Sacriste, ‘Les “regroupements” de la guerre d’Algérie, des “villages stratégiques”?’, Critique internationale, 79/​2 (2018), 25–​43; Michel Cornaton, Les camps de regroupement de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). 15 Stucki, ‘  “Frequent Deaths” ’; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Rural (in)Securities: Resettlement, Control and “Development” in Angola (1960s–​ 1970s)’, Comparativ, 27/​ 2 (2018), 75–​ 97; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘A Robust Operation: Resettling, Security, and Development in Late Colonial Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Itinerario, 44/​ 1 (2020), 55–​ 79; Brendan F. Jundanian, ‘Resettlement Programs: Counterinsurgency in Mozambique’, Comparative Politics, 6/​ 4 (1974), 519–​ 40; Andreas Zeman, ‘From Slave Trade to War and Tourism. The Many Faces of a Small Village in Africa, c. 1880–​ 2016’, unpublished PhD dissertaion, University of Bern, 2019, 221–​262. 16 Peter Busch, ‘Killing the “Vietcong”: The British Advisory Mission and the Strategic Hamlet Programme’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 25/​1 (March 2002), 135–​162. 17  Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 151–​207; Louis A. Wiesner, Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-​Nam, 1954–​1975 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 25–​38; Richard A. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 20–​23; Geoffrey C. Stewart, Vietnam’s Lost Revolution: Ngô Đình Diệm’s Failure to Build an Independent Nation, 1955–​1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 192–​232.

444   Moritz Feichtinger

People’s War and Population-​C entric Counter-​Insurgency The years after 1945 witnessed a massive politicization, popularization, and professionalization of guerrilla tactics. Some European militaries had resorted to guerrilla tactics themselves in their fight against the Axis powers during the Second World War. Particularly salient was the jungle warfare training of anti-​Japanese groups by British and French colonial officers in South East Asia.18 Even more significantly, the ultimately successful application and immediate theorization of guerrilla tactics by the Chinese communist movement and its appeal to various anti-​colonial revolutionaries had led to the emergence of a coherent and modern doctrine: Maoist-​type People’s War. This doctrine was a highly politicized variant of guerrilla warfare, which emphasized a cohesive political leadership and broad popular support and thus went far beyond mere tactical advice to local insurgents.19 Western politicians were alarmed by the appeal of this new doctrine, because it seemed to follow an almost universal pattern: a revolt of the poor and the peasants in impoverished and remote rural areas on the one side versus the rich, the elites, and the cities held by incumbent regimes on the other side. Colonial militaries after 1945 tried to counter the doctrine of People’s War by significantly politicizing their own counter-​ insurgency strategies. They developed the concept of ‘revolutionary warfare’ or ‘population-​centric counter-​insurgency’ as an antidote to the People’s War and, arguably, Strategic Resettlement was its most paradigmatic realization.20 In essence, the novel counter-​insurgency doctrine inverted the core elements of the Maoist approach. Where People’s War was based on a disciplined cadre organization of political commissioners, counter-​insurgency doctrine envisaged the formation of a counter-​revolutionary elite to bypass the corrupt leadership installed by old-​style colonial divide-​and-​rule policies. Broader social representation and grassroots reform of communal governance were expected to reinvigorate relations between colonial subjects and the state; as in the Maoist model, popular support was to be established through intensive propaganda and constant interaction.21

18 Daniel

Marston, ‘Lost and Found in the Jungle. The Indian and British Army Jungle Warfare Doctrines for Burma, 1943–​5, and the Malayan Emergency, 1948–​60’, in Hew Strachan (ed.), Big Wars and Small Wars: The British Army and the Lessons of War in the 20th Century (New York: Routledge, 2006), 84–​114. 19 Sam C. Sarkesian (ed.), Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare. Theories, Doctrines, Contexts (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1975). 20  Michael Fitzsimmons, ‘Hard Hearts and Open Minds? Governance, Identity and the Intellectual Foundations of Counterinsurgency Strategy’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 31/​3 (2008), 337–​365; Ian F. W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-​Insurgencies: Guerrillas and Their Opponents since 1750 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 70–​85; Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1977). 21 Mahfoud Bennoune, ‘La doctrine contre-​ révolutionnaire de la France et la paysannerie algérienne: les camps de regroupement (1954–​1962)’, Monthly Review, 25/​7 (1973), 43–​60; Eqbal Ahmad, ‘Revolutionary Warfare and Counterinsurgency’, in Norman Miller and Roderick Aya (eds.), National Liberation. Revolution in the Third World (New York: Free Press, 1971), 137–​213.

Strategic Resettlement   445 Western counter-​insurgency theorists believed that the egalitarian ideas of communism appealed to colonized societies marked by tribalism and fragmentation, so they conceived community development programmes as an antidote, enabling colonized rural populations to learn and practice a new spirit of community and belonging.22 When revolutionary anti-​colonial movements challenged the widespread injustices of land titles, adherents of population-​centric counter-​insurgency proposed sweeping reforms to established patterns of ownership and inheritance. When insurrectionists pointed to the extraction of labour and resources by colonial regimes, colonial administrations announced vast infrastructure and industrialization programmes. Where the popular base of Maoist-​type insurrections consisted of peasants, living widely dispersed on remote farmsteads, late colonial planners envisioned the rapid introduction of urban lifestyles, which they hoped to realize in model settlements fashioned after an idealized picture of European villages.23 The conditions in resettlement camps and new villages were supposed, finally, to facilitate the longer-​term social engineering at the heart of such counter-​insurgency, introducing new gender roles, nuclear families instead of large kinship groups, and above all an attitude favouring personal prosperity and its achievement though education and hard work. In other words, late colonial counter-​insurgents tried to counter the communist and anti-​colonial promises of their opponents with opposite, but no less revolutionary policies.24

Control and Community By 1900 colonial armies had become familiar with the use of displacement and forced removal as a means of bringing inaccessible regions under control and depriving the guerrillas of opportunities for retreat. These goals persisted into the second half of the twentieth century, but Western armies had by then developed additional technical means to achieve it. Aerial surveillance, aircraft transport, and air-​delivered attacks enabled late colonial incumbents to observe inaccessible forest and mountain hideouts, to declare these areas restricted zones, and to strafe and bomb those seen moving within them.25 The old strategy 22  Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small. The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 101–​ 131; Ben Oppenheim, ‘Community and Counterinsurgency’, Humanity, 3/​2 (2012), 249–​265. 23  For imaginaries of the ideal village in Western thinking, see Nick Cullather, ‘“The Target is the People”: Representations of the Village in Modernization and U.S. National Security Doctrine’, Cultural Politics, 2/​1 (2006), 29–​48; Nicole Sackley, ‘The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction’, Journal of Global History, 6 (2011), 481–​504. 24 Anthony James Joes, Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004); Paul B. Rich and Richard Stubbs (eds.), The Counter–​ insurgent State: Guerrilla Warfare and State Building in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1997). 25  Alexander J. Zervoudakis, ‘From Indochina to Algeria: Counter-​ Insurgency Lessons’, in Martin S. Alexander, Martin Evans, and J.F.V. Keiger (eds.), The Algerian War and the French Army, 1954–​62 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2002), 43–​60; Keith Sutton, ‘Army Administration Tensions over Algeria’s Centres de Regroupement, 1954–​1962’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 26/​2 (1999), 243–​270; Alfonso Castro and Kreg Ettenger, ‘Counterinsurgency and Socioeconomic Change: The Mau Mau War in Kirinyaga, Kenya’, Research in Economic Anthropology, 15 (1994), 63–​101; Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 122, 222.

446   Moritz Feichtinger of scorched earth was thus modernized by resort to large-​scale aerial bombardments, including the use of napalm and chemical defoliation.26 While state-​of-​the-​art technical means were used to monitor restricted zones, the locations in which colonial security forces placed evacuated civilians during the wars of decolonization initially shared much in common with the colonial concentration camps of the nineteenth century. Most of them were improvised camps surrounded by fences made of local materials. In most resettlement camps, access was strictly controlled at just a few gates, and guards could detect any movement inside and outside the camps from watchtowers. A rigid regimen of curfews restricted access and exit to certain times of the day.27 The difference was that late colonial armies and administrations employed the most modern means of bureaucratic control at their disposal to monitor and restrict the movements of resettled communities. The concentration of rural communities in resettlement camps was always accompanied by their administrative registration. Officers issued personal documents, which promised secure identification through fingerprints or photographs. The iconographic photographs of defiant Kabyle women taken by Marc Garanger during the Algerian War have their origins in the administrative registration of a resettled rural population. The French soldiers forced the women to take off their veils, to be photographed, and to have their fingerprints taken.28 In the context of resettlement policy, it became possible to link identity documents with permits to control and regulate mobility. The confined and tightly regulated conditions in late colonial resettlement camps allowed local commanders and administrators to employ these sites as disciplinary laboratories for individual and collective punishment of alleged supporters of insurgency. Three forms of violence can be distinguished: selective violence in interrogations and punishments; publicly exercised punishment of individuals, which was intended to have an educational and dissuasive effect; and, finally, collective punishment of entire communities for the actual or alleged misconduct either of individual members or the whole group. The administrative registration via identity documents and population registers discussed above was pivotal in identifying those selected for punishment. Bureaucratic control was complemented by intensified interrogation and torture in order to track down and destroy

26 Matthew

Adam Kocher, Thomas B. Pepinsky, and Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘Aerial Bombing and Counterinsurgency in the Vietnam War’, American Journal of Political Science, 55/​ 2 (2011), 201–​ 218; David Milne, ‘“Our Equivalent of Guerrilla Warfare”: Walt Rostow and the Bombing of North Vietnam, 1961–​1968’, The Journal of Military History, 71/​1 (2007), 169–​203; Edwin A. Martini, Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012); Beau Grosscup, Strategic Terror. The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006). 27  Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds, 1948–​ 1958 (Richmond: Curzon, 2002): 127; Francis Loh Kok Wah, Beyond the Tin Mines: Coolies, Squatters and New Villagers in the Kinta Valley, Malaysia, c. 1880–​1980 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988), 151. 28  Neil MacMaster, Burning the Veil: The Algerian War and the “Emancipation” of Muslim Women, 1954–​62 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 209–​ 214; Bruce Berman, ‘Bureaucracy and Incumbent Violence. Colonial Administration & the Origins of the “Mau Mau” Emergency’, in Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (eds.), Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, Vol. 2, Violence and Ethnicity (London: James Currey, 1992), 227–​264; Paul B. Rich and Richard Stubbs (eds.), The Counter–​insurgent State: Guerrilla Warfare and State Building in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1997).

Strategic Resettlement   447 the structures of the civilian support network for guerrilla movements.29 Counter-​insurgents also encouraged denunciations, publicly staged interrogations, and punishments to enhance their control over the resettled groups. One example is the hooded informants who pointed out members and supporters of Mau Mau at village meetings during the Emergency in Kenya. But European militaries used the resettlement camps and their tight regime of control to induce public denunciation and to display instant punishment for subversion in other late colonial counter-​insurgency campaigns as well. Another way of inducing terror was to display the bodies of killed guerrilla fighters or members of their clandestine networks at the entrances of resettlement camps. Again, these acts of symbolic and communicative violence were widely documented in several anti-​guerrilla campaigns of the late twentieth century.30 Collective punishment followed a similar logic. For example, when guerrilla units had been active in the vicinity of a given resettlement camp, colonial officers imposed extra fines, extended curfews, extracted additional forced labour, tightened food rationing, or imposed corporal punishments on an entire community.31 Collective punishments for lack of cooperation or based on denunciations could also be employed for symbolic and communicative purposes, their intended audience being neighbouring communities as much as those directly punished. The disciplinary repertoire applied to resettled civilians was not wholly repressive. In addition to the physical separation of the resettled population from the guerrillas, late colonial administrations attempted to deepen this divide psychologically through propaganda and rewards.32 In many camps and new villages, loudspeaker installations regularly broadcast pro-​government programmes and speeches. In less well-​equipped camps, the resettled had to attend rallies where mobile loudspeakers mounted on trucks were deployed. Some of these mobile propaganda systems even carried transportable film projectors and screens. Late colonial psy-​war specialists also used modern media to discredit insurgent movements by spreading rumours. In Kenya during the Mau Mau Emergency, for example, broadcasts and leaflets implied that the guerrilla fighters in the forests suffered from contagious diseases or were controlled by foreign powers.33 29 

Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’armée Pendant La Guerre d’Algérie: 1954–​1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001); Neil Macmaster, ‘Torture: From Algiers to Abu Ghraib’, Race & Class, 46/​2 (October 2004), 1–​21; David M. Anderson, ‘British Abuse and Torture in Kenya’s Counter-​Insurgency, 1952–​1960’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012), 700–​7 19; MacMaster, Burning the Veil, 224. 30 For a discussion of spectacular violence, see Kim A. Wagner, ‘Expanding Bullets and Savage Warfare’, History Workshop Journal, 88 (2019), 281–​287. 31 Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-​ Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 220; for a broad discussion on violence in conflicts over decolonization, see: Martin Thomas, ‘Violence, Insurgency, and the End of Empires’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 32 On propaganda efforts on late colonial counter-​ insurgency, see: Marie-​ Catherine and Paul Villatoux, La République et son armée face au péril subversif. Guerre et action psychologiques (1945–​1960) (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005); Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-​Insurgency, 1944–​1960 (London: Leicester University Press, 1995); Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda. The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds 1948–​1958 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2002). 33  The National Archives, Public Record Office, Kew, United Kingdom (henceforth TNA), FCO 141/​ 6227, Note by the Secretary of the War Council, Psychological Warfare Projects proposed by Kikuyu Loyalists and submitted by the Psychological Warfare Staff (War/​C.847), 25 January 1956.

448   Moritz Feichtinger In accordance with the principle of mirroring Maoist practices, late colonial counter-​ insurgency specialists also tried to build up their own network of counter-​revolutionary commissioners. Members of armed auxiliary troops and colonial administrative staff appeared to be best suited for such positions. They benefitted from regular pay and numerous privileges such as access to better housing, education, and supplies. Late colonial governments knew that such rewards would expose their recipients to condemnation by insurgent movements as collaborators and profiteers, thus providing ‘loyalists’ with an existential interest in the victory of the government side.34 In contrast to the ‘divide and rule’ principle of the nineteenth century, however, late colonial counter-​insurgency planners built bridgeheads into the colonized societies, hoping to persuade their selected avant-​garde to serve as role models for the modernization of attitudes and lifestyles. To this end, members of pro-​government militias were enrolled in professional training programmes, recruited to administrative positions, and readied for leadership roles in local representative bodies after their service. According to the ideas of late colonial planners, resettled people were to learn a new lifestyle through various community development programmes. These programmes could include sporting events, adult education, and festivities. In late colonial Kenya, the British established a ministry for community development to organize the ‘rehabilitation’ of detainees and resettled populations.35 Attempts to attract Algerian youth through sporting activities and educational programmes were, by contrast, coordinated by the French Army’s special branch for psychological warfare, the infamous 5th Bureau. However, like all other measures to win the hearts and minds of the population in the context of forced resettlement, such projects intermingled repression and reform. Participation in events was not always voluntary, and the propagandistic purpose behind them was all too obvious.

Spatial Transformation Displacement and relocation radically changed both the mode of life and the settlement patterns in the affected regions and societies. The forcible introduction of new forms of housing and the transfer to new settlement areas implied irreversible changes in economic practices, social structure, and customs. Strategic Resettlement mainly affected communities in remote areas where a permanent military presence was difficult to maintain. Thus, settlements in the mountains were evacuated and transplanted to the valleys, and communities living in forests and jungles were relocated to cleared areas. Scattered settlements on hilltops or along waterways were regrouped and concentrated in

34 Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya. Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); François-​Xavier Hautreux, La Guerre d’Algérie des harkis, 1954–​1962 (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2013). 35  Thomas Askwith served as Commissioner for Community Development during the Emergency, but the idea appealed to African politicians as well. Caroline Elkins, ‘The Struggle for Mau Mau Rehabilitation in Late Colonial Kenya’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 33/​1 (2000). 25–​57; John Lonsdale, ‘Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya’, The Journal of African History, 31/​3 (1990), 393–​421.

Strategic Resettlement   449 encampments close to traffic routes in order to facilitate control and logistical supply. With the conversion from smaller, scattered settlements to large, concentrated camps and villages, living practices changed profoundly. Relocated communities had to adapt to these new ways of life practically overnight. Unfamiliar housing, crowding, and cohabitation with strangers, as well as the sudden separation from ancestral and often spiritually significant homesteads, were a traumatic experience for many rural families. The new patterns of domestic life intrinsic to forcible relocation often exacerbated intergenerational conflicts and accelerated changes in cultural norms and practices. Colonial officials arranged the dwellings for the resettled population in newly created camps on a strict grid layout, with the houses, tents, or huts grouped together and lined up in rows.36 This setup facilitated surveillance from watchtowers and allowed for a spatial continuation of administrative surveillance. The accommodations were numbered, and their inhabitants were listed. The number of the lodging, in turn, was noted on the identity documents and passes of its inhabitants. These measures were the basis for controlling and disciplining the resettled population, echoing the measures famously applied by French paratroopers during the battle for Algiers or the Kipande system in colonial Kenya.37 Strategic Resettlement was an instrument to restrict and control mobility. It had a massive impact on mobility-​based economies. Fishermen were no longer able to work on the rivers; forestry workers could no longer enter woodlands freely; and shepherds could no longer accompany their herds to graze. Such prohibitions were particularly devastating when mobility was essential to economic activity as well as being a way of life. Nomadic communities were especially hard hit, typically losing their livelihood. Ironically, more modern forms of income such as seasonal work and migrant labour were also severely hampered by forced resettlement. After their initial relocation, many resettled people suffered from disastrous sanitary conditions, in addition to constant surveillance and violence. For tactical reasons, security forces often evacuated the restricted areas hurriedly without prior notice or sufficient preparatory arrangements for the accommodation of evacuated families and groups. Initially at least, resettled people might be crammed together in collective shelters, tents, or improvised huts in camps lacking core sanitary infrastructure such as drinking water and toilets. Further aggravated by malnutrition, infectious diseases spread in many places during the preliminary phase of Strategic Resettlement, resulting in high death rates, particularly among the most vulnerable groups such as infants and the elderly. The reactions of colonial governments to these grievances and their disclosure varied. Channelling the support of non-​governmental aid organizations like the Red Cross and religious groups to the resettled was one way to deal with the immediate humanitarian consequences of uprooting.38 In some cases, governments transferred the coordination of 36 Samia Henni, Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (Zurich: gta Verlag, 2017); Ginger Nolan, The Neocolonialism of the Global Village (Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2018). 37  Examples can be found in: Daniel Brückenhaus, ‘Identifying Colonial Subjects: Fingerprinting in British Kenya, 1900–​1960’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 42/​1 (2016), 60–​85; for the battle of Algiers and the development of counterinsurgency tactics, see: Denis Leroux, ‘La “doctrine de la guerre révolutionnaire”: théories et pratiques’, in Abderrahmane Bouchène et al. (eds.), Histoire de l’Algérie à la Période Coloniale, 1830–​1962 (Paris: La Decouverte, 2014), 526–​532. 38 Jennifer Johnson, The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Fatima Besnaci-​ Lancou, Prisons et Camps

450   Moritz Feichtinger resettlement policy from the military to civilian administrators. Sometimes, governments transformed strategically motivated mass displacement into more comprehensive policies of rural restructuring. Administrations then tried to dissolve particularly overcrowded and unhygienic camps and to expand and develop other, better-​equipped camps into permanent villages. When former camps were developed into permanent new villages, colonial authorities used them as propaganda tools to counter the negative reports of overcrowded camps. Serialized newspaper reports and propaganda films depicted resettled communities enjoying greater security, unprecedented material prosperity, and more modern lifestyles in their new settlements. These images also served the self-​promotion of Western colonial powers before an increasingly sceptical global audience.39 But these examples were exceptions, not the rule. Most resettlement camps, however, remained improvised throughout their existence. If late colonial administrators selected certain camps to become permanent new villages, they planned to build marketplaces or cafés alongside public services such as post offices and schools. Above all, however, permanent housing was also built in such new villages. New homes should first and foremost remedy the hygienic deficiencies of the improvised camps, offering sufficient space and modern comfort for healthy living. Access to such accommodation remained highly politicized. Members of the pro-​government segments of the resettled population were typically the first to move into modern houses. Late colonial planners also pursued a modernizing agenda through the construction and allocation of showcase dwellings: a modern lifestyle was to be implemented through nuclear family living and the corresponding division of residential and functional spaces. For example, houses were designed especially for small families according to the European model, thus making life in traditional extended families or polygamous structures impossible. In Algeria, colonial planners deliberately left out the traditional courtyards in new buildings in resettlement villages in order to deprive women of their traditional sphere of private domestic space and thus ‘emancipate’ them. In other cases, planners deliberately omitted necessary areas and spaces for subsistence farming, such as sufficiently large gardens for growing vegetables or stables and paddocks for livestock.40

Land Use and Labour Counter-​ insurgent interventions in the settlement structure often rendered rural populations’ traditional economic activities impossible. Colonial planners sought to take advantage of this rupture, implementing schemes to reorganize the prevailing economic structure. Anticipating the main hypothesis of modernization theory, theorists of late colonial d’internement En Algérie: Les Missions Du Comité International de La Croix-​Rouge (CICR) Dans La Guerre d’indépendance, 1955–​1962 (Vulaines-​sur-​Seine: Éditions du Croquant, 2018). 39  Susan L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media, and Colonial Counter-​Insurgency, 1944–​1960 (London; New York: Leicester University Press, 1995), 113. 40  Tan Teng Phee, ‘Oral History and People’s Memory of the Malayan Emergency (1948–​60): The Case of Pulai’, Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 27/​1 (2012), 84–​119, here 99–​108; Keith Sutton, ‘Population Resettlement—​Traumatic Upheavals and the Algerian Experience’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 15/​2 (1977), 279–​300, here 289.

Strategic Resettlement   451 counter-​insurgency believed that anti-​colonial uprisings tended to spread in societies that were transitioning from tradition to modernity. Accordingly, if this shift was to be controlled and accelerated the uprisings would be denied their breeding ground. By radically breaking with traditional economic activities, Strategic Resettlement created both the necessity and the opportunity to restructure late colonial economies. Changes to patterns of labour and land ownership thus became integral to resettlement policy. While unable to pursue their accustomed economic activities, many resettled communities were compelled to work on the construction of new villages or the completion of basic infrastructure in their surroundings. Colonial administrators considered these compulsory works as an educational enterprise, designed to acculturate the resettled communities to regular working routines and to prevent the impression that the ‘amenities’ of the new homesteads would be given out for free. Again, the lines separating repression from reward could blur. Administrators sometimes imposed the disliked compulsory labour services as a form of collective punishment for disobedient groups and individuals within the resettled population. When resettlement camps developed into new villages, work for the colonial administration could be transformed into paid wage labour, and these assignments were specifically awarded to loyal sections of the population. Such measures were targeted attempts to monetize and formalize labour in societies where informal employment, family-​based division of labour, and the seasonal and weather-​related rhythm of rural life prevailed.41 Advocates of population-​centric counter-​insurgency asserted that anti-​colonial guerrilla movements were psychologically manipulating colonized societies. At the same time, they recognized that insurgents could easily exploit the social injustices of the colonial system, especially in matters of land use and ownership. As a result, land reform became one of the most important political measures to accompany the repressive side of counter-​insurgency. Such reforms consisted of allocating new land to small farmers who had been settled at a great distance from their places of origin. To this end, existing large estates that were owned by the colonial state, by settlers, or by local elites were expropriated and divided up. In this way, late colonial administrators hoped to undermine one of the most important political demands of the insurgents. These policies were, on occasion, accompanied by attempts to modernize agriculture, including the establishment of agricultural cooperatives, the adoption of specialized labour, and efforts to persuade peasant farmers to convert from subsistence farming to the export-​orientated cultivation of cash crops. Integrated into wider rural reconstruction programmes, land reform also sought to consolidate widely scattered and fragmented plots of land. In Kenya, for example, the forced resettlement of large parts of the population in the centre of the country created the conditions for a massive programme of land consolidation.42 However, only those farms that seemed profitable to the colonial administrative experts were provided with titles for newly demarcated land. This recourse to technocratic ‘rationalization’ had profound 41  Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le Déracinement: La Crise de l’agriculture Traditionnelle En Algérie (Paris: Les Éd. de Minuit, 1989), 71–​80; Hartmut Elsenhans, Frankreichs Algerienkrieg 1954–​1962. Entkolonisierungsversuch einer kapitalistischen Metropole (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1974), 585. 42 William J. Barber, ‘Land Reform and Economic Change among African Farmers in Kenya’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 19/​1 (1970), 6–​24, here 14; M.P.K. Sorrenson, Land Reform in the Kikuyu Country: A Study in Government Policy (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1967).

452   Moritz Feichtinger consequences. Smaller plots of land and informal rights of use were eliminated, which led to the emergence of a huge landless class. Interventions in land ownership and inheritance also challenged established social hierarchies and relational structures, such as tribes, clans, and kinship groups. Sometimes, however, local elites managed to enhance their influence by taking up decisive positions as counsellors in the division and redistribution of land, thereby consolidating the socio-​economic power of group identities and social communities that sprang from the fantasies of colonial administrations rather than actual local traditions.43 Strategic Resettlement did not only affect small farmers in remote regions, but often also agricultural workers, day labourers, and seasonal workers who lived in more urbanized environments and were closely connected to the monetary economy. For strategic reasons, colonial counter-​insurgents assigned workers in camps to the site of their workplace, such as plantations or mines. Confinement and concentration exposed them to a tightened disciplinary regime and potential exploitation by factory and plantation owners. The repressive regime of the state of emergency and the omnipresence of armed security forces prevented protest and organization against these measures.

Females, Families, and the Social Fabric For the communities affected, forced resettlement meant a radical break from familiar forms of housing, economic practices, and social structures. In addition, Strategic Resettlement conducted according to the precepts of population-​centric counter-​insurgency and modernization theory often involved direct interventions into the social fabric and attempts to re-​engineer families and households. A defining element of Maoist ‘People’s War’ is that it mobilizes women and children as potential combatants, or at least as core elements in insurgent networks of supply and information.44 Population-​centric counter-​insurgency similarly targeted women and children in both its repressive and its transformative elements.45 43 For

a critical discussion of invented communities and kinship-​ systems, see for example Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 72–​108. 44  Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘Reconsidering Women’s Roles in the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, 1952–​ 1960’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017): 227–​ 256; Tabitha Kanogo, ‘Kikuyu Women and the Politics of Protest: Mau Mau’, in Sharon Macdonald, Pat Holden, and Shirley Ardener (eds.), Images of Women in Peace and War. Cross-​Cultural and Historical Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 78–​99; Djamila Amrane, Les Femmes Algériennes dans la Guerre (Paris: Plon, 1991); Gilbert Meynier, ‘Les femmes dans l’ALN/​FLN’, in Jean-​Charles Jauffret and Charles-​Robert Ageron (eds.), Des hommes et des femmes en guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2003), 307–​319, Sandra C. Taylor, Vietnamese Women at War Fighting for Ho Chi Minh and the Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999); Kathleen Sheldon, ‘Women and Revolution in Mozambique. A luta Continua’, in Mary Ann Tétreault (ed.), Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 33–​61; Sita Ranchod-​Nilsson, ‘“Men in our Country Behave Like Chiefs”: Women and the Angolan Revolution’, in Mary Ann Tétreault (ed.), Women and Revolution in Africa, Asia, and the New World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1994), 89–​110. 45  Marina E. Santoru, ‘The Colonial Idea of Women and Direct Intervention: The Mau Mau Case’, African Affairs, 95/​379 (1996), 253–​267; Andreas Stucki, Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies.

Strategic Resettlement   453 Due to their conditions of confinement in the camps, including forced cohabitation with strangers and the omnipresence of armed guards, resettled women were particularly vulnerable to abuse, violence, and sexual exploitation.46 In response, some women-​only compounds were established and, in others, administrators and aid-​workers initiated health and education campaigns aimed at the female camp population. Women actively participated on both sides of the conflicts over decolonization. In consequence, the role of women in the respective conceptions of a post-​conflict order became an important field of debate between revolutionaries and counter-​insurgents. Anti-​colonial movements, especially those with a social revolutionary-​Maoist background, promoted a radical reorganization of gender relations and often included women in their ranks as combatants or political commissars. Even anti-​colonial resistance movements without such radical claims promised to stand up for the restoration of the honour of colonized women with their struggle against colonial occupation. Progressive reformist counter-​insurgency theorists came to understand that gender relations and the role of women were a crucial battleground in decolonization conflicts. The incumbent colonial governments established women’s clubs in the midst of decolonization wars to promote the education and emancipation of colonized women. Promises to reform outdated and misogynistic traditions such as female circumcision and discrimination against women in questions of citizenship, marriage, and inheritance were also made.47 Staunch supporters of anti-​colonial movements spurned such clubs, rightly identifying them as instruments of government. Several were founded and led by the wives of high-​ranking members of the government and military, such as the Mouvement de Solidarité Féminine in Algeria (presided over by the wives of the proto-​fascist putschists Raoul Salan and Jacques Massu), the Mocidada Portuguesa Feminina in Angola and Mozambique, or the Vietnamese Women’s Solidarity Movement in South Vietnam, led by the notorious Madame Nhu (Trần Lệ Xuân). In addition to European-​style charity events, such organizations were instrumental to high-​profile government propaganda, such as the meticulously orchestrated unveiling of Algerian women in 1958. However, some late colonial women’s organizations acted more subtly. The British-​founded Women’s Institute in Malaya—​which was supposed to have a direct impact on women in the resettlement villages—​enjoyed little success, whereas the local initiatives of the anti-​communist Malayan Chinese Organisation were far more

Feminizing the Portuguese and Spanish Empire, 1950s–​1970s (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Vina A. Lanzona, ‘The Philippines—​“Engendering” Counterinsurgency: The Battle to Win the Hearts and Minds of Women During the Huk Rebellion in the Philippines’, in Hannah Gurman (ed.), Hearts and Minds. A People’s History of Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013), 50–​76. 46 Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, 249; Branche, La torture, 290–​ 294, Moritz Feichtinger, ‘ “A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (January 2017), 45–​72; MacMaster, Burning the Veil, 224; Kamel Kateb, Nacer Melhani, and M’hamed Rebah, Les déracinés de Cherchell: camps de regroupement dans la guerre d’Algérie (1954–​1962) (Paris: INED éditions, 2018), 95–​98. 47  Ryme Seferdjeli, ‘La politique coloniale à l’égard des femmes “musulmanes”’, in Bouchène et al. (eds.), Histoire de l’Algérie, 359–​363; Tabitha Kanogo, African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya 1900–​50 (Oxford: James Currey, 2005), 4–​5; Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence. Algerian Women in Question (New York: Routledge, 1994), 98–​141; Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb. Women, Reproduction and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 79–​102.

454   Moritz Feichtinger successful.48 In Kenya, the ‘Maendeleo Ya Wanawake’ movement led by the Department for Community Development attained a large membership—​especially among resettled women.49 And even in Algeria, cercles féminins and foyers féminins existed in resettlement camps and reached many resettled women. Such initiatives were funded by the government or by associated counter-​revolutionary actors such as religious groups, but locally resettled rural women encountered them in the person of thoroughly committed voluntary—​and often young—​women. A telling example is the activities of the SFJA in Algeria, which were an element of the reformist side of French colonial policy and counter-​insurgency, alongside similar initiatives.50 Late colonial counter-​insurgency apologists and psy-​war specialists envisaged a dual role for these organizations, corresponding to the double-​edged model of repression and reform characteristic of community-​orientated counter-​insurgency: on the one hand, they were supposed to gather intelligence about the rebels’ clandestine support networks within the resettlement camps, which were often largely supported by women, and to disseminate government propaganda.51 On the other hand, they constituted a form of amenities and incentives specifically tailored towards women, intended to generate political support for the government side in the sense of ‘hearts and minds’ policy. In a proposal on ‘propaganda to eliminate Mau Mau psychology’, the Provincial Commissioner of Kenya’s Central Province, for example, called for the establishment of a ‘stable and contented population’, of which a central element was ‘the build up of the women’.52 Women’s groups also provided assistance to alleviate the sanitary consequences of resettlement. Women’s clubs in resettlement villages, for example, often provided childcare and hygienic training for women who had been forced to live in disastrous conditions by the actions of colonial security forces.53 At the same time, however, the counter-​insurgents intended these institutions to propagate specific values of a domesticated role of women in a nuclear family, based on Western-​European ideals. It is striking that many late colonial resettlement camps offered sewing classes for resettled women. Before relocation, these women

48 

Tim N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 187. 49  Audrey Wipper, ‘The Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization: The Co-​ Optation of Leadership’, African Studies Review, 18/​3 (1975), 99–​120. 50  Luc Capdevila, Femmes, armée et éducation dans la guerre d’Algérie: L’expérience du service de formation des jeunes en Algérie (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2017); for the liberal roots of this policy, see: James D. Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 51  For the Kenyan and Algerian case, see the respective directives: TNA FCO 141/​6274, Memorandum by the Minister for African Affairs, Intensification of Measures against the Passive Wing (WAR/​C. 375), 22 November 1954; TNA FCO 141/​6133, Memorandum by the Director of Intelligence and Security, Effects of Villagization and Concentration of Labour on Action against Mau Mau (Annexure to WAR/​ C. 360), 16 November 1954; Archives nationales d’outre mer, Aix-​en-​Provence, France (henceforth ANOM) 81F/​339, General Challe, Action sur les milieux féminins en Algérie (N° 257/​E.M.I./​3/​P.H.), 27 March 1960. 52 TNA FCO 141/​ 6227, PC Central Province (Johnston) to Minister for African Affairs (E.H. Windley), Joint Proposals of District Commissioners and Advisory Council, Propaganda to eliminate Mau Mau Psychology, 10 September 1956. 53 Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, The Mau Mau Rebellion and Social Change in Kenya (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 167.

Strategic Resettlement   455 were fully engaged in the economic activities of their societies and families, occupations that were also often characterized by considerable mobility. Late colonial campaigns for women, by contrast, were intended to establish a female role model that combined political abstinence with a domesticated mode of production and a suburban lifestyle. In line with measures to control and educate the urban workforce, the women’s clubs in the resettlement camps offered courses on sexual morality.54 But course content was inspired by the racist fantasies about sexuality in colonized societies that female aid workers and volunteers, who often came from Christian organizations, brought with them from Europe. That said, educational programmes to protect against sexual exploitation also took into account that relocation and the resulting disintegration of extended family units had led to a large number of widows and single girls in the camps and new villages.55 Hence, women’s clubs and emancipation campaigns in resettlement camps display the same ambiguity as resettlement policy as a whole: in the consolidation phase, significant improvements in the living conditions were put in place, especially when compared with the conditions in temporary, improvised resettlement camps. At the same time, all of these reform programmes clearly bear the hallmarks of social engineering, psychological warfare, and forced modernization.

Effects and Commemoration of Strategic Resettlement Strategic Resettlement came at a very high price. People lost their homes and their livelihoods. Lives were turned upside down. Forced resettlement could be the prelude to years of malnutrition and poor sanitation. Mortality and morbidity rates inside resettlement camps could be high. For their part, colonial governments faced heavy long-​term expenditure on the personnel and materials required to build and operate strategic villages. Were there any concomitant military benefits of Strategic Resettlement to justify these high costs and sacrifices? Historical research has unanimously said no. Few resettlement camps and new villages completely cut off contact between insurgents and the civilian population. Often there were too few soldiers available to ensure effective surveillance. Locally recruited guards often turned out to be either corrupt, uninterested, or even complicit with the rebels. Even when late colonial armies deployed their entire repressive arsenal, resettled communities found ways to communicate with insurgents and provide them with food, medicine, and information. As significant, the political and moral damage caused by Strategic Resettlement outweighed any military advantages. Even Malaya’s New Villages, which some counter-​ insurgency theorists held up as a blueprint for the successful implementation of Strategic 54 Luise

White, ‘Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of Gender, Sexuality, and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939–​1959’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 23/​1 (1990), 1–​25, here 7; Mary Shannon, ‘Rebuilding the Social Life of the Kikuyu’, African Affairs, 56/​225 (1957), 276–​284. 55 Kenda Mutongi, Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 139–​148; for a general discussion, see Catherine Brun and Todd Shepard (eds.), Guerre d’Algérie: le sexe outragé (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016).

456   Moritz Feichtinger Resettlement, are now viewed extremely critically by most researchers.56 It was not the material improvements offered in the New Villages, such as new houses or reallocated land, that ultimately alienated Malaya’s Chinese rural population from the communist guerrillas, but rather the political failure of the guerrillas combined with the long-​term prospect of citizenship for the colony’s ethnic minorities within a newly founded Malaysian Federation.57 By contrast, the suffering, hardship, and hunger in the early years after resettlement left a legacy of trauma among displaced families.58 The verdict on the use of strategic forced resettlement in the African wars of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s is even clearer. Even though infrastructure improvements and the provision of schooling and medical care for remote rural areas are notable in some late colonial counter-​insurgency campaigns, the negative effects of forced resettlement outweighed the positive ones. The violent displacement and uprooting, as well as the catastrophic conditions in the camps, which many resettled people had to endure often for years, finally discredited the Western colonial powers and their promises of reform in the eyes of colonized societies.59 The camps de regroupement, which France set up during the Algerian war, illustrate the point. When conditions inside the camps became known to the press and a number of critical reports appeared, the French government could not possibly maintain the status quo and was increasingly required to offer political solutions to the conflict.60 The Algerian independence movement, on the other hand, latched onto the emotive language of ‘French concentration camps’ and employed it to devastating effect in its propaganda and diplomacy.61 More difficult to calculate are the socio-​economic effects of Strategic Resettlement. Can the transformations of the affected rural societies be qualified as ‘modernization’? There is no doubt that resettlement policy in its irreversible effects was a catalyst of change. However, these changes did not correspond with the intended effects and normative notions of progress and development anticipated by modernization theory. In almost all cases, a significant decline in small-​scale subsistence farming can be observed. The changes in rural settlement structure and forms of housing also indicate a trend towards urbanization of the affected rural areas. However, the break with traditional ways of life was only rarely followed by sustainable transformations. The loss of smallholders’ self-​sufficiency was not compensated 56 Karl

Hack, ‘The Malayan Emergency as Counter-​ Insurgency Paradigm’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​3 (2009), 383–​414; Karl Hack, ‘“Iron Claws on Malaya”: The Historiography of the Malayan Emergency’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 30/​1 (1999), 99–​125. 57  Marc Frey, ‘Control, Legitimacy, and the Securing of Interests: European Development Policy in South-​East Asia from the Late Colonial Period to the Early 1960s’, Contemporary European History, 12/​4 (2003), 395–​412; Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency, 1948–​ 1960 (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004). 58 Huw Bennett, ‘“A Very Salutary Effect”: The Counter-​ Terror Strategy in the Early Malayan Emergency, June 1948 to December 1949’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​3 (2009), 415–​444; Karl Hack, ‘Malaya—​Between Two Terrors: “People’s History” and the Malayan Emergency’, in Gurman (ed.), Hearts and Minds, 17–​49. 59  Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 60  Michel Rocard, Rapport Sur Les Camps de Regroupement et Autres Textes Sur La Guerre d’Algérie, edited by Sylvie Thénault (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2003). 61  Matthew James Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

Strategic Resettlement   457 for by jobs in industry or a modernized agricultural sector based on wage employment, export production, and a more formal division of labour. The uprooted small farmers became rural sub-​proletarians and day labourers in many decolonized countries. Many resettled people left the former camps and strategic villages after the state of emergency and mobility restrictions were lifted. Where it was impossible to return to their old places of residence, or where the new villages offered a higher standard of living, resettlement sites rarely developed into prosperous communities as envisaged by their planners, instead becoming rural slums. The negative record of resettlement policy in almost all wars of decolonization is due to its often-​inadequate planning and implementation, but above all to the political context in which population removal was conducted. It is true that the resettled were subjected to a strict disciplinary regime, which forced them to participate in the many and varied elements of transformative interventions. At the same time, resettled colonial subjects used whatever leeway they could for selective adaptation to—​or subversive refusal of—​the demands made of them. Resettled communities appear to have valued educational opportunities such as schools and vocational training, as well as medical care or infrastructural improvements such as the supply of clean water and electricity.62 But most resented the political motivation and coercive conditions attached to such support. Resettled families were frequently hesitant to accept confiscated land because of the uncertain outcome of the war. Similarly, resettled societies tended to shun newly created organs of local self-​government.63 They considered the risk of becoming overly exposed and politically discredited in the event of a rebel victory to be too great. Late-​colonial records confirm time and again that resettled people tried to maintain equidistance between the government and the rebels.64 The uneasy position of victims of strategic forced relocation between government and insurgents, between forced acceptance of amenities in new villages and passivity as the only viable medium for resistance, left a difficult legacy in post-​colonial societies. The experiences of those who were resettled—​often mostly women and children—​did not fit into official narratives of heroism and activism. But even if official commemoration in newly independent states denounced the resettlement camps as ‘concentration camps’ and thus collectively declared the resettled people to be victims of late colonial repression, this did not capture the complex and ambivalent role and forms of agency that resettled populations exercised. In the worst case, resettled communities were confronted with accusations of collaboration with the colonial regime through enrolment in self-​protection militias or accepting the social amenities offered as part of ‘hearts and minds’ policies.

62 Marc Côte, Pays, Paysages, Paysans d’Algérie (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1996); Edward W. Soja, The Geography of Modernization in Kenya a Spatial Analysis of Social, Economic, and Political Change (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1968). 63  Laurence K.L. Siaw, Chinese Society in Rural Malaysia: A Local History of the Chinese in Titi, Jelebu (Kuala Lumpur; New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 105; Judith Strauch, Chinese Village Politics in the Malaysian State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 70–​84. 64  Neil MacMaster, ‘The “Silent Native”: Attentisme, Being Compromised, and Banal Terror during the Algerian War of Independence, 1954–​1962’, in Martin Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Mind, Vol. 2 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 283–​303; Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher, ‘How “Free” Is Free Riding in Civil Wars?: Violence, Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem’, World Politics, 59/​2 (January 2007), 177–​216.

458   Moritz Feichtinger Victims of forced relocation thus struggled to find their place in emerging nationalist narratives and official policies of remembrance in postcolonial societies.65 That said, the fate of resettled people is slowly gaining more attention, especially through the publication of oral history-​based research and micro-​histories of particular settlement sites.66 It is only through such first-​hand accounts that the experience of forced resettlement can be grasped in all its complexity and in its many local variants. These voices and narratives constitute an important contribution to understanding of the tenor of late colonial counter-​insurgency as, at once, a strategy of intense repression and a project of ambitious social engineering.

Conclusion Forced relocation and Strategic Resettlement continue to fuel vivid scholarly debates, concerning definition, interpretation, and analytical approaches toward this phenomenon. While the term Strategic Resettlement helps to distinguish forced removal for military purposes from other forms of forced relocation, the actual boundaries are more blurry than an analytical distinction suggests. There are many historic and current examples of resettlement projects without an outspoken military-​strategic objective. States, international organizations, and non-​state actors relocated populations in order to create space for infrastructure programmes, to channel urbanization processes, or to settle refugee populations.67 Ironically, quite a few postcolonial states resorted to this strategy as well—​even if their populations have suffered from its consequences during violent decolonization. Algeria, Mozambique, and Tanzania have experimented with rural reconstruction and villagization schemes, in the case of Algeria even in continuation of late colonial Strategic Resettlement, expanding and improving the sites of the French camps.68 Kenya incorporated some of the 65  Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l’oubli: la mémoire de la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: La Découverte, 2011); Evan Mwangi, ‘The Incomplete Rebellion: Mau Mau Movement in Twenty-​First-​Century Kenyan Popular Culture’, Africa Today, 57/​2 (2010), 86–​113; Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 66  See, for example, the documentary film by Dorothee Myriam Kellou, ‘In Mensurah, You Separated Us’ (Algeria, France, 2019); Teng Phee Tan, Behind Barbed Wire: Chinese New Villages during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–​1960 (Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2020); Moritz Feichtinger, Agency & Agony: Remembering Forced Relocation in Wars of Decolonization (forthcoming). 67  Anthony Oliver-​Smith, Development & Dispossession: The Crisis of Forced Displacement and Resettlement (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2009); Chris J. De Wet (ed.), Development-​ induced Displacement: Problems, Policies and People (New York: Beghahn Books, 2006). 68 Keith Sutton, ‘Algeria’s Socialist Villages—​ A Reassessment’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 22/​2 (1984), 223–​248; Rachid Tlemcani, State and Revolution in Algeria (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), 95–​104, 124–​136; Cyrille Megdiche, ‘Les villages socialistes en Algérie (éléments pour une approche socio-​historique) ’, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 14/​1 (1977), 81–​92; James C. Scott, Seeing like a State. How Certain Scheme to Improve the Human Conditions Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 223–​261; João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘State Resettlement Policies in Post-​Colonial Rural Mozambique: The Impact of the Communal Village Programme on Tete Province, 1977–​1982’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 24/​1 (1998), 61–​91; Ralph Ibbott, Ujaama: The Hidden Story of Tanzania’s Socialist Villages (London: Crossroads Books, 2014).

Strategic Resettlement   459 emergency villages into rural and peri-​urban settlement projects and even applied Strategic Resettlement itself during the Shifta war in the late 1960s.69 As this overlap between military and developmental motivated removals reveals, the historical context of forced displacement is not necessarily always colonial or imperial. The ‘defence villages’ built by the Nazis in Belarus during the Second World War can still be interpreted as imperial, the Chinese resettlement programmes or other violent mass removals in the context of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the long twentieth century were certainly marked by violence, but the qualification as ‘colonial/​imperial’ does not always do justice to the often-​complex historical contexts.70 So are there distinguishing elements common to all cases of Strategic Resettlement in the context of decolonization but that also clearly stand out from any other resettlement projects? Late colonial resettlement policy was characterized by a high degree of racist thinking and prejudice, like any form of colonial policy. Racist ‘othering’ legitimized extreme violence, but it also produced specific forms of violence. Firstly, European officers in various colonial armies believed that violence could serve as communication. They staged acts of spectacular and symbolic violence in order to have a deterrent effect beyond the directly affected population. Second, and related to this, acts of extreme violence were often directed against collectives and communities rather than against individuals alone. This followed the racist belief that colonized people primarily identified themselves as members of collectives such as kinship systems, clans, and tribes, even if these entities had only been invented by the colonizers as instruments of control. Finally, late colonial counter-​insurgency measures, even reformist efforts and access to ‘amenities’, were based on the assumption that colonial societies were inherently apolitical or at least politically immature. Progressive counter-​insurgents might have conceded that the colonial system was unjust and that rebels were successful because they addressed legitimate grievances. However, they did not acknowledge a genuine nationalism or an actual commitment to socialist ideals in anti-​colonial movements, and certainly not in their rural civilian supporters.71 A specific paternalist-​developmental attitude becomes evident particularly when militarily motivated concentration of the rural population transformed into longer-​term rural development projects. While colonial militaries in the old days justified the enormous violence of colonial ‘pacification’ campaigns by the fact that the ‘primitives’ would not understand any other language than brute force, late colonial counter-​insurgents considered ‘backwardness’ and ‘underdevelopment’ rather as culturally determined. The fact that this

69 Hannah Whittaker, ‘Forced Villagization during the Shifta Conflict in Kenya, ca. 1963–​ 1968’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 45/​3 (2012), 343–​364. 70 Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts-​und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2000), 1,036–​1,055; Klaus Mühlhahn, ‘The Dark Side of Globalization: The Concentration Camps in Republican China in Global Perspective’, World History Connected, March 2009, . 71  Frank Füredi, Colonial Wars and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994); Neil MacFarlane, Superpower Rivalry and Third World Radicalism: The Idea of National Liberation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

460   Moritz Feichtinger perspective also led to enormous violence shows the continuity of colonial thought patterns not only in late colonialism, but in the general worldview of developmentalism too.72 Another characteristic feature of late colonial resettlement policy is that benevolent-​ paternalist racism drew on a considerable reservoir of scientific expertise. A culturally rather than biologically based racism depended on ethnographic and anthropological knowledge that explained social dynamics as causes of rebellions and produced recommendations for countermeasures adapted to the respective cultures. The involvement of Luis B. Leaky and John C. Carothers in Kenya and the advisory work of Jean Servier in Algeria are paradigmatic examples of such applied social science.73 But other scientific experts and technocrats, like agricultural planners, architects, sociologists, and economists also got involved in late colonial counter-​insurgency.74 Finally, late colonial resettlement policy was also characterized by the prominence of psychological warfare and propaganda. Colonial powers in the post-​1945 world knew that they were operating under the scrutiny of the major Cold War powers, both of which were increasingly adopting anti-​imperial positions.75 Similarly, the domestic and global public opinion was not very sympathetic to bloody, protracted, and expensive campaigns on the imperial periphery. The propagandistic emphasis on reconstruction and development efforts within the framework of ‘pacification’ and Strategic Resettlement therefore became particularly important. Thus, newly created villages with neatly lined-​up houses equipped with running water, electricity, and nearby schools became a favourite subject in newspaper articles and films, produced with massive support from colonial propaganda agencies. To a far greater extent than in colonial counter-​insurgency before 1945, Western colonial armies deployed psychological warfare techniques in the resettlement villages. These measures were not limited to newspaper articles, leaflets, radio broadcasts, and projections of films, but encompassed a wide range of material incentives and social events. This material and practical propaganda included access to schools, improved housing and medical care, community sports events, cultural festivities, and, above all, the structuring and targeted manipulation of the resettled communities in women’s groups, youth groups, professional associations, and so on.76 72  Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Repressive Developmentalism: Idioms, Repertoires, and Trajectories in Late Colonialism’, in Thomas and Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire, 638–​554; Moritz Feichtinger and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Transformative Invasions: Western Post-​9/​11 Counterinsurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism’, Humanity, 13/​1 (2012), 35–​63. 73  Robert Buijtenhuijs, ‘Defeating Mau Mau—​Some Observations on “Counter Insurgency Research” in Kenya during the Emergency’, Sociologische Gids, 19/​5–​6 (1972), 329–​339; Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and ‘the African Mind’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 64–​76; Sloan Mahone, ‘The Psychology of Rebellion: Colonial Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa’, Journal of African History, 47 (2006), 241–​58; Fabien Sacriste, Germaine Tillion, Jacques Berque, Jean Servier et Pierre Bourdieu: Des ethnologues dans la guerre d’indépendance algérienne (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011). 74  Joseph M. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert. Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); David Webster, ‘Development Advisors in a Time of Cold War and Decolonization: the United Nations Technical Assistance Administration, 1950–​59’, Journal of Global History, 6/​2 (2011), 249–​272; Valeska Huber, ‘Introduction: Global Histories of Social Planning’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 3–​15. 75 Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence. 76  TNA, FCO 141/​6227, Note by the Secretary of the War Council, Psychological Warfare Projects proposed by Kikuyu Loyalists and submitted by the Psychological Warfare Staff (War/​C.847), 25 January 1956; Archives Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes, France (henceforth SHD) 1H 4063/​D3,

Strategic Resettlement   461 In addition to a clearer distinction between precursors and parallel cases, the interpretation of late colonial resettlement policy has also changed. Revisionist historiography has corrected the conception of Strategic Resettlement as an example of military restraint or minimum force. There was massive violence, especially during the initial expulsion of affected communities, and coercion continued in the strict surveillance by guards and militias inside the camps. Even more formative in the memories of those affected were forms of indirect, structural violence, such as the catastrophic sanitary conditions, hunger, confinement, and movement restrictions. However illusory it was in practice, ‘hearts and minds’ was not just a cleverly chosen propaganda formula. Late colonial counter-​insurgents considered themselves to be engaged in a predominantly political struggle. They made serious attempts to generate political consent in rural societies, developing reform projects that went beyond a restitution of the colonial order by preparing for more modern forms of interdependence between metropolitan capital and colonial labour and raw materials. Ultimately, they even considered granting civil rights and political participation to colonized groups. The adoption of individual villages or of resettlement policies as a whole by post-​colonial regimes was made possible by this high-​modernist mindset, which was shared by capitalists and communists, colonizers and colonized. It is striking that newly independent states, working with assistance from organizations such as the World Bank, readily adopted the restructured countryside created by resettlement or, for their part, resorted to resettlement themselves as part of large infrastructure projects.77 Recent research on late colonial Strategic Resettlement is characterized by approaches employing comparison, embedding decolonization in larger historic processes and focusing on local agency of colonized populations. The work of scholars who approach decolonization from a comparative angle has proved to be insightful.78 What stands out most are similarities that indicate a common set of ideologies and worldviews in colonial warfare and counter-​insurgency and partially also suggest transfers. Another productive approach is to incorporate Strategic Resettlement into a longer history of rural structural changes precipitated by violent transformation. In part, this entails understanding anti-​colonial uprisings as a sequence of different and distinguishable phases, an approach that allows us both to resolve the contradiction between the repressive and reformist aspects of resettlement policies and to understand the consolidation measures in

Corps d’Armée d’Oran, Directive non diffusé, Les bases de l’Action Psychologique à mener dans les Centres de Regroupement, 28 August 1958; ANOM 81F/​444, Région d’Oran, Cabinet civil et militaire, Regroupements de Populations (N° 1069/​CAB.), 5 November 1959. 77  Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development. Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–​2007 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013); Julia Tischler, Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation. The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 52–​91; Olivia Bennett and Christopher McDowell, Displaced. The Human Cost of Development and Resettlement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 78  Martin Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact. A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008); Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight. Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Christopher Baley and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).

462   Moritz Feichtinger later phases as consequences of the violence and displacement in earlier phases.79 In part, the longue durée perspective also looks to post-​colonial projects of rural restructuring as well as their colonial forerunners, acknowledging the importance of forced displacement as a precondition of many attempts in modernization and state-​building.80 Finally, more recent research specifically explores the agency of resettled communities and individuals.81 Such approaches open up a deeper understanding of the heterogeneous social composition of the affected groups, which could lead to very different reactions and perceptions of resettlement. Such research, which focuses on the impact of forced resettlement on its target populations, also produces new answers to the question of the ultimate outcomes of this policy. Often based on oral history, works interested in the affected communities focus on the cohesion and solidarity of rural societies, where historiography primarily concerned with colonial state or security force actions tends to blame misconceptions, poor planning, or excessive brutality for the failure of resettlement policies. Those resettled communities that sustained their sense of solidarity were better able to cope with the humanitarian consequences of resettlement, making them impervious to the techniques of control and propaganda employed against them.82 Hence the importance of identifying the factors that produce stronger social resilience in conditions of flight and migration and, in turn, how displacement affects societal cohesion. These questions are as pressing for our present as they are for understanding the past.

Select Bibliography Bessel, Richard, and Claudia B. Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Branch, Daniel, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya. Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Branche, Raphaëlle, La Torture et l’armée Pendant La Guerre d’Algérie: 1954–​ 1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). Carruthers, Susan L., Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media, and Colonial Counter-​Insurgency, 1944–​1960 (London; New York: Leicester University Press, 1995). Curless, Gareth, and Martin Thomas (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 79  Karl Hack, ‘The Art of Counterinsurgency: Phase Analysis with Primary Reference to Malaya (1948–​60), and Secondary Reference to Kenya (1952–​60)’, in Thomas and Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict, 177–​196. 80  Christopher Leo, ‘Who Benefited from the Million-​ Acre Scheme? Toward a Class Analysis of Kenya’s Transition to Independence’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 15/​2 (1981), 201–​222; Gary Wasserman, ‘Continuity and Counter-​Insurgency: The Role of Land Reform in Decolonizing Kenya, 1962–​70’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 7/​1 (1973), 133–​148; Daniel Branch, Kenya between Hope and Despair, 1963–​2011 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 89–​98; David W.P. Elliot, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–​1975 (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). 81  John Lonsdale, ‘Editorial: Agency in Tight Corners: Narrative and Initiative in African History’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 13/​1 (2000), 5–​16. 82  Neil MacMaster, War in the Mountains. Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–​1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020): 471.

Strategic Resettlement   463 Elkins, Caroline, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London: Pimlico, 2005). Elliot, David W.P., The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–​1975 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). Harper, Tim N., The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Hautreux, François-​Xavier, La Guerre d’Algérie des harkis, 1954–​ 1962 (Paris: Éditions Perrin, 2013). Johnson, Jennifer, The Battle for Algeria: Sovereignty, Health Care, and Humanitarianism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Khalili, Laleh, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013). Klose, Fabian, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Loh Kok Wah, Francis, Beyond the Tin Mines. Coolies, Squatters and New Villagers in the Kinta Valley, Malaysia, c. 1880–​1980 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988). MacMaster, Neil, Burning the Veil: The Algerian War and the ‘Emancipation’ of Muslim Women, 1954–​62 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). MacMaster, Neil, War in the Mountains. Peasant Society and Counterinsurgency in Algeria, 1918–​1958 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020). Stubbs, Richard, Hearts and Minds in Guerilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency, 1948–​1960 (Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004). Tan, Phee, Behind Barbed Wire: Chinese New Villages during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–​ 1960 (Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre, 2020).

Chapter 24

Gendering Dev e l opme nt an d So cial C ont rol i n t he Iberian E mpi re s i n Africa, 1950s –​197 0s Andreas Stucki Introduction ‘[I]‌t is the woman who produces and transforms the environment in the family and it is the family which transforms and uplifts society . . . ’.1 This excerpt from a report by the Mozambican branch of the Female Portuguese Youth (MPF, Mocidade Portuguesa Feminina) helps explain why colonized women were caught time and again in the cross hairs of coercive development and social control. For centuries female colonial populations have been targeted in myriad ways.2 Even so, the colonial state regularly failed to integrate colonized women within its framework only to rediscover them repeatedly as crucial ‘partners’ who, it was hoped, might stabilize and support imperial domination. For all these continuities, it was in the 1950s and 1960s that ideas of social development were explicitly fused with coercive concepts of social control. One manifestation was the gendered tools of counter-​insurgency condensed into influential manuals that circulated around the globe. 1  This

essay is based on the research for my monograph Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies: Feminizing the Portuguese and Spanish Empire, 1950s–​1970s (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Excerpt from the annual MPF report from Mozambique (1963–​1964), 25 March 1964, Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal (AHU)/​Ministério do Ultramar (MU)/​Direcção-​Geral de Educação (DGEDU)/​Repartição do Ensino (RE)/​M30, cx. 143, proc. 30.2. 2 See Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Indigenous Cooperation: Foundation of Colonial Empires or New Historical Myth?’, in Tanja Bührer et al. (eds.), Cooperation and Empire: Local Realities of Global Processes (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 363–​375; for the early modern period Amélia Polónia and Rosa Capelão, ‘Connecting Worlds: Women as Intermediaries in the Portuguese Overseas Empire, 1500–​1600’, in Bührer at al. (eds.), Cooperation and Empire, 58–​89. For the ups and downs in women’s education in Kenya, see Joanna Lewis, Empire State-​building: War and Welfare in Kenya, 1925–​52 (London: James Currey, 2000), 52–​68.

Gendering Development   465 However, the idea of furthering women’s education within wider development policies designed to sustain imperial control was part of a larger discussion that extended beyond military circles.3 African Women, a twice-​yearly supplement to the British Colonial Review published from 1955, is an illuminating example of how women’s status in colonial societies, their training and education, concerned not only anthropologists and other colonial and development scholars, but late colonial administrations in general. The journal African Women circulated widely among European colonial powers, confirming that late-​colonial authorities paid closer attention to gendered tools of governance and social control.4 In a similar vein, the International Institute of Differing Civilizations (the former International Colonial Institute) dedicated its 1958 conference in Brussels to Women’s Role in the Development of Tropical and Sub-​tropical Countries. In the opening conference address, King Leopold III of Belgium asserted that ‘All economic, social or intellectual progress must . . . be accompanied by an evolution in the status of women’. However, Leopold III still perceived women as an ‘auxiliary in th[e]‌[civilizing] task’, as did the first vice-​chairman of the Institute, the former Portuguese overseas minister (1950–​1955) Manuel Sarmento Rodrigues. Although Sarmento Rodrigues conceded that it would eventually be ‘necessary to grant wom[e]n rights equal to those of m[e]n’, he made clear that this should be achieved in ‘harmony’ with women’s ‘physiological and cultural conditions’.5 On the one hand, conference attendees acknowledged that ‘to neglect the education of one half of the human race’ represented ‘an astonishing waste of human resources’, a fact also highlighted by Pierre Wigny, Belgium’s Minister for Foreign Affairs. On the other hand, male politicians and ‘experts’ took care not to disrupt established gender paradigms, and usually focused on advancing women’s purported soft skills in the social realm and the domestic sphere.6 The contradiction of planning to transform women’s lives in cultural, economic, and political terms while, at the same time, expecting them to maintain traditionally defined roles as wives and mothers and to remain largely subject to men escaped the conservative modernizers’ analysis in Brussels. Equality between women and men in social, cultural, and economic terms was not necessarily the desired outcome of the modernizing endeavour. Improving the status of women was largely conceived in terms of benefits for coming generations. The advantages to be gained by educating women were often conceptualized in an overwhelmingly instrumental sense, their core purpose being to stabilize rapidly changing societies.7 Taking this understanding of furthering women and stimulating socio-​economic ‘development’ in the 3 José Norton de Matos, A nação una: Organização política e administrativa dos territorios do ultramar português (Lisbon: Paulino Ferreira, Filhos, Lda., 1953), 94–​95; Amadeu de Castilho Soares, Política de bem-​estar rural em Angola: Ensaio (Lisbon: JIU, CEPS, 1961), 101–​103. 4  Issue number 3, 1955, of the journal African Women, issued by the Department of Education in Tropical Areas, University of London Institute of Education, can be found among the documents on colonial education in the Portuguese Overseas Archive in Lisbon. See AHU/​MU/​DGEDU/​RE/​C32, cx. 34. 5  See for the quotations INCIDI (ed.), Women’s Rôle in the Development of Tropical and Sub-​Tropical Countries (Brussels: INCIDI, 1959), 9, 16, 27, and Marie-​Hélène Lefaucheux, ‘Le rôle de la femme dans le développement des pays tropicaux et subtropicaux: Aspect social et culturel’, in INCIDI (ed.), Women’s Rôle, 432. 6  For the quotation from Wigny’s welcome address, see INCIDI (ed.), Women’s Rôle, 24. 7  In the ‘Final Recommendations’, the Assembly could not agree on issues such as equal pay for equal work or family planning. See INCIDI (ed.), Women’s Rôle, 529–​532 for the final recommendations.

466   Andreas Stucki colonies into account is essential in order to grasp what motivated official Portuguese and Spanish youth and women’s organizations’ enterprise in Africa’s Iberian colonies from the early 1960s. The Iberian youth and women’s organizations and their activities in the African colonies provide illuminating examples of the ways in which development was gendered in order to further social control. The following sections approach the different forms of coercive development through a gendered lens. Focusing, in part, on the Iberian way of uplifting ‘native women’ in the colonies and, in part, on the overlaps with counter-​insurgency doctrine in general, makes plain that purportedly inoffensive programmes in domestic sciences or childcare were integral to the coercive development schemes of these late colonial states. Shifting attention to the family, the house, and the village as a unit of ‘development’ and indoctrination underlines the point. Ideas of gendered development and social control apply to both Iberian imperial states as well as to the revolutionary modernizers fighting against Portuguese and Spanish colonialism. In order to support the revolution, African women were once again called on to transmit cultural values to the next generation. By juxtaposing revolutionaries’ notions of women’s roles in the envisaged independent societies with the Portuguese and Spanish imperial projects, both continuity and revolutionary rupture become visible. Thus, concepts of ‘women’s advancement’ did not evolve in isolation, but in a broader context of war and violence.

Uplifting ‘Native Women’ At the 1958 Brussels conference on Women’s Role in the Development of Tropical and Sub-​ tropical Countries mentioned above, a young member of the Portuguese delegation, Maria José Salema, gave a paper entitled ‘The Woman in the Portuguese Provinces in Africa’. She argued that the Portuguese task was to empower African women to enable them to ‘fulfil [their] mission’ as genuine and preferably Catholic spouses and mothers. The goal was to teach local girls practical skills in areas like hygiene, nursing, nutrition, and childcare. Yet, for Salema, women were not only the ‘guardians of customs and traditions’; they also occupied a central position in their societies, contributing to ‘peace’ and ‘progress’. Salema’s argument combined earlier concepts of gendered colonial welfare with traditional Portuguese family patterns, all presented in a language of social modernization. Salema’s evaluation provided the arguments for a gendered ‘civilizing mission’ in Portugal’s colonies in Africa, building simultaneously on modern universalist values such as women’s dignity and freedom. Her words practically foreshadowed the United Nations’ slogan of ‘equality, development, and peace’ for women, as ‘important factors in the well-​ being of societies everywhere’ which gained traction shortly after the conference in the 1960s and 1970s.8 What Salema outlined in her paper was effectively a blueprint for a Portuguese programme to acculturate African women to Portuguese-​style domesticity. African women’s 8 Maria

José Salema, ‘Provinces portugaises d’Afrique’, in INCIDI (ed.), Women’s Rôle, 110, 120, 122; The United Nations and The Advancement of Women, 1945–​1996 (New York: Department of Public Information, United Nations, 1996), 5; Barbara Bush, ‘Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism: Gender and the Dynamics of Decolonization’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson

Gendering Development   467 consciousness was to be first awakened, then shaped, and Portuguese ‘sisters’ were to enable them to develop their feminine qualities. Some degree of guidance was considered necessary. Nor was this education and emancipation to go too far. A ‘good woman’ was to fulfil her tasks of ‘being an intelligent companion to and collaborator for her husband’, educating the children, and helping to maintain socio-​political stability, both in the family and the empire.9 This conceptual agenda substantially determined the programme of the state-​sponsored Portuguese Female Youth (MPF) movement as it expanded its activities to the African colonies in the early 1960s. Salema’s paper offered both an ideological outline and a road map for the MPF’s involvement in the overseas territories once legal changes opened the way for the organization to work in Africa. Only a few years after the conference in Brussels, Salema, a language teacher from Mozambique, became the MPF’s first adjunct commissioner responsible for the overseas territories in the organization’s main office in Lisbon.10 A solitary delegate, César García y Fernández Castañón, a legal scholar and historian of international relations, represented Spain at the Brussels conference in 1958.11 Spain’s minimal presence in Brussels might be explained by the fact that the Women’s Section (Sección Femenina, SF), Spain’s official women’s organization, would not initiate new endeavours in ‘Spanish Africa’ until the mid-​1960s. However, its aims and programmes for ‘incorporating’ African ‘women into modern life’ were similar to those of its Portuguese counterpart organization. As the Spanish daily La Vanguardia explained to its readers in 1968, the ‘fundamental mission’ was to advance African women ‘so that they can educate their children within common norms of hygiene [and] culture’. The goal was that ‘tomorrow’ adequately trained African women would disseminate their newly acquired knowledge ‘in an appropriate and positive way’ within their families and societies.12 The road map discussed in Brussels provided the common currency for improving women’s condition in Africa’s Iberian colonies. Underlying the whole argument was the trope of African women as passive creatures who had to be stimulated and instructed.13 The (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2, for the British example. 9  Salema,

‘Provinces portugaises’, esp. 108–​109, 119–​124. For (white) women as the stabilizing force in the British empire in the 1920s, see Barbara Bush, ‘Feminising Empire? British Women’s Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from 1918 to Decolonisation’, Women’s History Review, 25 (2016), 506. 10  ‘Comissária Nacional Adjunta para o Ultramar da M.P.F.’, Boletim Geral do Ultramar, 429–​430 (1961), 222–​224. Born in Mozambique, Salema worked as a language teacher in the Liceu António Enes in the colonial capital of Lourenço Marques. Perhaps the paper she presented in Brussels in 1958 was what got her the job as the representative of the overseas branch of the MPF in Lisbon at the age of only 27. As a descendant of a Portuguese settler family, she was perfectly suited for a MPF career. Salema received her higher education in Lisbon, completing her PhD in Roman Philology with a thesis on a sixteenth-​ century Portuguese cookbook. See António Henrique R. de Oliveira Marques, Daily Life in Portugal in the Late Middle Ages (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 314. 11  Fernández Castañón was a member of the INCIDI. See on the participants the annex to the conference proceedings, INCIDI (ed.), Women’s Rôle, 536 and 538. 12  Juan Mascarell Roig, ‘Importantes realizaciones de la Sección Femenina en el Sájara Español’, La Vanguardia, 8 May 1968, 62. 13  See on the colonial narrative also Barbara Bush, ‘Motherhood, Morality, and Social Order: Gender and Development Discourse and Practice in Late Colonial Africa’, in Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hödl, and Martina Kopf (eds.) Developing Africa: Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-​Century Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 271.

468   Andreas Stucki Portuguese and the Spanish programmes shared a common point of departure in conceiving women as cultural mediators. However, despite frequent collaboration between the two regimes across the Iberian Peninsula from the 1930s onwards, no evidence has yet come to light of informal networks or organizational entanglements between the colonial MPF and SF branches.14 The rhetoric of women’s advancement and social progress might have been in tune with other international rural development schemes, but the official Iberian youth and women’s organizations’ attempts to transform colonial societies and implement some sort of Iberian domesticity in the African territories faced particular obstacles. For one thing, chronic financial restraints dogged the MPF and the SF throughout their history from the 1930s to the mid-​1970s. For another, women from Western Sahara to Mozambique subverted and transformed the alleged offers of ‘education’ and ‘progress’ to suit their needs. In Western Sahara, for example, Sahrawi women managed to obtain both Islamic religious instruction and training in Arabic, which was usually not part of the Spanish (Catholic) educational canon for women.15 Furthermore, colonized women skilfully used the colonial youth and women’s organizations to tap into the empires’ networks of benefits and patronage—​notably, privileged access to state housing and to menial jobs within the Iberian youth and women’s organizations on the spot. Having said that, in the 1960s and 1970s we find small numbers of European women trying to inculcate ‘Iberian’ gender roles in the African colonies beyond the few urban ‘islands of modernity’. Their endeavours embodied a conservative Catholic outlook freighted with some fascistic elements, which, together with their cooking and sewing classes and their courses in home economics, now seem anachronistic. While the visible fascist remnants implemented in the 1930s and 1940s included uniforms and the roman salute, which was still practised in the colonies in the 1960s, the fascist ideological trappings did not go much further than a few slogans displayed in the classrooms. In the Portuguese case, the youth organizations (more closely modelled on the Italian fascist and Nazi-​German ideals of the 1930s) also drew strong criticism from within Salazar’s regime. In 1957, the Portuguese education services considered the MPF’s ‘uniforms, marches, [and] militaristic styles’ outmoded.16 With the outbreak of anticolonial wars in the Portuguese colonies of Angola (1961), Guinea-​Bissau (1963), and Mozambique (1964), the Female Portuguese Youth sensed the opportunity to recover lost ground, restoring its role as the nation’s moral watchdog, albeit overseas.17 Clearly, then, the activities and rhetoric of the MPF and SF did not develop in isolation, but in an environment of war, violence, and states of emergency. In the Western Sahara, gendered restructuring of local society, including forced sedentarization, followed on the heels of the imperial war in Ifni-​Sahara (1957–​1958). After the war, a spate of violent destruction 14 

Maria José Salema, the MPF’s first commissioner for the overseas in Lisbon, confirms this general impression. She could not recall any institutional links at all with the Spanish counterpart within the MPF’s colonial branch when consulted in 2017. 15  For the SF it was quite a relief, however, when their students not only asked for Arabic lessons, but also for instruction in Spanish. 16  See the analysis of the Ministério da Educação Nacional. Gabinete do Subsecretário de Estado, 25 April 1957, Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Arquivo Salazar, AOS/​CO/​ED-​4, doc 1, 2ª subdivisão, fol. 16–​17 (quotation). 17  See for further details Stucki, Violence and Gender, chap. 2.

Gendering Development   469 marked by extensive area bombing, the colonial state focused on community reconstruction in accordance with ‘Iberian values’, placing particular emphasis on the home.18 As the following section elucidates, the Iberian late colonial states aimed to increase their authority over many African families in the 1960s and 1970s in order to stabilize their empires—​or, at minimum, to strengthen their long-​term cultural ties in anticipation of an eventual post-​ colonial partnership. The family was the crucial unit which would guarantee continuity. In the Portuguese and Spanish colonial imagination, it was ‘the family which transforms and uplifts society’. In the politicized domestic colonial space, new mechanisms of control combined indoctrination, dominance, and coercive modernization, blurring the boundaries between cultural repression and open violence.

Development, the New Name for Peace It will come as no surprise that the women’s organizations in the colonies found their core business swiftly transferred to strategic discussions of counter-​insurgency in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the context of combating guerrilla warfare starting in Spanish Sahara in 1955, and soon followed in the Portuguese colonies of Angola in 1961, Guinea-​Bissau in 1963, and Mozambique in 1964, civilian administrators and military officials identified ‘the social development of women’ in the African empires as one of, if not the ‘most important’ concerns of the time.19 Women were perceived as partners whose cooperation in the ‘pacification’ of the ‘overseas provinces’ was indispensable. The Portuguese doctrine on subversive warfare in Africa went furthest in assuming that it was ‘the woman’ who ‘moulds her children’s character and personality’, and that the mother was primarily responsible for their upbringing: ‘Hence, the decisive significance of attracting the woman to our cause’, as one manual lectured. If one could get African women to cooperate, control over tomorrow’s society was secured: that was the message. Hence, ‘[s]‌ecuring her support, winning her over’, was considered ‘an imperative necessity’ that had to be achieved, preferably at little financial cost.20 The expectations about a woman’s role in society portrayed in these texts still confined her to a subordinate role within the allegedly separate sphere of the family household. Military

18  Enrique Bengochea Tirado and Francesco Correale, ‘Modernising Violence and Social Change in the Spanish Sahara’, Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interaction, 44/​1 (2020), https://​doi.org/​ 10.1017/​S01651​1532​0000​042. See for the ‘emergencies’ in the British and French colonies in Africa at the time Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 19  See the interview with Rui Leite [Fugoso], administrator in the Niassa District, Mozambique, in the soldier’s magazine Os Lobos, 20 September 1968. Thanks to Andreas Zeman for sharing this document with me. 20  Centro de Instrução de Operações Especiais (CIOE), ‘Curso de guerra subversiva e Curso de acção psico-​social e política. Bases gerais orientadoras da elaboração das lições dos cursos III Acção Social. 2ª parte. Objectivação da teoria ao caso nacional,’ n.d., 71–​72, AHU/​MU/​Gabinete do Ministro (GM)/​ Gabinete dos Negócios Políticos (GNP)/​60/​Pt. 1. See Keally McBride and Annick T. R. Wibben, ‘The Gendering of Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’, Humanity 2 (2012), 202, 206, 210, for a recent revival of the trope in the US-​led war in Afghanistan.

470   Andreas Stucki strategists agreed that women were critical to the task of stabilizing the empire, but expected them to fulfil their mission submissively. Portuguese discourse and practice reflected the simultaneous presence of a familiar and contradictory view of women’s role in society. This was a binary understanding that can be summed up with the words ‘Power and Pawn’, as two coexisting narratives. In the imperial setting, the Iberian late-​colonial states attributed significance to both European and African women within a broader understanding of their role in colonial ‘pacification’. However, the male-​dominated colonial mind conceptualized women’s ‘power’ in an instrumental sense and continued to perceive women as ‘pawns’ to be strategically moved whenever required in order to counter support for the anticolonial movements.21 In this calculated scheme to integrate women into counter-​subversive efforts, Portuguese strategists could draw upon several recent colonial precedents, for example during the colonial wars fought by the French in Algeria (1954–​1962) or the British ‘Emergency’ in Kenya (1952–​1960).22 Whereas Portuguese officers like Hermes de Araújo Oliveira, author of a key Portuguese counter-​insurgency manual, were fascinated by the French ‘women-​only’ medical and social units deployed in the ‘pacified’ Algerian countryside during the war, the Spanish military did not capitalize in a direct way on this line of thinking. Araújo Oliveira, however, had attended counter-​insurgency training with the French army in Algeria in 1958.23 He then envisaged similar socio-​medical units for the Portuguese colonies, which were to guide and instruct ‘native girls and women’, paving the way for the military to conquer their ‘hearts and minds’. In lectures Oliveira gave in Portugal, he urged young women to ‘take on the robe of a teacher, a nurse, a social assistant’ and join the ranks of the local brigades of psycho-​social action in ‘Portuguese Africa’.24 Araújo Oliveira applied his ‘French experience’ directly to Portuguese counter-​insurgency principles for Angola and Mozambique. Guidelines developed at the recently created Special Operations Centre for Instruction in Counter-​subversive Warfare and Psycho-​social Action and Policies in Lamego, Portugal, further elaborated on the role of these social-​medical units. The Portuguese teams, which were to administer to the colonial population, should be composed of both sexes and include a military doctor, social workers, and nurses. According to the colonizers’ vision, the female nurses in particular would help ‘to win over’ African women to the Portuguese cause. To that end, the guidelines stipulated that the nurses ‘should 21 Ann Pescatello, Power and Pawn: The Female in Iberian Families, Societies and Cultures (London: Greenwood Press, 1976), xiii, 229. 22  Marina E. Santoru, ‘The Colonial Idea of Women and Direct Intervention: The Mau Mau Case’, African Affairs, 95 (1996), 262, 265 (quotation); Ryme Seferdjeli, ‘The French Army and Muslim Women during the Algerian War (1954–​62)’, Hawwa, 1 (2005), 40–​79. See for the further career of the concept, e.g. the US army’s Female Engagement Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan, Synne L. Dyvik, ‘Gender and Counterinsurgency’, in R. Woodward and C. Duncanson (eds.), The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 325–​329. 23  Hermes de Araújo Oliveira, Guerra Revolucionária (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca do Exército, 1965), first published in Lisbon, 1961. On Araújo Oliveira, see Luís Nuno Rodrigues, ‘ “Preparing for the Next War”: The Portuguese Army Staff Corps and the Military Reforms on the Eve of the Colonial Wars’, Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 1 (2012), 125–​27. 24  Hermes de Araújo Oliveira, ‘A missão da mulher no ultramar’, Boletim Geral do Ultramar, 454–​ 455 (1963), 113–​16, 122; Oliveira, Guerra Revolucionária, 274–​275. See, for government policies, Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, África no feminino: As mulheres portuguesas e a guerra colonial (Porto: Afrontamento, 2007), 26–​29.

Gendering Development   471 not, however, be just Europeans’, but also of African descent. A white nurse, it was argued, would show that the ‘European woman’ did not set herself above the Africans in an ‘arrogant way’. On the other hand, an African nurse would demonstrate that the ‘European’ had come to work ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with the community. The advertisement and representation of these social-​medical teams remained a controversial and disputed subject among Portuguese propaganda units, as leaflets of the time illustrate.25 It was expected that ‘native women’ would initially be reluctant ‘to approach the social-​ medical unit’, but once they saw how their ‘children, their husband, their brothers and sisters, their parents, and their neighbours were cured’ of chronic illnesses they would be won over, the counter-​subversive guidelines asserted.26 Portuguese reports from so-​called mobile brigades (Brigadas Móveis), which toured Mozambique’s districts and countryside in a fact-​finding mission in 1962, that is, before the outbreak of the anti-​colonial war, also highlighted the importance of gaining access to the feminine sphere. Still, for all their enthusiasm, Portuguese counter-​insurgency theorists and social practitioners were repeatedly misled by their own gender preconceptions. The Portuguese dictatorship’s construct, with its neatly separated spheres for men and women, did not correspond with social realities in the African colonies. Reports from rural areas suggest that women and children were often among the first to visit the brigades’ encampments—​even in predominantly Muslim northern Mozambique. Notwithstanding this fact, the difficulties in accessing the women’s sphere were emphasized. The assessment was then followed by a call for further female appointments to the brigades.27 Gender stereotypes, in other words, proved stronger than actual reports from the field.28 Prejudice, stereotypes, and gender hierarchies were also mirrored within the mobile brigades themselves. Brigades were usually headed by a male chefe and in several the only female member was the social assistant. As always, gender and race intersected in different ways. Comments in reports on black female assistants emphasized their allegedly ‘rough’ character. These remarks went hand in hand with paternalistic observations: after a period of ‘adaptation’, it was argued, the ‘native’ assistant would purportedly ‘become more caring and 25  As one Portuguese propaganda leaflet on healthcare read: ‘The authorities care for your health and look after your children so that they can grow up healthy and be educated in school and in church. Their goal is the well-​being of your family’. And the handwritten comment in red critically notes regarding the illustration: ‘The impact would be better if the doctor was black and the nurse white’. See AHU/​MU/​GM/​ GNP/​056/​Pt.7 and CIOE’s ‘Curso de Guerra subversive’ for the instructions. 26  CIOE, ‘Curso de guerra subversiva’, 60–​61. 27  See the report on the brigade touring Mozambique’s north among the Makonde: Serviço de Acção Psicossocial. Gabinete Provincial, ‘Relatório da visita às Brigadas Móveis: Feita pelo Inspector do Serviço de Acção Psicossocial, Romeu Ivens-​Ferraz de Freitas. 6 de Agosto a 6 de Outubro 1962’, Lourenço Marques, 28 October 1962, esp. 52–​55, AHU/​MU/​GM/​GNP/​60/​Pt. 1. Similar brigades were active throughout Angola. See for scheme and scope Junta Provincial de Povoamento de Angola (ed.), Brigadas de Promoção e Desenvolvimento Rural (Luanda: JPPA, 1971), 11–​27. See also João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete (1968–​1982): A History of State Resettlement Policies, Development and War’, PhD dissertation, University of Bradford, 1993), 152–​156, 283–​284. 28  For reforms in public health in Angola and Mozambique, see Philip J. Havik, ‘Gendering Public Health: Shifting Health Workforce Policies and Priorities in Portugal’s African Colonies, 1945–​1975’, in Francisco Bethencourt (ed.), Gendering the Portuguese-​Speaking World: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 199–​228.

472   Andreas Stucki more concerned with fostering sympathy’ among the local populations. Finally, Portuguese accounts highlighted that allegedly the ‘elements of colour [felt] perfectly at ease and satisfied with the spirit of camaraderie that reign[ed] in the brigade’. And yet, the reports often stated regarding the job of the social assistants—​preferably a woman of African descent—​that a suitable candidate had yet ‘to be appointed’ or that the ‘designated candidate [had] quit’. Again, local reality did not correspond with abstract prescriptions about the harmonious and ‘multiracial’ nation.29 Gender conflicts also affected the performance of the mobile brigades, at least from an inspector’s point of view. Sexual relationships among members of the brigades working in the field allegedly jeopardized brigades’ ‘good reputation’. All members were advised to display ‘the most exemplary behaviour in all aspects of their life’. However, it was usually the brigade’s female enlistee who faced dismissal for ‘indecent and discrediting behaviour’, while male staff went unpunished.30 Although reports from the field highlighted the key role of women within the teams and promoted multiethnic brigades as an illustration of ‘multiracial’ Portugal, the brigades often reproduced the unequal and gendered power structures characterizing colonial Mozambique. With the outbreak of the war, ‘social action’ became a decisive component of Portuguese counter-​insurgency in Africa. Along with the ‘propaganda of the Portuguese ideology’, social action was identified as key to ‘securing the adhesion of the populations’.31 Overall, counter-​insurgency doctrine with its focus on coercive development framed as social action was in tune with the youth and women’s organization’s programmes.32 Throughout the colonies, girls were to attend feminine centres (centros femininos) every day after school was over. In practice, these centres were still to be created. In theory, though, the girls attending them were to be ‘prepared for their future role as spouses and mothers’. They were expected, in addition, to acquire skills in ‘sewing, needlework, cooking, childcare, and to adopt the norms of hygiene, etc.’. Education in these ‘centres’ envisaged that the girls would become the ‘moral fortress of the household’. These centres and their envisioned activities were almost congruent with the MPF’s extracurricular institutions and social centres.33 The Portuguese manual asserted that, even if in the beginning only a few pupils attended the courses, ‘female curiosity’ would win out and finally all the girls would attend, ‘stimulated by the desire to learn how to live’. And if one could train and instruct about two or three girls in each village, they would disseminate cultural skills and values and teach their peers.34

29  See ‘Relatório da visita às Brigadas Móveis’ for the composition of the brigades in general, and 7 for the quotations. 30  See the comments preceding the ‘Relatório da visita às Brigadas Móveis’. 31  Romeu Ivens Ferraz de Freitas, Conquista da adesão das populações (Lourenço Marques: SCCI, 1965), 194. 32  Gender and counter-​insurgency have only recently received new scholarly attention. See Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘Reconsidering Women’s Roles in the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, 1952–​60’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 160, 169; Dyvik, ‘Gender and Counterinsurgency’, 323, 326; Julia Welland, ‘Gender and “Population-​Centric” Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’, in Simona Sharoni et al. (eds.), Handbook on Gender and War (Cheltenham: Elgar Publishing, 2016), 127–​145. 33  ‘Curso de guerra subversiva’, 70–​74. 34 See Freitas, Conquista da adesão, 206, for a call on the MP/​ MPF to engage in the counter-​ subversive effort in Mozambique.

Gendering Development   473 This argument was not new, consistent as it was with the tenets of colonial instruction for women from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Women from the metropole were also assigned a distinct ‘mission’ in this counter-​insurgency scheme. They were expected to strengthen the home front, giving moral, material, and financial support to the troops, while also fulfilling their generic role as a ‘mother of the soldier’. Furthermore, the presence in the colonies of military men’s wives was considered beneficial as they could assume responsibility for social activities and offer instruction in Portuguese. They could help to prepare African youth ‘of colour or mixed origin’ to become ‘dedicated wives and highly affectionate mothers’. Conceding that not enough had been done to uplift African women hitherto, Portuguese planners and counter-​insurgency strategists were confident that winning African women’s hearts and minds would help guarantee the empire’s existence.35 As a result, reports from Mozambique on ‘uplifting the native populations’ as part of the wider counter-​insurgency effort in the early 1960s called on the MPF to intensify its commitment in the ‘provinces’, even though its structure and organization was still ‘deficient’. At a symposium on counter-​insurgency held in Angola during 1968 and 1969, the planners concluded that the MPF should continue to reach out to rural youth and highlighted the advantages of Portuguese education and culture as stabilizing factors. In practice, the national youth organization proved unable to fulfil these expectations, especially in the rural context. And it seems that it had earned a reputation for ineffective activities in previous years. From Bié, central Angola, it was reported that the state-​sponsored youth organizations were incapable of enhancing opportunities for the youth of the district. The national youth organizations were a failure when it came to educating young people in the rural areas. And, as the provincial secretary for rural development (Secretário Provincial do Fomento Rural) in Angola put it, this was ‘no surprise to anybody’, as the MPF was ‘completely unprepared to do a serious and comprehensive job’.36 More and more, the military took youth policies into its own hands. In order to prevent colonial youth from ‘developing objectionable thoughts’, the army aimed to provide professional education with a strong emphasis on ‘practical’, that is to say, manual skills.37 All the same, the male branch of the national youth organization was a regular guest at provincial meetings on counter-​insurgency issues, thanks to its personal entanglements with the armed forces.38 Interestingly, although a few women worked at the Information Centralisation and Coordination Services in Mozambique, the leaders of the Portuguese Female Youth in the colonies never secured a seat on the steering board of either the Mozambican or the Angolan Information Services or in the counter-​insurgency councils—​whether at a provincial, district, or local level. This, despite the fact that the MPF representatives would have been the 35 

CIOE, ‘Curso de guerra subversiva’, 70–​74; Freitas, Conquista da adesão, 155–​156, 194. the paragraph on rural resettlement in the ‘Acta. Conselho Provincial de Contra-​Subversão. (Conselho Plenário)’, 19 August 1971, 37–​38 (quotation), AHU/​MU/​GM/​GNP/​56/​Pt. 6. 37  CIOE, ‘Curso de guerra subversiva’, 66, 69. 38 Fernando António da Costa Cordeiro Gonçalves, head of the Serviços de Centralização e Coordenação de Informações de Angola (SCCIA), served also as the MP commissioner for Angola. So did his chief MP administrator, Rui da Silva Ferreira Quilherme, who headed the SCCIA delegation. See the MP/​MPF’s staff sheet [1973] in AHU/​MU/​DGEDU/​RE/​C32, cx. 142, proc. 30.6/​73; and Alfredo Rui Gonçalves Pereira to Fernando António Costa Cordeiro de Gonçalves, n.d., ANTT, Mocidade Portuguesa (MP), Secretaria General do Comissariado Nacional (SGCN), cx. 3376, mç. 1, proc.100.3.1, fol. 42. 36  See

474   Andreas Stucki perfect match for the late colonial state’s military planners’ objectives in integrating Angolan and Mozambican women into its widely advertised vision of a multiracial and multiethnic society.39 For the military and social planners, the family was the nucleus that would bring about change, first in the household, then in the village, and in the wider economy. The family and the village were the spaces that would finally help consolidate a new sense of belonging to the allegedly benevolent imperial or ‘pluri-​continental’ nation. In Mozambique, Romeu Ivens-​ Ferraz de Freitas, inspector of the Mozambican Service for Psycho-​Social Action (Inspector do Serviço de Acção Psicossocial), outlined this vision on a small scale in late October 1962. It was soon adapted to become a large-​scale model and—​one could argue—​the centrepiece of Portuguese counter-​insurgency in the African colonies.40 Only a few years later, it was again Ivens-​Ferraz de Freitas who published a manual entitled ‘Winning the Population’s Hearts and Minds’.41 The Portuguese civil and military modernizers perceived carefully groomed pilot families and villages as the nurseries of modernization and pacification, both from a psychological point of view and a traditional military perspective. In the so-​called new villages (aldeamentos) and pilot villages, local militias were supposed to protect these new spaces of ‘scientifically’ grounded social engineering and coercive development, reducing the regular army’s workload and securing the areas where psychological, social, and political action would unfold. Furthermore, life within the new villages, it was argued, would liberate the ‘native masses from the primitivism in which they [had lived]’ so far. This wording in an outline for future aldeamentos in Mozambique (1967) was certainly not congruent with official Lusotropical rhetoric, but as a declaration of intent it offers a glimpse of the immediate, and violent, change that imperial authorities sought. A new environment, one that was easy to control, would bring about the total transformation of ‘native’ societies. What had been destroyed of the traditional lifestyle, including vacated settlements, was supposedly compensated for with new and better values (such as perseverance and affection) as well as new houses. In this regard, the Portuguese offer of development—​a ‘better life’—​would help to ease the transition to modernity.42 In Western Sahara, the Spanish Women’s Section sent their own teams, so-​ called visitadoras sociales, throughout the territory, but focused primarily on the new suburbs of Laayoune and Villa Cisneros (today Dakhla). ‘This group of social assistants’, as official rhetoric had it, ‘detects social, health and cultural problems and helps to solve them . . . ’. The ‘problems’ that the SF personnel from Spain perceived in Sahrawi households during their visits were mostly related to the changes being imposed from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle, from the jaima, the large tent, to new brick houses. A central preoccupation was to 39 The same is true for Spain, where, it seems, the direct integration of women in the counter-​ insurgency effort was hardly considered. The military was not ready to receive female ‘experts’ among their ranks. On the turbulent history of SCCIM, see Sandra Araújo, ‘Shaping an Empire of Predictions: The Mozambique Information Centralization and Coordination Services (1961–​1974)’, in Emmanuel Blanchard, Marieke Bloembergen, and Amandine Lauro (eds.), Policing in Colonial Empires: Cases, Connections, Boundaries (ca. 1850–​1970) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2017), 151. 40  Freitas, ‘Relatório da visita às Brigadas Móveis’, 63–​64. 41 Freitas, Conquista da adesão; Coelho, ‘Protected Villages’, 198. 42  ‘Sugestões para construção futura de aldeamentos’, 27 April 1967, ANTT, SCCIM, nº 1639; Armando Eurico Gonçalves from Inhambane, Mozambique, 31 August 1973, ANTT, SCCIM, nº 1635.

Gendering Development   475 inculcate supposed norms of hygiene—​both within the house and concerning the body—​in short, a new way of life. Allegedly the endeavour never intended to ‘uproot’ anybody from their ‘environment, their religion, family and customs’. Supposedly Sahrawis wanted to join the ‘rhythm of other nations’, that is, modern times. ‘Hence the importance of the education of the native woman’, the SF argued. In their own educational centres in Spain, the Spanish Women’s Section trained young Sahrawis as so-​called divulgadoras rurales. They were expected to disseminate Spanish lifestyle and culture, as well as the modern norms of hygiene, to the remotest corners of the colony. As Enrique Bengochea Tirado explains, for the Spanish colonial power, even Sahrawi’s ‘life at home became a truly imperial enterprise . . . ’.43 Iberian visions of a transformed and gendered future lifestyle for Africans—​from Western Sahara to Mozambique—​have received little attention so far. In societies where women were freed from their customary (agricultural) obligations, such as day-​to-​day field labour, they were thus made ready for new tasks, like ‘sewing’, taking care of the family’s clothing and diet, ‘hygiene in the house and family relations’. The ‘married woman’ would be the centrepiece of a new society, the ‘moral bulwark at home’, and the new housing schemes were the perfect trial system. In 1974, the SF reported on what they considered ‘acceptable’ housing conditions in El Argoub, close to Villa Cisneros at the Atlantic coast. The account highlighted the ‘great improvement in those homes where a family member’ had attended their courses.44 Several female actors were to implement the Iberian dictatorships’ ideals of stable and decent family relations in order to stabilize the colonial societies; the MPF and the SF were two of these groups, and each struggled to meet these expectations in practice. Overall, what from a certain distance might look like a ‘feminine turn’ in colonial governance was something altogether more instrumental: a scheme devised by the Iberian modernizers as a means to an end. Portuguese and Spanish calls for African women’s access to basic education and some sort of social integration were first and foremost elements in a broader security strategy whose ultimate goal remained the preservation of the empire. Adequately ‘educated’ women were thought of as disseminators of particular ‘cultural’ attitudes, who would bring Portuguese or Spanish ‘values’ not only into the daily life of African families, but also into wider colonial society. Still, even this subordinate position opened up new spaces and opportunities for African women—​at least for a chosen few.

The ‘Other’ Modernizers: POLISARIO, MPLA, and FRELIMO In the Portuguese and Spanish colonies in Africa, women’s support in creating a ‘new society’ was a contested field between the imperial and anti-​colonial players. The struggle over 43  See

the correspondence in the folder ‘Gabinete técnico’, Archivo General de la Administración de Alcalá de Henares (AGA), Sección 15 (África), Fondo 24 (Sahara), caja S-​2802; Enrique Bengochea Tirado, La Sección Femenina en la provincia de Sahara: Entrega, hogar e imperio (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2019), 115. 44 See for the Portuguese colonies Gonçalves’ report from Inhambane, 31 August 1973, fol. 64; Oliveira, Guerra Revolucionária, 275. For Western Sahara, see ‘Informe de Aargub’ [1974], AGA, (15)24, caja S-​2801.

476   Andreas Stucki women’s support extended across a wide spectrum of social, cultural, educational, and economic issues. The modernizing freedom fighters of the POLISARIO Front (Frente Popular de Liberación de Saguia el Hamra y Río de Oro), the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and the Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO), as well as the Iberian late colonial states who opposed them, all aimed to transform what were referred to as traditional African societies. The Iberian empires’ schemes for authoritarian transformation in the African colonies were designed to implement, among other goals, purportedly Iberian values and traditions that included models of family life, patriarchal ideas about women’s roles in society, and—​with the exception of Western Sahara—​the propagation of the Catholic faith. All of these were considered pillars of the imagined imperial or pluri-​ continental nation. In a similar vein, the Marxist-​leaning transformation advocated by the main liberation movements included a focus on overcoming cultural ‘prejudices about the role of women’ in African societies.45 In Western Sahara, opposition to Spanish exploitation among young and educated Sahrawis crystallized around Mohammed Bassiri towards the late 1960s. Bassiri’s movement for liberation, Harkat Tahrir, took inspiration from Gandhi’s non-​violent actions in India decades earlier. After Bassiri’s forced disappearance in 1970, following a peaceful protest against Spanish colonialism in the Zemla neighbourhood in Laayoune, a new nationalist liberation movement emerged. Formally constituted as the POLISARIO in 1973, with El-​ Ouali Mustapha Sayed as its first secretary-​general, the liberation front immediately took up arms against Spanish domination. From the movement’s early days, Sahrawi women and teenagers contributed in different ways to anti-​imperial resistance. Young women took on significant roles, visibly shaping anti-​colonial opposition from the early 1970s onwards. A case in point is the organization of the 1970 Zemla protests mentioned above. Ironically, several of the young female activists involved had been trained and educated by the Women’s Section. While Spain aimed to benefit from the ‘new generations of [educated] women’ who would ‘serve as a trigger for social change’ in the territory, the young Sahrawis in fact constituted an important nucleus in the organization of resistance and anti-​ colonial protest. This surprised SF teachers and instructors, their shock replicated within the colonial administration. In Western Sahara, Spanish colonial theorists had agreed that the ‘necessary nationalism’ of the younger generations was to be conveniently channelled’. Yet, in the 1970s, attempts to guide Sahrawi nationalism in controlled orbits were in vain. Once more colonial social engineering proved counter-​productive, paradoxically contributing to unintended outcomes: in this case, the consolidation of anti-​colonial nationalism.46 Only in hindsight did the SF leadership in Western Sahara become aware of the stages by which their pupils leaned towards the independence movement. In 1974, a report analysing 45  See the pamphlet ‘Mozambique and the Mozambique Institute (Brief History)’, 1969, 11; Patrick Chabal, ‘Emergencies and Nationalist Wars in Portuguese Africa’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 3 (1993), 238–​239; Irene Vaquinhas, ‘A família, essa “pátria em miniatura”’, in Irene Vaquinhas (ed.), História da Vida Privada em Portugal, Vol. 3: A época contemporânea (Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 2011), 120–​126; and on the imperial nation, Josep M. Fradera, The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 185–​207. 46  Joanna Allan, Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), 53–​64; ‘Plan de promoción de Sáhara’, Fundación Sur (Madrid), Fondo Documental Luis Rodríguez de Viguri, nº 1881 (quotations).

Gendering Development   477 the previous ten years of Spanish colonial rule in Western Sahara concluded that ‘the woman of this territory not only has influence, she is in command’. Supposedly passive Muslim women were now seen as completely transformed; they had become an independent and confident part of an emerging Sahrawi society, the report conceded. Although the SF took some pride in having allegedly provided the stimulus with their training for the now politically active women, this was certainly not the kind of empowerment they had envisioned for their clientele. SF-​trained women now stood at the forefront of organized agitation for Sahrawi self-​determination.47 There were also several overlaps between the late colonial states and the liberation movements in their adoption of modernizing rhetoric. Accordingly, the revolutionary women’s organizations, particularly the Organization of Angolan Women and the Organization of Mozambican Women, explicitly campaigned against polygamy, bride prices, child marriage, and initiation rites, although for different, ideologically motivated reasons than their imperial counterparts. Such practices were perceived as obstacles to the integration of African women into the revolutionary movement. For the liberation movements, women were to contribute to constructing united, egalitarian, and sovereign nation-​states that would overcome political, cultural, and ethnic divisions. In the end, ‘changing traditional customs’ throughout the imagined national territory was seen as an important element of post-​independence Mozambican and Angolan nation-​building. The common quest for modernity and its implicit integrative promises would also weld the different ethnicities within the territories together—​this was at least the modernizing African nationalists’ vision. To a certain degree, African nationalists and the colonial state pursued similar aims, claiming that their policies were ‘inherently representative of an emergent nation’, be it a sovereign nation-​state or a part of the imperial nation.48 Although those who sought to maintain the imperial nation and those seeking to achieve independence were engaged in armed struggle, the language and concepts employed by the main nationalist liberation movements overlapped with those voiced by official representatives of the empires. FRELIMO representatives attached a similar priority to aiding women in remote and ‘scattered settlements’, as did international development agencies and the former colonial authorities. Community development programmes, now presented as socialist achievements, were to facilitate women’s access to healthcare and education, with literacy training as a first step. Such schemes for rescuing women and fostering a ‘new mentality’ by integrating rural communities into the envisioned nation, as well as the arguments with which they were promoted, sound all too familiar. Belief in modernization and development proved compatible with almost any ideological position.49 As historian 47  María

Concepción Mateo Merino, ‘La situación y actitud política de la mujer sahraui’, October 1974, 4–​6, Real Academia de la Historia, Archivo Documental de ‘Nueva Andadura’, 3ª etapa, carpeta 166, 3–​9. 48 ’Preparação da Segunda Conferência da Organização da Mulher Moçambicana’, Tempo, 318 (1976), 54–​56; ‘Women in Mozambique’, [1980], 4–​5, Hoover Institution Archives, Mozambican Subject Collection, box 1; Miles Larmer and Baz Lecocq, ‘Historicising Nationalism in Africa’, Nations and Nationalism, 24 (2018), 901. 49 See the leaflet ‘Mozambique Women’ in the ‘Rescue Kit’ for Mozambique, edited by the Cooperation Canada Mozambique (Cocamo), Hoover Institution Archives, Mozambican Subject Collection, box 1; ‘Preparação da Segunda Conferência’, 56. For Angola, see O.M.A., The Organisation of Angolan Women (London: Angola Information, 1982); Michael Mahoney, ‘Estado Novo, Homen Novo: Colonial and Anticolonial Development Ideologies in Mozambique, 1930–​ 1977’, in David

478   Andreas Stucki Joseph Hodge reminds us, what was dubbed ‘development became a part of the strategy for managing decolonisation as a shared goal of both colonial officials and African nationalist leaders’.50 In his opening address to the inaugural Mozambican women’s conference in March 1973, Samora Moisés Machel, FRELIMO leader and first president of independent Mozambique, stated that ‘The liberation of women is a fundamental necessity of the revolution, a guarantee of its continuity, a condition of its triumph’. Mozambican women were expected to contribute to the revolution, fulfilling the specific functions assigned to them: giving birth, caring for and raising the next generation of revolutionaries, and thus guaranteeing that socialist ideals would spread and endure throughout Mozambican society. ‘[W]‌omen bear the responsibility for educating new generations, free from tribalism, regionalism and racism, free from the archaic mentality of oppressing women or passively accepting oppression, free from superstition, imbued with our class spirit with an international feeling’, Machel explained. African women were once again called on to transmit cultural values to the next generation.

Perspectives: Coercive Development Building peace in the colonies and ‘supporting the population’ required a new kind of soldier. This new warrior would not be ‘limited’ to using ‘blind destructive force’. Nor, even worse, were they to become an ‘instrument of terror’. Instead, the ideal soldier would fuse with the ‘nation’, visit cafés, bars, neighbourhoods, and suburbs, always ‘in the service of order and progress’. The perfect soldier was a development aid worker in uniform with comprehensive cultural knowledge, including a sensitivity to gender issues, who supported civilians whenever possible and made a difference simply by virtue of his firm will.51 This wishful thinking contrasted with the brutal realities of late-​colonial conflicts in which forced resettlement and massacre were common practice.52 Contrary evidence notwithstanding, when Pope Paul VI referred in a 1967 encyclical to ‘development’ as the ‘new name for peace’, this was grist to the Portuguese colonial mill.

C. Engerman et al. (eds.) Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 165–​ 197; Patrick Chabal, ‘Imagined Modernities: Community, Nation and State in Postcolonial Africa’, in Luís Reis Torgal, Fernando Tavares Pimenta, and Julião Soares Sousa (eds.), Comunidades imaginadas: Nação e nacionalismos em África (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2008), 41–​48. 50  Joseph M. Hodge, ‘Beyond Dependency: North-​South Relationships in the Age of Development’, in Thomas and Thompson (eds.), Ends of Empire, abstract (quotation). 51 Session 2 June 1966 of the Angolan Grupo de Trabalho de Acção Psicológica; ‘Extractos do Plano Inicial de Acção Psicológica’, 1965, both in AHU/​MU/​GM/​GNP/​60/​Pt. 2; Oliveira, Guerra Revolucionária, 259, 238. See Hodge, ‘Beyond Dependency’, for ‘development as a means of retaining [the] empires’ (8). 52  See Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘A Robust Operation: Resettling, Security, and Development in Late Colonial Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Itinerario, 44/​1 (2020), 55-​79, https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S01651​1532​0000​ 054; Mustafah Dhada, ‘The Wiriyamu Massacre of 1972: Its Context, Genesis, and Revelation’, History in Africa, 40 (2013), 45–​75.

Gendering Development   479 Not surprisingly, when the Pope called for comprehensive human development and urged the world’s nations to collaborate more closely to combat growing global social inequality, the Portuguese eagerly exploited this dictum.53 With just a slight twist, the Pope’s pleas would serve to justify their ongoing colonial wars in the African colonies. The Portuguese authorities claimed, for example, that colonial ‘pacification’ was ‘synonymous with progress’. As late as 1970 colonial hardliners insisted that Portuguese armed forces were deployed to Africa to bring ‘economic, social, and cultural progress’. Troops were ‘an instrument of development’. These claims were not new. A decade earlier, Portuguese imperial rhetoric had it that the army was fighting for ‘social justice’ in Africa. Indeed, the Portuguese unashamedly itemized expenditure for their colonial wars in Africa as development aid throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. This sleight of hand turned Portugal into the most important donor country within the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-​operation and Development. Innovative Portuguese statistics supported the fiction of the Iberian country—​itself considered a developing nation—​outspending France and the USA as ‘Partners in Development’, at least when tallied in proportion to their gross domestic product.54 Furthermore, for the Salazarist regime ‘the military effort’ allegedly stimulated progress at home, leading to a win-​win situation for both the African territories and Portugal. Ultimately, so the argument went, the most important goal was to integrate new consumers and producers into the (global) market economy. The tens of thousands of Africans who were experiencing the transition from a subsistence to a market economy would bear witness to the benefits of Portuguese efforts to develop its overseas possessions, planners asserted.55 As these observations indicate, in the Iberian context ‘development’ had sometimes conflicting meanings.56 It could refer to new villages, the reorganization of the rural space, white settlements, or to mega-​infrastructure projects with international involvement such as the vast multinational energy project, the Cabora Bassa Dam, spanning the Zambezi River in Mozambique’s Tete district. Such mega-​projects offered the perfect opportunity both to advertise the Portuguese ‘determination to stay’ in Africa and to showcase ‘a decade of progress’. The hydroelectric project would allegedly ‘bring thousands of African families out of subsistence farming and into the market economy’.57 53  ‘Populorum Progressio. Encyclical of Pope Paul VI on the Development of Peoples’, 26 March 1967, http://​w2.vati​can.va/​cont​ent/​paul-​vi/​en/​ency​clic​als/​docume​nts/​hf_​p-​vi_​enc​_​260​3196​7_​po​pulo​ rum.html. For the overlap of ideas of development with notions of security, see also Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Ordering Resistance: The Late Colonial State in the Portuguese Empire (1940–​1975)’, Political and Social Theory, 33 (2017), 117–​123. 54  Manuel Barão Cunha, ‘A pacificação de Angola é sinónimo de “promoção”’, Permanência, 6 (1970), 10–​11. The booklet by C. da Silva Gonçalves, Reflexões políticas. Na posse da comissão ultramarina da Liga dos Antigos Graduados da M. P., em 19 de maio de 1970, esp. 29–​33, can be found in ANTT, MP/​ MPF (Ultramar), nº 190. Adriano Moreira, Provocation and Portugal’s Reply (Lisbon: Agência-​Geral do Ultramar, 1961), 20; Patricia Honlger, Den Süden erzählen: Berichte aus dem kolonialen Archiv der OECD (1948–​1975) (Chronos: Zurich, 2019), 119–​125, 210–​212. 55  Gonçalves, ‘Reflexões políticas’, 29–​33. 56 See Cláudia Castelo, ‘  “Novos Brasis” em África: Desenvolvimento e colonialismo português tardio’, Varia História, 30/​53 (2014), 509, for the late career of the term in the Portuguese case, and Joseph M. Hodge, ‘Epilogue: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead’, in Hodge, Hödl, and Kopf (eds.), Developing Africa, 376. 57  See the pamphlet Portugal, 1961–​1971: A Decade of Progress (Lisbon: The Overseas Companies of Portugal, Anuário Comercial, [1972]), 3; Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Dams, Displacement,

480   Andreas Stucki In the Spanish case, the term ‘development’ was also used to describe similar infrastructure projects, such as the construction of ports in Ifni and Sahara. But, while similar in scope, they were not similar in scale.58 Nonetheless, both colonial powers invested time and funds in presenting these landmarks of ‘development’ to local, national, and international audiences. Visual and aesthetic representations were a defining component of the discourse. Aerial views of industrial installations, such as oil refineries or cement plants,59 and documentary films about ongoing projects, became important instruments in promoting the development agenda.60 ‘Development’ was also the term invoked to describe the cultural and social transformation of local communities—​be it the agricultural and settlement experiments in the Angolan Andulo area, the (forced) sedentarization of nomads in Western Sahara, or the provision of access to water, healthcare, and education in rural settings in Mozambique. Last but not least, the omnipresent claims about ‘uplifting the native woman’ were pervasive in all development plans that would purportedly improve the African condition—​all in the name of peace, of course.61 Indeed, what was called modernization was the rallying cry throughout the respective territories in the 1960s and 1970s, regardless of the markedly different ideological positions voiced by the imperial authorities on the one hand, and by nationalist revolutionaries on the other. Belief in modernization and coercive development proved compatible with almost any ideological position. Generations of (mostly male) historians have constructed the narrative of irrational Iberian dictatorships, which stubbornly held onto their colonial possessions until the 1970s. Although this might seem out of kilter with wider patterns of decolonization, closer analysis shows that Portugal and Spain did not pursue a ‘special path’. When it came to gendered development and social control, the Iberian dictatorships were orientated towards the guidelines (or at least the rhetoric) of international organizations—​be it the World Bank with its developmental discourse or, in the Portuguese case, the military paradigms of NATO partners. The Iberian nations also adopted UN directives regarding the status of women, which from the 1950s onwards increasingly referred to the contribution that women might make to peace and development in their respective societies. Of course, there were still many peculiarities to highly militarized Portuguese and Spanish late colonialism. And yet, to the mid-​1970s the late colonial states were less at variance with European development agendas than might be imagined. and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–​2007 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2013), for the dam scheme and its impact. 58  For

Spain staging colonial mega projects in films and photos, see Vicente Caffarena Aceña, ‘Las obras portuarias en las provincias de Ifni y Sáhara’, Archivos del Instituto de Estudios Africanos, 78 (1966), 73–​90. 59  See photographs of ‘modern’ Luanda (1960s and 1970s) in ANTT, MPF (Ultramar), nº 185, fols. 101–​115. 60  Related information on the propaganda film ‘Angola na Guerra e no progresso’ (1971), in AHU/​ MU/​GM/​GNP/​56/​Pt. 5. 61 ‘Relatórios sobre a elevação da população nativa dos Governos dos Distritos de Gaza, Inhambane, Manica e Sofala, Zambézia, Tete, Moçambique, Cabo Delgado e Niassa, referentes ao 1o trimestre do corrente ano’ [1962], 3, 9, AHU/​MU/​GM/​GNP/​60/​Pt. 1. I am paraphrasing James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Gendering Development   481

Select Bibliography Allan, Joanna, Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Araújo, Sandra, ‘Shaping an Empire of Predictions: The Mozambique Information Centralization and Coordination Services (1961–​1974)’, in Emmanuel Blanchard, Marieke Bloembergen, and Amandine Lauro, eds., Policing in Colonial Empires: Cases, Connections, Boundaries (ca. 1850–​1970) (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2017), 137–​158. Bengochea Tirado, Enrique, and Francesco Correale, ‘Modernising Violence and Social Change in the Spanish Sahara’, Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interaction, 44/​1 (2020), 33–​54, https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S01651​1532​0000​042. Bush, Barbara, ‘Motherhood, Morality, and Social Order: Gender and Development Discourse and Practice in Late Colonial Africa’, in Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hödl, and Martina Kopf, eds., Developing Africa: Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-​Century Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 270–​292. Coelho, João Paulo Borges, ‘Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete (1968–​1982): A History of State Resettlement Policies, Development and War’, Ph.D dissertation, University of Bradford, 1993. Havik, Philip J., ‘Gendering Public Health: Shifting Health Workforce Policies and Priorities in Portugal’s African Colonies, 1945–​1975’, in Francisco Bethencourt, ed., Gendering the Portugues-​Speaking World: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 199–​228. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, ‘A Robust Operation: Resettling, Security, and Development in Late Colonial Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Itinerario, 44/​1 (2020), 55–​79, https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​ S01651​1532​0000​054. Mahoney, Michael, ‘Estado Novo, Homen Novo: Colonial and Anticolonial Development Ideologies in Mozambique, 1930–​ 1977’, in David C. Engerman et al., eds., Staging Growth: Modernization, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 165–​197. Stucki, Andreas, Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies: Feminizing the Portuguese and Spanish Empire, 1950s–​1970s (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Thomas, Martin, ‘Grand Narratives: Decolonisation and its Wars’, War and Society, 41/​4 (2022), https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​07292​473.2023.2150​480.

Chapter 25

Disc ourse s of Devel opm e nt a nd Pr actices of P u ni sh me nt Britain’s Gendered Counter-​Insurgency Strategy in Colonial Kenya Katherine Bruce-​L ockhart and Bethany Rebisz Introduction In July 1954, Jane Muthoni Mara was arrested for being a ‘Mau Mau sympathiser’.1 Approximately fifteen years old at the time, Jane spent the next three and a half years in prisons and detention camps throughout central Kenya. Run by the British colonial government, these sites were a key part of the counter-​insurgency strategy against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA). While it is widely referred to in the literature as the ‘Mau Mau’, the authors have opted to refer to this group as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, as this was the name used by members of the movement itself, while ‘Mau Mau’ was the label ascribed by the British. At the time of Jane’s arrest, the KLFA were amid a multiyear guerrilla struggle, fighting for the return of their land from the White settler population.2 The government’s response was marked by brutal violence and mass punishment. A State of Emergency was declared in 1952, and, by the time it was lifted in 1960, over one hundred 1  The authors would like to thank Stacey Hynd for reviewing an earlier draft of the chapter and for offering us generous feedback and knowledge. Witness Statement of Jane Muthoni Mara, 4 November 2010, Case No. HQ09X02666, accessed 17 February 2020, available at: https://​www.leigh​day.co.uk/​Leigh​ Day/​media/​Leigh​Day/​docume​nts/​Mau%20Mau/​Claim​ant%20sta​teme​nts/​Jane-​Muth​oni-​Mara-​WS-​-​ Final-​-​.pdf, 9–​10. 2  The capitalization of racial identifiers in this article is informed by the National Association of Black Journalists, ‘Statement on Capitalizing Black and Other Racial Identifiers’, 11 June 2020, https://​nab​jonl​ ine.org/​blog/​nabj-​statem​ent-​on-​capit​aliz​ing-​black-​and-​other-​rac​ial-​iden​tifi​ers/​

Discourses of Development    483 thousand Kenyans had been detained or imprisoned for allegedly violating Emergency regulations, upwards of one million forced into strategic resettlement sites, and over one thousand hanged.3 Jane, her family, and her community were among the many Kenyans impacted by this conflict. Her brother was a member of the KLFA and actively fought in the insurgency, while her family and others in her village in the Embu region were part of the network that provided food, supplies, and information to the KLFA.4 In 1953, the community was punished for this, forced to ‘demolish and burn’ their homes and relocate to a ‘strategic village’.5 Here, they experienced hard labour, interrogation, and abuse at the hands of the ‘Home Guards’—​ the African militia who worked for the British. After her arrest, Jane was taken to Gatithi Screening Camp, where she experienced physical and sexual torture and was charged with membership of the KLFA.6 Over the next few years, Jane was held in four other prisons and camps, where she was continuously subjected to violence, forced labour, and horrible living conditions. In 2011, Jane recounted her experience in London’s Royal Courts of Justice as a claimant in an unprecedented case between the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and Kenyans detained during the counter-​insurgency.7 Along with testimonies from Jane and her coclaimants, evidence came from archival documents uncovered by historians and forcibly released due to the case. Hidden away due to the ‘sensitive’ nature of their contents, these files—​part of a wider collection of ‘migrated’ archives that the British removed from its colonies prior to independence—​demonstrated the systematic use of torture and other forms of abuse in the camps.8 Faced with such evidence, the FCO settled the case in 2013, resulting in a total of 19.9 million pounds compensation for the 5,228 claimants, the funding of a memorial in Kenya, and a statement of regret from the British government.9 Speaking to Parliament following the settlement, Foreign Secretary William Hague acknowledged that ‘Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration’.10 He emphasized the ‘shocking level of violence’ and the ‘brutality’ of the ‘repressive measures used’ during the counter-​insurgency.11 3 

Cora Ann Presley, ‘The Mau Mau Rebellion, Kikuyu Women, and Social Change’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 22/​3 (1998), 512. On detention, see: Caroline Elkins, ‘Alchemy of Evidence: Mau Mau, the British Empire, and the High Court of Justice’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39/​5 (2011), 737–​739. On strategic resettlement, see: Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), xv. On capital punishment, see: David M. Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Phoenix, 2006), 354. 4  Witness Statement, 5. 5  Ibid., 7. 6  Ibid., 9–​13. 7  David M. Anderson, ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and the “Lost” British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39/​5 (2011), 699–​7 16. 8 Tony Badger, ‘Historians, a Legacy of Suspicion and the “Migrated Archives”’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012), 799–​807. 9 ‘Statement to Parliament on settlement of Mau Mau claims’, William Hague, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 6 June 2013, accessed 17 February 2020, available at: https://​www.gov.uk/​gov​ ernm​ent/​news/​statem​ent-​to-​par​liam​ent-​on-​set​tlem​ent-​of-​mau-​mau-​cla​ims. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

484    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz As Jane’s experience attests to, the British sought to monitor, control, and punish women’s and girls’ involvement in the KLFA. This chapter examines the counter-​insurgency tactics used against females in Kenya, focusing on the strategic villages and detention camps—​the primary places that women encountered state efforts to limit and punish their involvement. It also pays attention to the gendered dimensions of these tactics. By gender, we are referring to the social construction of masculine, feminine, and non-​binary identities. The issue of how to deal with women has been central to counter-​insurgency strategies, from other colonial African cases such as Algeria and Angola, to more contemporary examples such as Afghanistan. As Laleh Khalili argues, ‘Counterinsurgency doctrine and practice directly bring those bodies and spaces previously coded as “private” or “feminine”—​ women, non-​combatant men, and the spaces of the “home”—​into the battlefield’.12 There is an ever-​growing literature on female participation in liberation struggles and how counter-​ insurgency measures have been designed to combat these branches of insurgent groups.13 The use of oral history methodologies has been a key strength of this scholarship, particularly in works by Natalya Vince and Emily Bridger. Their use of oral history has not only foregrounded women’s voices in conflict narratives, but has also demonstrated their varied experiences in relation to conflict, activism, and punishment.14 This chapter adopts a similar approach, drawing on both oral and written accounts of women to gain insight into their experiences, which challenge the progressive and developmental rhetoric of the colonial archive. In determining how counter-​insurgents have responded to female participation in insurgencies, scholars are increasingly exploring the impact of development work.15 During the post-​Second World War period, colonial powers tried to secure their interests and control decolonization. Coined by D.A. Low and John Lonsdale as the ‘second colonial occupation’, this predominantly involved the social and economic ‘modernization’ of colonial states, which ostensibly readied them for ‘self-​government’.16 Britain began playing a more active role in promoting the welfare of its colonial subjects, initiating schemes of social engineering

12 Laleh

Khalili, ‘Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency’, Review of International Studies 37/​4 (2011), 1474. 13  See, for example: Yolande Bouka, ‘Women, Colonial Resistance, and Decolonization: Challenging African Histories’, in: O. Yacob-​Haliso and T. Falola (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); Tanya Lyons, Guns and Guerilla Girls: Women in the Zimbabwean National Liberation Struggle (Trenton, NJ: Africa Research & Publications, 2004); Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki become You? The Militarization of Women’s Lives (London: Pandora Press, 1988). 14  Emily Bridger, ‘Soweto’s Female Comrades: Gender, Youth and Violence in South Africa’s Township Uprisings, 1984–​1990’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 44/​4 (2018), 559–​574; Natalya Vince, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954–​2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 15  See, for example: Barbara Bush, ‘Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism: Gender and the Dynamics of Decolonization’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of The Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Moritz Feichtinger, ‘ “A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72. 16  D.A. Low and John Lonsdale, ‘Introduction: Towards the New Order 1945–​1963’, in D.A. Low and Alison Smith (eds.), History of East Africa Vol III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 12–​13.

Discourses of Development    485 designed to produce the ‘minimization of sources of internal dissent’.17 These programmes codified welfare and social work as feminine and targeted women in their roles as mothers and gatekeepers to reforming the rest of the community. While Britain led the way in terms of gendering development in this period, other imperial powers adopted this ‘gendered form of welfare colonialism’ in tandem with the ‘repressive developmentalism’ used to respond to anti-​colonial insurgencies.18 Andreas Stucki, for example, shows how Spain and Portugal focused on ‘ “lifting up” African women and fostering their social advancement’ in response to insurgencies in places such as Angola, Mozambique, and Western Sahara. ‘What was termed development’, he argues, ‘was closely connected to gendered ideas about control and domination’.19 Focusing on the ways that Kenya was both representative of these broader trends and also a unique case, this chapter makes three main arguments. First, it argues that the British response to KLFA women was shaped by racialized notions of respectable and deviant femininity. British views on masculinity and femininity during the Emergency Period largely mapped on to wider trends observed by feminist scholars of war and violence: men were viewed as the agents of violence, whereas women were seen as inherently peaceful.20 Kenyan women’s involvement in the KLFA disrupted these gender dichotomies. Deviant categories were further shaped by racist stereotypes. Kenyan men’s involvement in the KFLA aligned with colonial beliefs about the hyper-​aggression of African males, whereas KFLA women were often viewed as sexually promiscuous, mentally ‘unsound’, or as ‘dangerous’ due to their status as ‘witches’.21 In the view of the British, these females were deviant on multiple levels, as they were not only engaging in an anti-​colonial insurgency, but were also undermining the gender norms and racial hierarchies that were central to the operation of colonial power. As has been demonstrated in many other counter-​insurgency contexts, punishment was also gendered.22 Sexual abuse and torture was often used to punish those suspected of KFLA

17  Miguel

Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Repressive Developmentalism: Idioms, Repertoires, and Trajectories in Late Colonialism’, in Thomas and Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of The Ends of Empire, 539–​540. 18  Andreas Stucki, Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies: Feminizing the Portuguese and Spanish Empire, 1950s–​1970s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 12; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘A Robust Operation: Resettling, Security, and Development in Late Colonial Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Itinerario, 44/​1 (2020), 55. For a longer history of development in Africa, see Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon, The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 19 Stucki, Violence and Gender, 12. 20 See, for example: Laura Sjoberg and Caroline Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women’s Violence in Global Politics (New York: Zed Books, 2007); Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 21  Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘“Unsound” Minds and “Broken” Bodies: The Detention of “Hardcore” Mau Mau Women at Kamiti and Gitamayu Detention Camps in Kenya, 1954–​1960’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 8/​4 (2014), 590–​608; UK National Archives (UKNA), PRO FCO/​141/​6324/​25/​1, ‘Hard Core Female Detainees’, from K. Warren-​Gash to Secretary of State for Community Development, 2 August 1957. 22  Raphaëlle Branche, ‘Sexual Violence in the Algerian War’, in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Bridger, ‘Soweto’s Female Comrades’.

486    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz involvement, and the rape of Kenyan females was widespread within the camps, in strategic villages, and beyond these spaces.23 Secondly, while to some extent representative of broader trends, Kenya offers a unique case when it comes to gendered counter-​insurgency strategies. The colonial state specifically designed spaces—​detention camps and strategic villages—​to control and punish women en masse. Approximately 8,000 women and girls were detained, and the majority of 1.2 million Kenyans in the strategic villages were females. While many colonial states targeted female insurgents, these gendered geographies of coercion were more pronounced in Kenya than anywhere else. Furthermore, the colonial administration justified these sites as spaces to ‘advance’ women and turn them into pillars of social order. The development work directed at them was an established approach used elsewhere, demonstrating the pervasiveness of these gender stereotypes across imperial regimes. Finally, this chapter argues that violence, in its multiple dimensions, was not simply an outcome of counter-​insurgency development schemes in Kenya, but was rather intrinsic to them. Colonial officials sought to carefully code and categorize their counter-​insurgency efforts, presenting villagization and the rehabilitation programme in the camps as part of their wider ‘civilizing mission’. Violence—​which, in the colonial view, was narrowly defined as physical—​in these sites was presented as incidental or aberrant.24 While the High Court case and recent scholarship demonstrated that physical violence was used systematically in Kenya, other forms—​such as symbolic and structural violence—​were also fundamental to colonial counter-​insurgency strategies.25 From this perspective, colonial violence—​in Kenya and elsewhere—​can never be denied, minimized, or confined to specific sites or practices, but is rather, as Frantz Fanon argues, visible as the ‘natural state’ of colonialism.26

‘Keeping Mau Mau Alive’: Women in the KLFA At the outset of the Emergency, the British assumed that Kenyan women would remain on the sidelines. As feminist scholarship on warfare has demonstrated, women are often portrayed as non-​violent, tied to domestic spaces, and in need of male protection.27 These stereotypes had endured in Kenya despite the active involvement of Kenyan women in colonial politics, including protests against the arrest of politician and anti-​colonial activist

23  David M. Anderson and Julianne Weis, ‘The Prosecution of Rape in Wartime: Evidence from the Mau Mau Rebellion, Kenya 1953–​60’, Law and History Review, 36/​2 (2018), 267–​294. 24  David M. Anderson, ‘British Abuse and Torture in Kenya’s Counter-​insurgency, 1952–​1960’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012), 701. 25  Samuel Kalman, ‘Introduction: Colonial Violence’, Historical Reflections, 36/​2 (2010), 1–​6; Nancy Scheper-​Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, ‘Introduction: Making Sense of Violence’, in Nancy Scheper-​ Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (eds.), Violence in War and Peace: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 1–​27. 26  Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weindenfeld, 1963), 60. 27 Elshtain, Women and War.

Discourses of Development    487 Harry Thuku in 1922 and bans on female circumcision, as well as women’s membership in the Kikuyu Central Association and the Kenya African Union.28 By 1953, it was clear that Kenyan women were playing a variety of significant roles in the KLFA. The District Commissioner of Kiambu characterized women as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the movement.29 Drawing upon the highly charged terminology used by colonial officials towards the KLFA, he noted that the ‘part played by women to aid the terrorists is considerable’.30 Thomas Askwith, the Commissioner of Community Development, shared this view. In a speech that same year, he discussed women’s roles, commenting, ‘It is believed that at the present time they are keeping Mau Mau alive’.31 By that point, there was evidence of at least one hundred women in the forests.32 Some played a supporting role, but others were actively involved in the fighting. The most famous, Muthoni wa Kirima, rose to the rank of Field Marshal and remains a heroic figure in postcolonial Kenya.33 Others were civilian leaders, serving on the KLFA councils and courts.34 The most common role for women, however, was in what the British termed the ‘passive wing’: a network who provided food, supplies, and intelligence for the forest fighters. Jane Muthoni Mara was actively involved in this network. ‘I was given the lead role of co-​ordinating the women and girls in the village to provide the Mau Mau with food, water and wash their clothes’, she testified.35 As evidence of women’s involvement in the KLFA emerged, colonial officials agreed that a more robust response was needed. The Kenya Intelligence Committee made the stakes clear in a memorandum in 1954: ‘Unless the Kikuyu, Embu, and Meru women receive attention similar to that accorded to their menfolk, the operational aspect of the Emergency will be prolonged unnecessarily’.36 Similarly, Askwith argued that it was ‘more important to rehabilitate the women than the men if the next generation is to be saved’, demonstrating the official link between women and the stabilization of social order.37 The decision to establish strategic villages and the female-​only detention camps was meant to undermine the crucial role that women were playing in the KLFA. 28  Audrey Wipper, ‘Kikuyu Women and the Harry Thuku Disturbances: Some Uniformities of Female Militancy’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 59/​3 (1989), 300–​337; Lynn M. Thomas, Politics of the Womb: Women’s Reproduction and the State in Kenya (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 29 

Kenya National Archives (KNA) DC/​KBU/​1/​44, ‘Kiambu District Annual Report, 1953’.

30 Ibid.

31  Rhodes

House, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS. Afr.s. 2166, T. Askwith, ‘Mau Mau: Was it Really Necessary?’, 1994. 32  UKNA PRO FCO 141/​6244/​1/​1, Ministry of Defence, ‘Female Mau Mau Terrorists, Memorandum by the Kenya Intelligence Committee’, 4 November 1954. For more on women’s roles, see Tabitha Kanogo, ‘Kikuyu Women and the Politics of Protest: Mau Mau’, in S. MacDonald, P. Holden, and S. Ardener (eds.), Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-​cultural and Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987), 78–​96 and Cora A. Presley, Kikuyu Women, The Mau Mau Rebellion and Social Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). 33 Soni Kanake, ‘I Do Not Regret Fighting for this Country: Muthoni Kirima’, Daily Nation, 3 December 2019, accessed 18 February 2020, available at: https://​www.nat​ion.co.ke/​news/​Muth​oni-​Kir​ ima-​recou​nts-​life-​as-​Mau-​Mau-​hero/​1056-​5383​934-​for​mat-​xhtml-​wxrm​2vz/​index.html 34 Kanogo, Kikuyu Women, 94. 35  Witness Statement, 6. 36  UKNA PRO FCO 141/​6244/​1/​1, ‘Female Mau Mau Terrorists’. 37  UKNA PRO CO 822/​794/​1, ‘Rehabilitation’, 6 January 1954.

488    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz

‘If You Educate a Woman You Are Educating the Whole Family’: Community Development Colonial administrators enforced social responsibility onto Kenyan women, with one arguing that ‘if you educate a man you educate one person only, whereas if you educate a woman you are educating the whole family’.38 Villagization offered the opportunity to extend these efforts. The colonial government’s villagization policy—​now more aptly understood as strategic resettlement—​was a key aspect of the counter-​insurgency campaign. The administration designed the policy—​which was directly developed from a similar tactic imposed during the Malayan Emergency (1948–​1960)—​in 1953 and introduced it across central Kenya by 1954.39 Through its implementation, mainly Gikuyu, Embu, and Meru populations were forcibly resettled into enclosed villages under the control of colonial officers and Home Guards.40 It has been estimated that 1.2 million Kenyans were moved into strategic villages, where they lived for five to seven years.41 Though strategic resettlement served a purpose in protecting Kenyan loyalists from potential KLFA attacks, it was primarily applied as a form of collective punishment and population control over the ‘passive-​wing’.42 The so-​called villages separated the rural civilian population from armed insurgents, severing ties of communication and the transfer of supplies. These spaces were characterized by a high degree of surveillance, containment, ‘communal’ labour, and social engineering strategies. Primarily populated by Kenyan women, coercive development practices in these sites were highly gendered. The use of strategic resettlement as part of a counter-​insurgency campaign has recently benefitted from a flurry of academic inquiry.43 Moritz Feichtinger’s seminal study of Britain’s villagization process during the Emergency Period has encouraged scholars to reframe our understanding of this measure. In his analysis, Feichtinger approaches strategic resettlement both in its military and social contexts. On the one hand, it was a fundamental strategy to separate civilians from insurgent fighters; on the other hand, it provided an opportunity for social ‘reform’, supporting the broader agenda of the ‘second colonial occupation’.44 38 KNA DC/​ KMG/​1/​1/​178, ‘Community Development, Homecraft and Women Institutes; 1956–​ 59’, 158. 39 Feichtinger, A Great Reformatory, 46; Weston Library, Oxford, Mss. Afr.s.2100, ‘Thomas Askwith, Correspondence’, 35–​36. 40 Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 234–​235. 41 Feichtinger, A Great Reformatory, 46. 42 Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 107–​108. 43  See, for example: Moritz Feichtinger, ‘Strategic Villages: Forced Relocation, Counter-​Insurgency and Social Engineering in Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​62’, Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2017); David French, ‘Nasty not Nice: British Counter-​Insurgency Doctrine and Practice, 1945–​1967’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012); Heike I. Schmidt, Colonialism and Violence in Zimbabwe: A History of Suffering (Oxford: Boydell & Brewer, 2013); Ian Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-​ Insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London: Routledge, 2001); James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 44 Feichtinger, Strategic Villages, 138.

Discourses of Development    489 Military strategists used community development programmes in the strategic villages as tools to pacify and domesticate insurgent populations.45 The colonial administration described community development, which replaced earlier ‘welfare’ initiatives, as a means of providing adult education in ‘agriculture, animal husbandry, health, Local Government and homecrafts’, which were deemed skills required for ‘everyday life’.46 Despite its importance, the position of community development in Britain’s counter-​insurgency campaign has been neglected in studies of this conflict, with prominence being given to military analyses and more recently to the human rights abuses revealed through the High Court case.47 The introduction of community development initiatives signified the expansion of Britain’s rehabilitation programme in the villages and deserves further investigation. Despite fears that wide-​scale villagization across the central region of Kenya would foster greater resentment toward the government and an increase of disease-​spreading, the immediate military benefits of the strategy outweighed these concerns.48 With the military situation now under control in 1955, Askwith believed it was time to start ‘building up a satisfactory community life’ in the strategic villages.49 This involved the remodelling of house structures as well as the forming of local governments to enhance community life and sanitary facilities.50 In practice, the memories of former ‘villagers’ have centred on forced labour, severe malnutrition, violence, and, more specifically, sexual violence.51 While the prevalence of sexual violence against women in this conflict is documented in oral history accounts and published memoirs, the release of the ‘migrated archive’ has shed light on the colonial administration’s complicity in this abuse.52 As demonstrated by David Anderson and Julianne Weis, investigations of rape in the strategic villages ‘were frequently conducted by colleagues of the accused’.53 While some offenders were reported, trialled, and punished, the dominant view among colonial officials was that these prosecutions did more harm ‘to the morale of the security services and undermined the counter-​insurgency campaign’.54 The colonial government viewed women as vital players in improving community life in the strategic villages. More importantly, however, they were now recognized as key actors in the conflict. Despite this newfound awareness of women’s roles, the government

45 Patricia Owens, Economy of Force: Counterinsurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 24, 207. 46  KNA XH/​11/​7, ‘Reports: Annual Report for the Ministry of Community Development; 1956’, 1. On welfare, see: Joanna Lewis, Empire State Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925–​52 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000). 47  ‘Statement to Parliament on settlement of Mau Mau claims’. 48 Feichtinger, A Great Reformatory, 52–​53. 49  National Museums of Kenya, Gladys Sybil Bazette Beecher Collection, GSSB/​24, ‘Re: Sociological Committee, Sunday Papers, Committee Reports and Minutes, Re: Emergency’. 50 Ibid. 51 Interviews with Sophia Wambui Kiarie, Agnus Wanjiru Mwangi, Grace Mwathe, Grace Njoki Kanguniu, Susan Wanjiru Giteru, John Mwangi Stephen, Leah Nyaguthia Kariuki and Esther. (Upon her request, Esther’s full name is not included.) See, for example: Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, chap. 8. 52  For memoirs, see, for example: Wambui Waiyaki Otieno, Mau Mau’s Daughter: A Life History (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998). For documented oral history accounts, see, for example: Elkins, Imperial Reckoning. 53  Anderson and Weis, ‘The Prosecution of Rape in Wartime’, 282. 54  Ibid., 282.

490    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz characterized their participation as a ‘product of male persuasion’.55 While a physical wedge between women and the forest fighters was believed to have been secured through villagization, a psychological wedge was now needed to give women ‘something to think about as an alternative to subversion and/​or politics’.56 Officials believed that re-​education as well as the restoration of moral—​preferably Christian—​values was the solution to this subversion.57 Colonial development policies were promoting ‘the modernisation of gender roles and relations’ since the 1920s, specifically education for mothers and wives.58 Joanna Lewis, however, argues that the Colonial Office refocused its social policies in the 1940s to manage ‘African male social deviance and urban disorder’, forcing women’s issues to the side.59 While the belief remained that supporting the ‘essential conditions for family life’ was necessary in preventing male anti-​social behaviour, Lewis contends that men were reprivileged as ‘bearers of social welfare’.60 It was in the context of the intensifying late-​colonial insurgencies that there was a resurgence to centre women at the heart of community reform. By the 1950s, welfare and socioeconomic advancement policies were redirected at women in hopes of minimizing discontent.61 An important branch of this work was the introduction of Maendeleo ya Wanawake clubs in the strategic villages. Maendeleo ya Wanawake (KiSwahili: Women’s Progress) had originally been founded in the 1940s for women involved in the Jeanes School, an adult education institution.62 The organization was formally established as a movement by the colonial government in 1952, with the proclaimed aim of encouraging the ‘advancement of African women’.63 The organization reported to the Department of Community Development and Rehabilitation and worked closely on programmes focused on boosting ‘self-​help’ among African women during the Emergency Period.64 Classes run by Maendeleo centred on home governance.65 Kenyan women attended training sessions on household cleanliness, personal hygiene, and nutritional education, but the space also provided opportunities for recreational activities such as sewing, crocheting, singing, and dancing.66

55  Katherine

Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘Reconsidering Women’s Roles in the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, 1952–​1960’, in Thomas and Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict, 162. 56  KNA AB/​1/​55, ‘Administration; Maendeleo ya Wanawake Club and Membership; 1956’, 46. 57  Weston Library, Mss. Afr.s.2100, 35–​36. 58 Bush, Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism, 521. 59  Joanna Lewis, ‘ “Tropical East Ends” and the Second World War: Some Contradictions in Colonial Office Welfare Initiatives’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 28 (2000), 56. 60  Ibid., 56 and 62. 61 Bush, Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism, 521. 62 Feichtinger, A Great Reformatory, 64. 63  KNA AB/​1/​73, ‘Administration; Advancement of African Women; 1954–​55’, 1. 64 KNA AB/​ 1/​73, 1. For a broader assessment on the ‘self-​help’ approach, see Kara Moskowitz, Seeing Like a Citizen: Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–​1960 (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2019), 171. Maendeleo ya Wanawake clubs were not exclusive to central Kenya during the Emergency Period. For the West Kenyan context, see Mildred Ndeda, ‘Women and Development Since Colonial Times’, in William Robert Ochieng (ed.), Historical Studies and Social Change in Western Kenya: Essays in Memory of Professor Gideon S. Were (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2002), 232–​261. 65  KNA AB/​2/​1A, ‘Policy; Maendeleo ya Wanawake Policy’. 66  KNA AB/​2/​1A.

Discourses of Development    491 Maendeleo ya Wanawake ‘came under the patronage of upper-​class colonial women including Lady Mary Baring, the Governor’s wife’, as well as members of the East Africa Women’s League (EAWL), a settler-​led association founded in 1917.67 Maendeleo club activities were supported by the British Red Cross Society, the EAWL, and the Christian Council of Kenya. While strategic villages were exclusively guarded and governed by men, European women entered these spaces as Community Development Women’s Officers or volunteers. With the emancipation of Western women in this era, feminist demands for women’s rights directed concern towards the welfare of colonized women.68 As Deanne van Tol emphasizes, ‘a philanthropic role was central to the identity of imperial white womanhood’.69 In order to secure engagement and trust among women villagers, Maendeleo ya Wanawake involved African women as club leaders also. African women were lynchpins for the movement, and this was characteristic of imperial strategy.70 In order to become a member of Maendeleo ya Wanawake, women were required to pay an annual membership fee of two Kenyan shillings.71 More importantly, however, to join the group they had to denounce any involvement with the KLFA, as well as any oaths they had taken. Colonial officials believed that by showing a better life to those who were yet to denounce the ‘Mau Mau oath’, women could be swayed to loyalism. To incentivize women to join, membership was rewarded with resources for one’s home, childcare, training to become paid leaders of their village and district clubs, and exemptions from ‘communal’ labour.72 In these gendered development strategies, Kenya was not an isolated case in colonial counter-​insurgency practice.73 During France’s counter-​insurgency fought against the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (1954–​1962), for example, the French state channelled its ‘hearts and minds’ campaign toward Muslim women, believing this secured the support of the Muslim family. Vince describes this as a ‘burst of last-​ditch welfare colonialism’, where strategies were used to attract Algerian women from the ‘oppression of tradition’ and into the realm of ‘becoming “modern” mothers and housewives’.74 Stucki identifies the movement of these practices between European powers and their territories in Africa, arguing that the Portuguese and Spanish shaped their approaches to women in their colonies based on the findings of the French and British.75 This commonality in addressing African women through the lens of advancement reemphasizes the gendered and racialized ‘civilizing mission’ that guided colonial rule in Africa. In Kenya, development schemes were shaped by the administration’s belief that the rise of the KLFA was a direct result of the disintegration of the family unit. Anti-​colonial discontent was understood as evidence of the fragmentation of an entire generation, with young men and women lacking ‘tribal discipline’.76 Askwith believed that rebuilding family life restored 67  Audrey

Wipper, ‘The Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization: The Co-​Optation of Leadership’, African Studies Review, 18 (1975), 99–​100. 68 Bush, Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism, 521. 69 Deanne van Tol, ‘The Women of Kenya Speak: Imperial Activism and Settler Society, c.1930’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (2015), 436. 70  KNA AB/​2/​1A, 41. 71  KNA AB/​14/​53, ‘Education; Maendeleo ya Wanawake; 1953–​54’, 1. 72  KNA AB/​2/​1A, 47. 73  Bruce-​Lockhart, Reconsidering Women’s Roles, 169. 74 Vince, Our Fighting Sisters, 74. 75 Stucki, Violence and Gender, 10. 76  KNA AB/​1/​73, 1.

492    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz stability; women in their roles as mothers were integral to this work.77 He maintained that if the women and girls on the fringes of the KLFA lacked social status, they were more likely to be ‘seduced’ by the movement to pursue their cause. By teaching women valuable skills of homecraft and mothercraft, Askwith believed women would be ‘less susceptible to “manipulation” by Mau Mau men’.78 In his view, this training helped educate African women and ensured they were not as ‘primitive as their mothers had been’.79 Askwith’s language here is characteristic of the paternalistic and racist discourse of the colonial era. Furthermore, women were recognized by the colonial administration solely as ‘socio-​economic beings’, deprived of their own political or ethical views. Askwith believed that ‘through the mother’s natural concern for the child and its welfare’, women would learn to appreciate the social reforms that were supposedly being taken in their interest, thereby instilling stability in village communities.80 This highlights a generational tension in the fight against the KLFA; community development advanced women so they were no longer exploited by KLFA men, but equipped women to influence their children. This coding of practices as domestic and female made the strategic villages the ideal site for the colonial authorities to pursue this work. Increasing membership figures in Maendeleo ya Wanawake in the late 1950s could be read as a sign of the success of these clubs and the encouragement of loyalty.81 Colonial records laud the growth of membership from 10,300 in 1954 to 43,000 by 1956.82 It is difficult to confirm the accuracy of these figures, however, as many women recorded as members never paid their fees or participated in activities.83 Many ‘chose to remain publicly sympathetic to Mau Mau’ and therefore were not able to participate in Maendeleo activities.84 Interviews with Gikuyu women in the central region of Kenya illuminate other reasons why they did not join. Agnes Wanjiru Mwangi was prohibited from participating as it went against her father’s wishes to remain separate from the colonial administration.85 The membership fees also caused issues for many; being forcibly resettled had increased poverty for villagers. As Esther described in her village, ‘there was so much suffering in that place people went for days without food’.86 Many were relying on the services of the British Red Cross Society to feed their families.87 Agnes highlighted the age and socio-​economic barriers which prevented women from being able to participate. She disclosed that the Maendeleo clubs in her area selected women based on their level of education and preferred those who ‘were not old’.88 Maendeleo’s constitution states that membership was confined to those over

77 Ibid.

78  Emily Baughan, ‘Rehabilitating an Empire: Humanitarian Collusion with the Colonial State during the Kenyan Emergency, c.1954–​1960’, Journal of British Studies, 59/​1 (2020), 68. 79 Ibid.. 80  Thomas Askwith, From Mau Mau to Harambee (Cambridge: African Studies Centre, 1995), 145. 81 See Wipper, The Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization, 101–​ 102 and Presley, Kikuyu Women, 519–​520. 82  KNA XH/​11/​7 and Presley, Kikuyu Women, 519. 83 Wipper, The Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organization, 102. 84 Presley, Kikuyu Women, 520. 85  Interview with Agnes Wanjiru Mwangi. 86  Interview with Esther. 87  Interviews with Sophia Wambui Kiarie and Beatrice Muthoni and British Red Cross Archive, 1594/​ 27, Vice-​Chairman’s Visit to East Africa Jan/​Feb 1957. 88  Interview with Agnes Wanjiru Mwangi.

Discourses of Development    493 the age of 16.89 While it does not offer a specific upper age bracket, it is important to note the term ‘young’ is regularly used when describing ideal members.90 The colonial government recognized that young African women on the cusp of starting their families were the ideal group to engineer into good, Christian, domesticated wives. Those who did join a Maendeleo club demonstrated their agency in coopting a colonial structure to resist the ‘communal’ forced labour.91 Villagers were expected to work seven days a week in operational labour tasks. Initially, this work focused on the construction of the village infrastructure itself; building village homes and surrounding trenches. Villagers were to then contribute their labour to other military operational work, which included building trenches, roads, and dams, as well as harvesting and cultivating land for food.92 By joining Maendeleo clubs, women were spared these exhausting responsibilities. This, as Daniel Branch argues, complicates the notion of loyalty in Kenya during this time. To declare oneself loyal to the colonial government did not simply mean you were a supporter of colonial rule. Women were pragmatic in their declarations of loyalty when using colonial structures for the survival of their family and to improve their living circumstances.93 Community development initiatives—​specifically Maendeleo ya Wanawake—​enabled the colonial administration to establish ‘direct contacts with resettled women’.94 The women’s clubs were useful spaces for the colonial state to gather intelligence from villagers.95 While Maendeleo claimed to provide opportunities and the subsequent ‘advancement’ of women, it was a highly coercive attempt by the British to regain control over their opponents. While military tactics, detention, and the supposed rehabilitation of insurgent fighters were fundamental to Britain’s approach, social engineering in the form of development in strategic villages was a core—​and highly gendered—​tool in the colonial government’s counter-​ insurgency toolbox.96

Detaining, Imprisoning, and ‘Rehabilitating’ Women Along with strategic resettlement, an extensive system of detention camps and prisons—​ known as the ‘Pipeline’—​formed a central part of the counter-​insurgency strategy.97 The British, who had relied on similar tactics during the Second South African War (1899–​1902) and the Malayan Emergency, used the camps to detain KLFA suspects without trial and the

89 

KNA AB/​2/​1A, 4. UKNA PRO FCO 141/​5887, ‘Corfield Report’, 102. 91 Feichtinger, A Great Reformatory, 65. 92  Interviews with Sophia Wambui Kiarie, Agnes Wanjiru Mwangi, John Mwangi Stephen, Grace Mwathe, Esther, Grace Njoki Kanguniu, Leah Nyaguthia Kariuki, and Susan Wanjiru Giteru. 93  Daniel Branch, ‘The Enemy Within: Loyalists and the War against Mau Mau in Kenya’, The Journal of African History, 48/​2 (2007), 311. 94 Feichtinger, A Great Reformatory, 64–​65. 95 Ibid. 96 Bush, Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism, 519. 97 Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 136. 90 

494    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz prisons to hold those formally convicted of crimes. Detention, however, was the primary approach. Despite their distinct purposes, prisons and detention camps were both under the authority of the Prisons Department.98 The Pipeline was composed of approximately 100 camps and prisons, creating a vast carceral network that stretched across Kenya.99 Accounts of detention and imprisonment have come from many sources, including memoirs, scholarship, and the High Court case.100 While the total number of detainees remains a subject of debate—​with estimates ranging from 80,000 to over 300,000—​it is clear that the camps were a system of mass punishment.101 Detainees were classified into different groups based on their perceived level of devotion to the KLFA, ranging from ‘white’ (least devoted) to ‘black’ (considered to be ‘hardcore’).102 Progression through the camp system—​which included multiple types of camps, such as transit camps, screening camps, detention camps, and works camps—​was contingent on detainees’ confession of their involvement in the KLFA and participation in the rehabilitation programme.103 The vast majority of the detainees were men, as most women believed to be involved in the KFLA were put into strategic villages. However, approximately 8,000 women and girls were detained and imprisoned under the Emergency Regulations, a vast set of temporary laws that included curfews, prohibitions on movement, and prohibition of membership in the KLFA.104 This section explores the treatment and experiences of these women, which, although similar to male detainees in some respects, were also shaped by British notions of respectable and deviant femininity. In contrast to the dense literature on the men’s camps, women’s detention has received much less attention. While these camps have been represented as the starkest example of the brutality of colonial counter-​insurgency techniques, they were deeply entangled with wider official efforts to contain, ‘develop’, and punish Kenyan women. The colonial government’s decision to detain women was marked by considerable debate. The incarceration rate for Kenyan women was very low prior to the Emergency Period; there was no precedent for the mass incarceration of women in colonial Kenya.105 Officials were wary of the scandal that had erupted during the Second South African War. As part of British efforts to cut off civilian support for the insurgents, the British had detained Boer women and children in what were referred to as ‘concentration camps’.106 While framed in paternalistic 98  A.R. Baggally, ‘Myths of Mau Mau expanded: rehabilitation in Kenya’s detention camps, 1954-​160’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 5:3 (2011), 561. 99 Daniel Branch, ‘Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya, c.1930-​ 1952: Escaping the Carceral Archipelago’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 38:2 (2005), 262; Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 132. 100  For memoirs, see for example: Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, Mau Mau Detainee: The Account of a Kenyan African of His Experiences in Detention Camps 1953–​1960 (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1975) and Otieno, Mau Mau’s Daughter. See also Marshall S. Clough, Mau Mau Memoirs: History, Memory and Politics (London: Lynne Rienner, 1998). 101  Elkins, ‘Alchemy of Evidence.’ 102 Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 317. 103  Ibid., 135–​136; Anderson, Histories of the Hanged, 313. 104 Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 55. 105  Branch, ‘Imprisonment and Colonialism in Kenya’, 249. 106  Paula M. Krebs, ‘ “The Last of the Gentlemen’s Wars”: Women in the Boer War Concentration Camp Controversy’, History Workshop Journal, 33/​1 (1992), 38–​56.

Discourses of Development    495 rhetoric of protection, an estimated 28,000 women and children died in the camps due to the terrible conditions.107 Their plight had caused an uproar in the metropole, with critics arguing that the policy transgressed ‘civilized’ gender norms.108 Black South Africans were also detained in similarly dire conditions, but they received much less attention from the British public.109 The South African controversy weighed heavily on the minds of officials in Kenya. In 1954, the Minister of African Affairs expressed his concern that the construction of a women’s camp would create ‘political agitation even greater than that which arose at the end of the Boer War’.110 Despite these misgivings, the construction of a female-​only detention camp began in 1954 on the grounds of Kamiti Prison, a maximum-​security facility outside of Nairobi.111 Initially, this camp was designed to hold only the most seemingly deviant women—​identified as the ‘two or three hundred female leaders of the passive wing’—​but it soon became clear that far more women were deeply involved in the KLFA.112 A second female-​only camp, Gitamayu, was built in 1958 and was designed as a site for the intensive interrogation of small groups of women deemed as particularly resistant to rehabilitation.113 Over the course of the Emergency Period, Kamiti held the vast majority of female detainees and prisoners. There was also a separate section for male prisoners.114 As Caroline Elkins outlines, Kamiti was unique in that it was a ‘self-​contained Pipeline’, where women were organized by compounds ‘based on their level of cooperation’.115 Despite their distinct status, female prisoners and detainees were ‘living in the same compounds and labouring together’.116 There were also girls at Kamiti, some of whom were born there and others who had been brought on account of violating Emergency Regulations. This stirred up significant controversy in Kenya and Britain, as some of the girls were reportedly below the age of 14 and therefore could not legally be imprisoned under the Juvenile Offenders Ordinance.117 In some cases, women and girls were put into camps or prisons that were predominately male—​a practice initiated prior to the construction of Kamiti and continued to a limited extent after it was built—​but they were held in small female-​only sections. One of the reasons for putting females in other camps or prisons was to reduce overcrowding at Kamiti.118 Jane Muthoni Mara’s experience is representative of how women and girls often moved through multiple penal sites: she was first taken to Gatithi Camp for screening; then Kerugoya Camp, where she was formally charged with ‘assisting the Mau Mau’; followed by Embu and Kamiti prisons; then Athi River

107 

Ibid., 39. Quoted in Paula Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 60. 109  Krebs, ‘Gentleman’s Wars’, 52. 110  UKNA PRO FCO/​141/​6324/​12, C/​M. Johnston to R.G. Turnbull, 10 September 1954. 111  KNA AB/​2/​51/​3, J.H. Lewis to the Hon. Director of Public Works, 22 March 1954. 112  UKNA PRO FCO 141/​6244/​9, ‘War Council Meeting’, 22 November 1954. 113  Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘ “Unsound” Minds’. 114 Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 221. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid. 117  Katherine Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘The “Truth” about Kenya: Connection and Contestation in the 1956 Kamiti Controversy’, Journal of World History, 26/​4 (2015), 823–​824. 118  UKNA PRO FCO 141/​6274, Progress Report on Rehabilitation in 1955. 108 

496    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz Prison to work on a dam project before returning to Kamiti; then finally back to Embu before her release.119 Although Kamiti was designed for ‘hardcore’ women, the detainees and prisoners had varying levels of involvement in the KLFA. Many were arrested for their role in the ‘passive wing’. Others had landed in Kamiti because they had violated other Emergency Regulations such as curfews and pass laws, and may have had no association with the KLFA whatsoever.120 Quite a number of women at Kamiti were sex workers, and may have been incarcerated simply because their mobility and profession deviated from British expectations of proper feminine behaviour.121 The same may be true for those classified as ‘witches’.122 Others at Kamiti were forced to take the KLFA oath, while some were falsely accused of involvement in the movement.123 A woman by the name of Elizabeth, for example, was allegedly labelled as a KLFA supporter after she refused to marry a loyalist chief.124 One member of the EAWL who visited Kamiti as a member of the Rehabilitation Committee noted that it contained a ‘mixed bag of hard core Mau Mau and comparatively innocent offenders’.125 As was the case in the men’s camps, colonial officials sought to design a rehabilitation programme that turned women away from the KLFA. The programme rested on gendered assumptions that shaped the community development schemes. Women were viewed primarily as mothers and homemakers, and received training in hygiene, embroidery, cooking, childcare, and gardening, whereas men obtained training in carpentry, animal husbandry, farming, cobbling, and tailoring.126 Initially, colonial officials extolled the benefits of this programme. Katherine Warren-​Gash, an officer-​in-​charge at Kamiti, described it as ‘better than a course of beauty treatment’ that turned ‘unpleasant and downright ugly’ detainees into ‘really pretty’ women, while the EAWL reported on the marked ‘change of heart’ amongst the formerly ‘sullen and un-​cooperative’ detainees.127 When discussing women who were deemed ‘rehabilitated’, Warren-​Gash noted that ‘the District Officers and Chiefs were also very pleased with the “finished products” from Kamiti’.128 Such statements not only illuminate the confidence of colonial officials towards the rehabilitation programme, but they also underscore the objectifying and dehumanizing lens through which officials viewed female detainees. Eileen Fletcher, a British woman of Quaker faith, was the original architect of the women’s rehabilitation programme. She was hired by the Department of Community Development 119 

Witness Statement, 17. CBMS 278, Eileen Fletcher, The Truth about Kenya—​An Eye Witness Account by Eileen Fletcher (London: Movement for Colonial Freedom, 1956). 121  School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) CBMS 278, Eileen Fletcher, ‘Proposed Scheme for the Rehabilitation of Women and Girls in Prisons and Camps’, February 1955. 122  UKNA PRO FCO/​141/​6324/​25/​1, Warren-​Gash to Secretary of State for Community Development, 2 August 1957. 123  Witness Statement, 3; KNA AB/​1/​112/​5, John Mukiri Githendu to Women’s Rehabilitation Officer, 18 January 1955. 124 Ibid. 125  KNA MAC/​KEN/​33/​7/​28, East African Women’s League, ‘The Story of Kamiti Prison’, 1956. 126  KNA AH/​4/​26/​11/​A, ‘Rehabilitation of Detained Persons’, 1953. 127 KNA AB/​ 1/​112/​92, ‘Mau Mau Women at Kamiti—​Christian Cleansing Successfully Used’, The Sunday Post, 1 April 1956; KNA JZ/​16/​7/​109, East African Women’s League, ‘Conditions in Kamiti Prison Camp’, 9 August 1956. 128  KNA/​DC/​1/​13, Ministry of Community Development and Rehabilitation Newsletter, April 1957. 120  SOAS

Discourses of Development    497 and Rehabilitation in 1954 to design an ‘appropriate’ programme for women.129 Fletcher had a background in teaching and social science, and had worked in a refugee camp in Uganda and a ‘Rehabilitation Unit’ for British ex-​prisoners of war.130 She was also associated with the international eugenics movement, and had gained notoriety for authoring an offensive report on the effects of ‘race-​mixing’ in Britain.131 Her experience in Kenya put her at the centre of another scandal: she left her position in 1956 and became one of the most outspoken critics of the camps.132 Fletcher was thus one of the most influential and controversial figures associated with women’s detention. Like the strategic villages, Fletcher’s programme was heavily influenced by British notions of respectable femininity. Women were framed as the anchors of family life, and, by extension, indispensable to restoring a social order that was compatible with the colonial project. ‘Women have an important part to play, they are the child bearers, the home makers and I believe they set the standard for a healthy family life’, Fletcher wrote in her proposal.133 ‘The men (of any country) cannot progress far unless their women keep pace with them’, she continued, ‘and when the time comes to re-​establish them in family life it will be essential for the women to rebuild their home life on a sound basis’.134 Fletcher categorized the rehabilitation programme as a defined stage of ‘reformation’ that was unique ‘from the ordinary work of development’.135 She insisted, however, that rehabilitation in the camps should be linked to the wider women’s development initiatives: I suggest that the Maendeleo ya Wanwake, which is the constructive side, continues as at present . . . There must be very careful co-​ordination of the whole process of rehabilitation from the reception, through to the punitive side, on to the preparation for freedom in the Guarded Villages, and then to the re-​establishment of normal family life in freedom. At each of these stages the detainees should be linked up to the next so that rehabilitation shows as a continuous process.136

This distinction between the ‘punitive’ and ‘constructive’ elements—​in which the camps were presented as the only site of punishment—​belied the coercive nature of life in the strategic villages and the widespread violence faced by Kenyans living under colonial rule. It did not take long for Fletcher’s enthusiasm about rehabilitation to dissipate, as she began to witness the realities of the camps firsthand. Upon returning to England, she began working with the Society of Friends, the Movement for Colonial Freedom, and the pacifist publication Peace News to raise awareness about camp abuses.137 Her allegations sparked a

129  SOAS CBMS 278, 01/​A/​14/​05, Box 278, Eileen Fletcher, Report on My Period of Employment in the Community Development Department of the Kenya Government, July 1956; Askwith, From Mau Mau, 107. 130  SOAS CBMS 278, Eileen Fletcher to Chief Secretary, Commissioner for Community Development and Rehabilitation, 5 June 1955; SOAS CBMS 278, The Truth about Kenya. 131  Fletcher’s entanglement with the eugenics movement has not been widely discussed in the scholarship on the Emergency Period in Kenya but has recently been made clearer in Chamion Caballero and Peter J. Aspinall, Mixed Race Britain in the Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 69. 132  For more on Fletcher’s campaign, see Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘The “Truth” about Kenya’. 133  SOAS CBMS 278, Eileen Fletcher, ‘Introduction’, no date. 134  SOAS CBMS, E278, Eileen Fletcher, ‘Proposed Scheme’. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137  See Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘The “Truth” about Kenya’.

498    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz scandal that resembled the Second South African War camp controversy, generating major public attention and becoming the subject of parliamentary debates. The government sought to discredit Fletcher in gendered terms, calling her claims ‘monstrously untrue’, and labelling her as ‘emotionally unstable’.138 While Fletcher’s claims generated significant metropolitan attention, female detainees also reported on the abuses in the camps through letters to colonial officials. In one such letter, detainees described the process of ‘screening by force’ in the camps and said they were ‘beat much’.139 While officials attempted to undermine these accusations, it is clear that female detainees were subjected to the punitive practices in the detention camp system.140 In her High Court testimony, Jane Muthoni Mara singled out Kamiti as ‘by far the worst place in which I was held’.141 She discussed the constant beatings at the hands of the guards, the gruelling ‘forced labour’, and the numerous deaths from ‘hunger, malaria and typhoid’.142 Female detainees also experienced gender-​specific punishments. Many women, including Jane, were subject to sexual torture, and those who were considered particularly devoted to the KLFA were labelled as ‘mad’, a trope often used to describe women viewed as violent, and, by extension, abnormal and unfeminine.143 The harsh conditions of camp life and the abusive treatment of the detainees have proved to be their most enduring legacies, both for those who experienced the camps firsthand and in the wider historical memory.

Conclusion Jane’s testimony not only reflects the significance of women’s participation in the KLFA, but also the lived trauma that has remained for those who were forcibly resettled and detained by the British. Memories of violence, and, for women, gender-​specific abuse, now sit at the forefront when examining Britain’s counter-​insurgency campaign. Women’s central role in insurgencies and the counter-​insurgency strategies designed to target this group are still underrepresented in the literature. When foregrounding women’s experiences of this conflict, there is a clear disconnect between how the colonial records describe Britain’s counter-​ insurgency strategy and how it was enacted; this is also shown through the memories of women and their experiences. On paper, Britain performed a reformative course of development and ‘rehabilitation’ for women involved in the KLFA. The rhetoric surrounding the treatment of KLFA females was suffused with notions of salvation and ‘civilization’, 138  British

Hansard (BH) ‘Miss Eileen Fletcher (Allegations)’, 31 October 1956; KNA AH/​9/​37/​90, Governor’s Deputy to Secretary of State, 19 May 1956. 139 UKNA PRO FCO 141/​ 6324/​93/​4, ‘ALL Woman detainees’ to Mr Patrick Gordon Walker, 26 November 1958. 140  Bruce-​Lockhart, ‘ “Unsound’ Minds’. 141  Witness Statement, 22. 142  Witness Statement, 20–​22. 143  See: Stacey Hynd, ‘Deadlier than the Male? Women and the Death Penalty in Colonial Kenya and Nyasaland, c.1920–​57’, Stichproben, 12 (2007), 13–​33; Meredith McKittrick, ‘Faithful Daughter, Murdering Mother: Transgression and Social Control in Colonial Namibia’, The Journal of African History, 40/​ 2 (1999), 265–​283; and Tapiwa B. Zimudzi, ‘African Women, Violent Crime, and the Criminal Law in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1900–​1952’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 30/​3 (2004), 499–​518.

Discourses of Development    499 from Askwith’s broader vision of community-​development programmes to Fletcher’s plan for female detainees’ rehabilitation. These programmes were fundamentally violent, from the paternalistic and racist ideas that informed them to the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of those forced to participate in them. To study the physical violence of this period separately from the developmental aspects of Britain’s counter-​insurgency campaign suggests that this violence was an unintended outcome of the strategy. By assessing them together, we can identify that the development policy was fundamentally violent at multiple levels—​symbolically and structurally, as well as physically—​and demonstrate a continuation of the ‘civilization’ discourse used throughout the colonial era to justify this violence. Gender dynamics played a key role in Britain’s approach to defeating the KLFA, from the Maendaleo clubs in the ‘villages’ to the ‘rehabilitation’ process in detention camps. This strategy was shaped by British notions of respectable femininity, with women positioned as the nucleus of the family who could restore social order in their community. For those forcibly resettled or detained, collective punishments, forced labour, malnutrition, and horrific abuse characterized the enactment of British counter-​insurgency strategy. By placing gender at the forefront of analysis of the Emergency Period, we not only contribute to scholarly analysis of women’s roles in liberation movements, but we also enable an improved understanding of how counter-​insurgency discourse and practice have been gendered in its design and imposition. In accessing women’s voices in archives and through testimonies, we can begin to differentiate between the performative and the enacted processes in counter-​ insurgency strategy. The colonial government perceived women to be non-​violent and situated in the domestic sphere, yet they played key roles in the KLFA, thus undermining this assumption. The counter-​insurgency practices deployed to mitigate this involvement remained firmly shaped by binary notions of gender, with women’s development and so-​ called ‘rehabilitation’ situating them as homemakers and custodians to an improved community life. Colonial counter-​insurgency campaigns bring to the forefront the entrenched everyday practices of violence which characterize the colonial era. Analysing a colonial counter-​ insurgency campaign offers a magnified version of the fundamental approaches taken by colonizers to oppress, coerce, and enact the violence that enabled colonialism, upheld colonial rule, and governed the decolonization process. Britain’s approach to KLFA women members and supporters demonstrates the wider workings of its colonial state, British assumptions about African women, and its approach to the imperial project. In the post-​ Second World War era, during which Britain was promoting the welfare of its colonial subjects through a modernizing agenda, the true hypocrisy of this approach is evident. As Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless argue, ‘the reliance of force to implement these allegedly emancipatory reforms underscores their bankruptcy’.144 Examining gender, development, and coercion in relation to one another in counter-​insurgency strategy is therefore vital in order to dismantle enduring narratives that violence was an unfortunate consequence of the decolonization process, as opposed to an intended practice.

144 

Thomas and Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict, 12.

500    Katherine Bruce-Lockhart and Bethany Rebisz

Select Bibliography Anderson, David M., ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and the “Lost” British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39/​5 (2011), 699–​7 16. Bouka, Yolande, ‘Women, Colonial Resistance, and Decolonization: Challenging African Histories’, in O. Yacob-​Haliso and T, Falola, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 1295–​1314. Bruce-​ Lockhart, Katherine, ‘Reconsidering Women’s Roles in the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, 1952–​1960’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless, eds., Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 227–​256. Bush, Barbara, ‘Nationalism, Development, and Welfare Colonialism: Gender and the Dynamics of Decolonization’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of The Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 519–​536. Elkins, Caroline, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005). Feichtinger, Moritz, ‘ “A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72. Hynd, Stacey, ‘Deadlier than the Male? Women and the Death Penalty in Colonial Kenya and Nyasaland, c.1920–​57’, Stichproben, 12 (2007), 13–​33. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, ‘Repressive Developmentalism: Idioms, Repertoires, and Trajectories in Late Colonialism’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of The Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Kanogo, Tabitha, ‘Kikuyu Women and the Politics of Protest: Mau Mau’, in S. MacDonald, P. Holden and S. Ardener, eds., Images of Women in Peace and War: Cross-​cultural and Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987), 78–​96. Khalili, Laleh, ‘Gendered Practices of Counterinsurgency’, Review of International Studies, 37/​ 4 (2011), 1,471–​1,491. Lewis, Joanna, Empire State Building: War and Welfare in Kenya 1925–​52 (Oxford: James Currey, 2000). Low, D.A., and John Lonsdale, ‘Introduction: Towards the New Order 1945–​1963’, in D. A. Low and Alison Smith, eds., History of East Africa Vol III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 1–​63. Presley, Cora A., Kikuyu Women, The Mau Mau Rebellion and Social Change (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). Stucki, Andreas, Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies: Feminizing the Portuguese and Spanish Empire, 1950s–​1970s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). Vince, Natalya, Our Fighting Sisters: Nation, Memory and Gender in Algeria, 1954–​2012 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015).

Chapter 26

T he L ab ours Of ( I n) Secu rit y In P ort u g u e se L ate C ol on ia l i sm Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro Introduction The control and supply of colonial labour was a crucial element in the political and moral economies of European modern empires. The management of colonial economies, and of labour in particular, was closely related to the maintenance of socio-​political order, not least because labour conditions were a frequent cause of dissent, protest, and unrest, with significant local and international consequences.1 Therefore, the administration of labour, in its economic and political dimensions, was tied to particular forms of social surveillance, control, and repression throughout Africa, as in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, from mining and oil industries to cotton or sugar plantations. The interdependence between public administration, socio-​political control (mostly through active policing), industrial and agricultural group interests, and labour exaction was multifaceted. As a result, in the inter-​war period anti-​colonial protests were often more closely tied to material grievances linked to the operation of colonial labour regimes than to strictly political concerns.2

1 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 2  Martin Thomas, Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Empires, 1918–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

502    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro The dynamics of colonial securitization—​associated as they were with the ability to offer tangible proof of politically and economically viable polities—​were unthinkable without the rationalization and regulation of labour. The centrality of labour administration to the functioning of colonial rule was evident in relation to different policies: from the challenge of attracting and retaining the supply of manpower to the more complex process of creating a wage-​labour system and ‘market’ economies. It was also bound up with debates regarding the potentially disruptive socio-​cultural, economic, and political effects of ‘de-​tribalization’ and urbanization and the need to protect the key economic sectors that generated the revenues to sustain the administrative and security infrastructures of the colonial state.3 This became transparently clear in the inter-​war period when colonial labour was subject to increased international scrutiny.4 The dynamics of labour management were equally fundamental during the final decades of colonialism, shaped by variegated ‘crises of empire’5 connected to efforts to reorganize political, economic, and juridical imperial frameworks, which were frequently framed in developmental terms. Labour administration was vital to multiple trajectories of ‘repressive developmentalism’, being a recurrent feature of the related cross-​fertilization between developmentalism, social engineering, and securitization.6 Similar arguments may be made regarding other aspects of late colonial welfarism, in the fields of health or education, for instance. These issues also shaped—​and were shaped by—​the dynamics of securitization, being associated with a growing, and diverse, number of experts and institutions with significant international, transnational, and inter-​imperial connections. This cross-​fertilization accelerated during late colonialism, particularly in situations of organized anti-​colonial conflict, creating optimal conditions for the intersection and interdependence of languages, arguments, and repertoires of action between those dealing with development and those concerned with securitization. Schools, medical facilities, sanitary programmes, social services, and labour regulation mechanisms were seen as means to prevent social unrest and popular anti-​colonialism. They were proclaimed to be essential to policies of resettlement and population control, for instance, and also to the political and diplomatic efforts devised by imperial administrations to legitimize their resilience.7 These dynamics were inclusively noticeable in the fiery debates taking place within the UN system concerning the colonial question, self-​determination, and human rights.8 3  See,

for instance, Stefano Bellucci and Andreas Eckert (eds.), General Labour History of Africa (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2019). 4  See, for instance, Susan Zimmermann, ‘ “Special Circumstances” in Geneva: The ILO and the World of Non-​Metropolitan Labour in the Interwar Years’, in Jasmien Van Daele et al. (eds.), ILO histories (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 221–​250; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, The ‘Civilizing Mission’ of Portuguese Colonialism, 1870–​1930 (London: Palgrave, 2015). 5  Martin Thomas, Bob Moore, and Larry Butler, Crises of Empire (London: Hodder Education, 2008). 6  Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Repressive Developmentalisms: Idioms, Repertoires, Trajectories in Late Colonialism’, in Andrew Thompson and Martin Thomas (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 537–​554. 7  Moritz Feichtinger, ‘ “A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘ “A Battle in the Field of Human Relations”: The Official Minds of Repressive Development in Portuguese Angola’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 115–​136. 8 José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Race, Development, Self-​ determination: The “Belgian Thesis” and Late Colonial Social Policies (1945–​1961)’, Études Internationales (forthcoming).

The Labours of (In)security    503 This chapter is organized into two different, but interrelated, sections. The first looks into different historical and geographical contexts, providing examples of the dynamics of cross-​fertilization between developmentalism on the one hand, and securitization and counter-​insurgency on the other. We argue that the securitarization of development and the developmentalization of security was a trans-​imperial process with important post-​colonial reverberations. Labour, social, health, and education policies were systematically addressed in conjunction with diplomatic, political, and securitarian concerns. Strategic and military planning increasingly adopted a holistic approach in an effort to legitimize empires internally and externally, while also stifling the seeds of revolt. By addressing distinct historical contexts, geographies, and topics, we stress the need to study these processes through an integrated analytical framework that highlights the circulation of concepts, doctrines, and schemes across colonies and empires, and even other kind of polities. In the second section, we engage more thoroughly with the labour question in Angola and Mozambique, addressing several critical moments from the 1940s to the early 1970s. Labour issues provided numerous opportunities for those wanting to capitalize on chronic inequality, exploitation, and coercion as justifications for projects of collective emancipation. As a consequence, irrespective of ideological outlooks or political and economic interests, labour was understood as a key cause of social unrest and political protest. As we argue, the political, diplomatic and securitarian concerns about the consequences of economic and social malpractices and misguided labour policies were present before the colonial conflict first erupted in Angola in early 1961.9 They were a recurrent topic of debate as social conditions in foreign colonies were assessed, not the least due to their impact on migratory dynamics. And the labour question was increasingly addressed under the broader heading of social policy, encompassing aspects such as leisure, health, or education. More inclusive and far-​reaching social policies were devised as contestation spread throughout Portugal’s African empire. As conflicts intensified, the metropolitan and local authorities reinforced ‘counter-​subversion’ programmes, transforming their principles, modi operandi, and purposes, and enhancing the cross-​fertilization of repressive and developmental arguments and policies. ‘Repressive developmentalism’ gained momentum, substance, and scope.

The (Connected) Histories of Development and Security From strikes in Senegal and Nyasaland to armed conflicts in Indochina, Malaya, or Algeria, the post-​1945 years witnessed mounting challenges to European colonialism.10 International political and diplomatic circumstances changed dramatically too. The gradual 9 

For an overview of the period and some of its key historical and historiographical issues, see Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Empire and Decolonization in Portuguese Africa’, in Jorge Fernandes, Pedro Magalhães, and António Costa Pinto (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Portuguese Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 70–​87. See also Norrie Macqueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (London: Longman, 1997). 10  Thomas, Moore, and Butler (eds.) Crises of Empire; Martin Shipway, Decolonization and its Impact (London: Blackwell, 2008).

504    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro crystallization of (anti-​colonial) self-​determination as the cornerstone of the global order and the emergence and consolidation of a new, supposedly universal, human rights regime challenged the legitimacy of colonial rule.11 It also transformed the markers of legitimate European sovereignty over African and Asian populations and territories. Political and civil, but also economic, social, and cultural rights became a rallying cry for subject populations.12 Post-​1945 developmentalist efforts, although rooted in the inter-​war years, sought to give substance to long-​promised improvements in colonial living conditions.13 Late colonialism was thus marked by increasing colonial demands for political, social, economic, and cultural entitlements and greater imperial efforts to satisfy them. The nexus between imperial security and colonial development was inescapable. The opportunities and the constraints, human and material, posed by the growing pre-​ eminence of counter-​insurgency programmes in late colonialism shaped the ways in which those working in the fields of labour, education, and health devised their own policies. Among other aspects, they aimed to prove their utility in the overall process of social and political appeasement. The field of labour is, in this respect, a good example: it was pivotal to various forms of ‘psychological intervention’, and it was a means of social control whose political and economic value appeared to increase in conflict environments. In theory, social order could be maintained, contact with ‘subversive’ forces could be minimized, and access to manpower could be facilitated. Political, military, social, and economic aims could be attained simultaneously.

The (In)securities of ‘Development’: Education Education was similarly valued as a decisive means to foster social control, for instance, through indoctrination and, it was widely thought, through group-​specific policies, which targeted women and youth in particular.14 Projects such as the Social Service Centres, devised by the ethnologist Jacques Soustelle, Algeria’s Governor-​ General (1955–​ 1956), illustrated these dynamics.15 ‘Assimilationist’ in inspiration and associated with a ‘global educational reform’ intended to promote the solidarity of a ‘Franco-​Muslim community’ by 11 Neta

Crawford, Argument and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-​Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 12 Roland Burke, Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Steven Jensen, The Making of International Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Roland Burke, Marco Duranti, and Dirk Moses (eds.), Decolonization, Self-​Determination and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 13  Joseph Hodge, Triumph of the Expert (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 14 Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992); Diane Sambron, Femmes musulmanes (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2007); Andreas Stucki, Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies (London: Palgrave, 2019). 15  Stephen Tyre, ‘From Algérie Française to France Musulmane: Jacques Soustelle and the Myths and Realities of “Integration”, 1955–​1962’, French History, 20/​3 (2006), 276–​296; Brooke Durham, ‘Une aventure sociale et humaine: The Service des Centres Sociaux in Algeria, 1955–​1962’, in Damiano Matasci, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, and Hugo Dores (eds.), Education and Development in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (London: Palgrave, 2020), 55–​82.

The Labours of (In)security    505 tackling socio-​economic inequality, the centres were seen as useful political and securitarian instruments.16 The centres sociaux were to provide an éducation de base, a concept widely shared internationally, and particularly by UNESCO, which paid close attention to the model of the Comité Algérien pour l’éducation de base. As one newspaper argued, the centres were to combat ‘ignorance and misery’, thereby promoting social stability.17 Nonetheless, their educational efforts also drew official criticism. They were suspected of aiding ‘anti-​ French’ activities. Schools were built and a new generation of teachers emerged. The army was actively involved: the numbers of soldier-​teachers in rural areas, mostly those with high levels of rebel activity, rose from 135 in early 1957 to 1,118 by mid-​1959. The enrolment rate in state schools for school-​age Muslims doubled between 1954 and 1962 (from 15% to 30%). Associated with the overall strategy of psychological welfare, education in rural contexts was considered crucial to ‘bring populations to a voluntary adherence to the French cause’.18 In all this, the role of the Specialized Administrative Sections (SAS), a military body focused more on ‘social’ interventions than repressive ones, was crucial, despite its relatively limited resources and capacities.19 As the French psychological warfare expert David Galula stated, the ‘six hundred new SAS officers could not become experts overnight’. They remained dependent on military protection, not least because the SAS officers ‘were a choice target’ of the FLN.20 Nearby military facilities usually provided SAS personnel in the first place, adding a ‘professional training’ to the éducation de base. Training in irrigation practices and sports guided by the Service de Formation de la Jeunesse Algérienne (created in December 1958) were equally crucial to teach French or basic mathematics. Combined, they enhanced the main aim of fostering a ‘sense of citizenship and respect’.21 The instrumental use of Muslim women was also important. They were involved in itinerant teams promoting household or sanitary education (in 1954, only 60,000 out of four million women were in school and only 4.5% were literate). The use of women teachers (and nurses) became pivotal to the overall project aiming to ‘liberate’ women through ‘westernization’, which, through women’s participation in elections, would strengthen French political control. The hopes 16 

James Le Sueur, Uncivil War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 55–​86, at 56–​57. ‘Une aventure sociale et humaine’, 60–​61, n. 41. See also Joseph Watras, ‘UNESCO’s Programme of Fundamental Education, 1946–​1959’, History of Education, 39/​2 (2010), 219–​237; Damiano Matasci, ‘Assessing Needs, Fostering Development: UNESCO, Illiteracy and the Global Politics of Education (1945–​1960)’, Comparative Education, 53/​1 (2017), 35–​53. 18 Alexis La Ferriere, ‘Colonial Education and Political Violence in the Algerian War of Independence’, in Zehavit Gross and Lynn Davies (eds.), The Contested Role of Education in Conflict and Fragility (Rotterdam: Brill/​SensePublishers, 2015), 171–​183, cit. at 172. 19  Grégor Mathias, Les sections administratives spécialisées en Algérie (Paris: Harmattan, 1998), 76–​ 81; Jacques Fremeaux, ‘LES SAS (Sections Administratives Spécialisées)’, Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, 208 (2002), 55–​68; Alexandra Lamodière, ‘L’action sociale et éducative des officiers SAS en Oranie’, in J.-​C. Jauffret (ed.), Des Hommes et des femmes en guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Autrement, 2004), 539–​551; Jennifer Johnson, The Battle for Algeria (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), esp. 48–​61. 20  David Galula, The Pacification of Algeria, 1956–​1958 (Santa Monica: Rand Corporation, 2006), cit. at 24, 107. 21 Diane Sambron, ‘La politique d’émancipation du gouvernement français à l’égard des femmes algériennes pendant la guerre d’Algérie’, in Jauffret (ed.), Des Hommes et des femmes en guerre d’Algérie, 226–​242, esp. 232–​235. With caution, see also Guillaume Lasconjarias and Jacques Jouan, ‘Les sections administratives spécialisées en Algérie: Un outil pour la stabilisation’, Cahier de la recherche doctrinale (2005), cit. at 48, 62. 17 Durham,

506    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro invested in associations such as the Mouvement de Solidarité Féminine was typical of such initiatives.22 Opération Pilote was a revealing example of these dynamics. Launched in 1957, it focused on the northern region of Orléansville (today’s Chlef). The outcome of a new policy promoted by governor-​general Robert Lacoste in 1956, which redefined the techniques and purposes of ‘pacification’, it was devised by the ethnologist Jean Servier and by the army’s Bureau d’Action Psychologique (an enthusiastic proponent of ‘revolutionary war’ doctrine). A violent, ‘purely repressive’ intervention was replaced by an ‘humanitarian’ one, based on the actions of Equipes Médico-​Sociale Itinérante (EMSI), comprised of young female social workers, both European and Muslim. Despite the declared aim of providing assistance in nursing and childcare, the Equipes also had a propagandistic and ‘policing purpose’, including sessions of ‘psychological action’ and information-​ gathering. This counter-​insurgency strategy was sold as a ‘policy of development’, fostering a ‘new Algeria’. Despite civil–​military disputes over methods, the operation served as a blueprint for other operations elsewhere in the territory.23 Women were to be converted into ‘antisubversive allies’. Their social and medical activities within the EMSI would help ‘collect information’, ‘identify potential allies, disseminate government directives, and sell colonial ideology’.24 In the Belgian Congo, similar concerns shaped the formation of foyer sociaux. Diverse techniques aiming at ‘psychological transformation’ placed educational efforts at the core of securitarian concerns, whether subordinated to the general goal of maintaining social order or to the specific objective of minimizing political mobilization. In the District of Stanleyville, the Kitawala Team sought to curtail the social and political impact of the ‘subversive’ Kitawala politico-​religious movement, while also providing educational services and public health counselling, both deemed crucial to curb unrest.25 Following a 1944 revolt in Kivu (Masisi district), which some attributed to social discrimination and economic deprivation, a combination of initiatives by the force publique alongside the provision of social welfare and propaganda were adopted.26 André Schöller, the governor of the Orientale Province, made several policy recommendations, combining ‘repression, intelligence-​ gathering and “native” welfare reforms’. Later on, in 1955, a Sûreté policy paper reinforced this direction: it was essential to foster ‘a material climate favourable’ to the ‘social and economic aspirations of the natives’. In early 1956, Schöller established a Sûreté Specialised Political Team and enacted operations of social action, which included medical and educational interventions alongside the projection of films, the aim being to depoliticize and 22  Noara Omouri, ‘Les Sections Administratives Specialisées et les sciences sociales’, in J.-​C. Jauffret and M. Vaisse (eds.), Militaires et guérilla dans la guerre d’Algérie (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 2001), 383–​397. 23  Denis Leroux, ‘Algérie 1957, l’opération Pilote: violence et illusions de la pacification’, Les Temps Modernes, 693–​694/​2 (2017), 146–​159, cit. at 153–​154. For the EMSI, see also Neil MacMaster, Burning the Veil (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), chap. 7. 24  Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 145–​169, cit. at 146–​147. 25  Nancy Hunt, ‘Domesticity and colonialism in Belgian Africa: Usumbura’s Foyer Social, 1946–​1960’, Signs, 15/​3 (1990), 447–​474; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Restoring Order, Inducing Change: Imagining a “New (Wo)man” in the Belgian Colonial Empire in the 1950s’, Comparativ, 28/​5 (2018), 77–​96. 26  Nicole Eggers, ‘Mukombozi and the Monganga: The Violence of Healing in the 1944 Kitawalist Uprising’, Africa, 85/​3 (2015), 417–​436, cit. at. 419.

The Labours of (In)security    507 ‘rehabilitate’ the local population. Official fears were compounded by the fact that many Kitawalists served in the colonial bureaucracy, the force publique, the police, and the prison service. The movement’s professed solidarity with the Mau Mau uprisings compounded the problem. Politicized education projects were reinforced by the Plan Décennal (1949–​1959) and by the action of the Fonds du Bien-​Être Indigène (1947–​1963). Although funds remained short, the FBEI and the Kitawala Teams consistently integrated ‘civic education’ within wider counter-​insurgency strategies.27 In the Portuguese empire, too, numerous government agencies pressed for the ‘liberation’ of African women from ‘old and traditional obstacles’ as a core element of ‘new’ doctrines of counter-​insurgency. One of the most important officials dealing with these matters, Hermes de Araújo Oliveira, in 1963 described the ‘Portuguese provinces of Africa’ as ‘areas of calmness’, immune to the ‘cyclone of true madness’ that was sweeping the continent. There was one exception: Angola, gripped by rebellion since 1961. According to Oliveira, women were decisive, whether to preserve or restore peace. In his view, nourishing ‘consciousness of her function within society’ as the ‘moral’ cornerstone of the household, combined with supportive social policies, would ‘attract them to the cause of order’. He pointed in this context to Algeria’s EMSI. The creation of ‘feminine centres’ and the provision of itinerant socio-​medical assistance were mandatory. The role of ‘European women’ as transmitters of metropolitan values was to be encouraged: they were to ‘spread the gospel’, contributing to social and political order, morality, and hygiene. Courses on ‘portugueseness’, which included topics from domesticity and ‘gymnastics to socio-​political education’, were judged more important than mathematics. Meanwhile, anxieties about ‘detribalized woman’ persisted, making official attention gradually shift from urban to rural areas, considered vital in the efforts of ‘repressive developmentalism’. Programmes such as Levar a Escola à Sanzala (Taking the School to Rural Areas), devised in early 1960s Angola, were exemplary, but also revealed the gulf between grandiose proclamations and actual accomplishments. It was difficult for counter-​insurgent soldiers to ‘act as teachers as well’, supporting the decisive ‘educational effort’.28

The (In)securities of ‘Development’: Health The provision of primary healthcare was also considered fundamental to prevent social unrest. The inter-​connections between conflict and improved public health policies and facilities were considered particularly consequential. For instance, the latter facilitated surveillance of internal labour migration and justified security-​orientated resettlement projects. Targeted projects were especially prominent, such as vaccination programmes or 27 

Dominic Pistor, Developmental Colonialism and Kitawala policy in 1950s Belgian Congo, MA dissertation, (Simon Fraser University, 2009), 42–​43, 60–​62, 83 n. 291, 89. See also Guy Vanthemsche, Genèse et portée du ‘Plan décennal’ du Congo belge (1949–​1959) (Bruxelles: Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-​ mer, 1994); Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 212. 28  Hermes de Araújo Oliveira, ‘A missão da mulher no ultramar’, Boletim Geral do Ultramar, 454–​455 (1963), 99–​122, cit. at 99, 106, 108–​110, 112; Stucki, Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies, 227, 229, 233, 96–​97; Cláudia Castelo, ‘ “Novos Brasis” em África: Desenvolvimento e colonialismo português tardio’, Varia Historia, 53 (2014), 507–​532, 518–​519.

508    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro intervention against particular disease vectors. Villages became ‘living laboratories’ of novel, ‘vertical’ forms of collective health security, predicated on mobile ‘mass medicine’, the provision of which entailed similar techniques of mapping, registering, intervention, surveillance, and social control. In late colonial counter-​insurgencies, the idea of ‘reservoirs of contagion’ was understood not just biomedically but politically as well. So, too, the declared objective of ‘eradication’.29 Connected to wider and long-​standing entanglements between internationalism and imperialism, increasingly medical engagement intersected with colonial counter-​insurgency. Welfare provision was exploited by diverse actors, either to praise ongoing developmental and securitarian efforts or to denounce the scarcity of medical facilities and personnel, which featured alongside other indicators of social and racial discrimination such as poverty, malnutrition, or education.30 In Algeria the SAS programme of Aide Médical Gratuite illustrated these dynamics. It was designed to provide rudimentary medical assistance to populations lacking the most basic health provision. Dogged by resource constraints, the scheme faced numerous obstacles. As Georges Merignargues—​a doctor working in Wagram (today’s Moulay Larbi), the location of an infamous FLN massacre in 1957—​conceded, these itinerant medical assistance operations amounted to little more than ‘medical-​administrative parades, exhibitions, illusions, forms of registration of political drives’. The hardships faced by those involved, from linguistic problems (the interpreters frequently failed to understand those consulted) to material scarcity, were exacerbated by the effort to extend the programme over large areas in some of the colony’s most insecure regions. Despite these problems, once it was better resourced with funds allocated under the Constantine Plan, the health assistance project, in combination with the military-​led scheme (the EMSI), eventually conducted around 16.7 million medical checks.31 Based on the provision of free medical consultations, vaccinations, and hygiene advice by experts—​physicians and nurses, the ‘peaceful pacifiers’—​‘medical pacification’ was never straightforward. Although closely connected, counter-​insurgency operations and the governmental provision of welfare were not reducible to each other, despite the fact that the SAS social programmes were ‘firmly subordinated’ to the military. Medicine was a ‘propaganda tool’ to be sure, but the provision of primary healthcare had other consequences, enhancing governmental control while hastening the rollout of equivalent strategies by their insurgent opponents.32

29 Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Samuel Coghe, ‘Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1920–​45’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​ 1 (2017), 16–​ 44; Philip Havik, ‘From Hospitals to Villages: Population Health, Medical Services and Disease Control in Former Portuguese Africa’, Portuguese Studies Review, 25/​1 (2017), 17–​56. See also the text by Philip Havik in this volume. 30  Jessica Pearson, The Colonial Politics of Global Health (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); Philip Havik and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Portugal, the World Health Organisation and the Regional Office for Africa: From Founding Member to Outcast (1948–​1966)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 49/​4 (2021), 712–​741. 31 Mathias, Les sections administratives spécialisées en Algérie, 67–​73, cit. at 71. For the Wagram massacre and the Constantine plan, see Martha Hutchinson, Revolutionary Terrorism (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1978), 44–​49 and Daniel Lefeuvre, Chère Algérie (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), 366–​425, respectively. 32 Johnson, The Battle for Algeria, cit. at 38, 41–​42, 49, 61.

The Labours of (In)security    509 These examples indicate that any rigorous and multidimensional history of (counter)insurgency must incorporate the actors, organizations, and processes related to the provision of health or education, labour, and land reform. The paucity of sanitary or health conditions caused unrest, driving individuals and communities to political action. The inability to rectify this situation weakened efforts to ‘win’ conflicts. Conversely, labour, educational, and health policies could all facilitate population control as they entailed numerous mechanisms of registration, enhancing the personal and collective ‘legibility of the state’, irrespective of the problems associated with the collection, treatment, and dissemination of information. Notwithstanding the questionable reliability of the mostly statistical information gathered in connection to labour recruitment, school enrollment or medical screenings, these operations of knowledge production and classification were useful to political, policing, and military purposes. The ‘expert knowledge’ essential to counter-​insurgency was plural and multifaceted, and was instrumental to the ways in which authorities assessed, planned, and justified programmes of societal intervention.33

Labour (In)securities and the ‘Coefficient of Resistance’ in Portuguese Late Colonialism Present Necessities, Past Solutions In April 1974, ten days before the Carnation Revolution—​which overthrew the authoritarian regime that governed Portugal and the Portuguese empire for four decades—​a press cutting from a Spanish newspaper arrived at the Overseas Ministry. The article took aim at the Portuguese policy of native settlements (aldeamentos indígenas), focusing on Mozambique, where it was estimated that by 1980 over seven out of nine million Mozambicans would be resettled. The piece argued that the resettlement scheme involved a fundamental contradiction: ‘with a view to foster[ing] the modernization of African traditional structures, through the logic of repression, the Portuguese forces often use violence against the natives they aim to protect against the men and women of FRELIMO’.34 The Portuguese embassy in Madrid responded swiftly. The aldeamentos were healthy and hospitable places, providing enhanced education and medical facilities, sanitation, and leisure facilities. Military dimensions were downplayed, the embassy insisting that the settlements were built with voluntary labour. They were not ‘fortified’, nor were they ‘contexts of war’. If anything, the settlements reduced the ‘effects of psychological action’ by the ‘terrorists’. Moreover, the inhabitants’ religious and cultural practices were respected. The aldeamentos were portrayed as incubators of socio-​ economic progress, something unachievable while the population remained dispersed.35 According to the governor-​general of Mozambique, the description of aldeamentos as

33 

Omouri, ‘Les Sections Administratives Specialisées et les sciences sociales’, 383–​397. ‘Ya’, 15-​3-​1974, Diplomatic Historical Archive, Portugal (hereafter AHD)-​MU-​GM-​ GNP-​RNP-​0032-​07320. See alsoJoão Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete (1968–​1982)’, PhD dissertation, University of Bradford, 1993. 35  Signed by Miguel Trigueiros, ‘Ya’, 19-​3-​1974, AHD-​MU-​GM-​GNP-​RNP-​0032-​07320. 34 Newspaper

510    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro a ‘copy of the “failed” American experience in Vietnam’ demanded rebuttal. Accordingly, the Services of Centralization and Coordination of Intelligence of Mozambique (SCCIM) started collecting data to feed official responses.36 The major source drawn upon was a piece written by Lopo Vaz de Sampaio e Melo, an inter-​war colonial expert. His report was a consequence of a 1939 draft bill, signed by the Minister of the Colonies Francisco Vieira Machado, which had three principal objectives concerning re-​settlement. Firstly, the spiritual needs of the native population should be catered for and, as such, Catholic missionaries should play a key role in the administration of the settlements. Secondly, residents should be entitled to a range of material benefits, namely, access to educational services, tax-​exemption during the first year of settlement, and exemption from recruitment for public or private works during the first three years. Thirdly, agricultural experts were to be seconded to the new villages, providing residents with key training and tools. In this way, the aldeamentos would provide the Portuguese empire with renewed moral and economic purpose.37 During debates on the 1939 bill some objected that the suspension of compulsory labour for residents would impede the supply of manpower. It remained unclear how to reconcile the resettlement project with the prevailing dynamics of colonial labour extraction and administration. It was concluded, however, that the potential benefits outweighed the costs. Villagization would facilitate population control and the coordination of socio-​economic initiatives.38 Sampaio e Melo’s report was unequivocal: villagization enabled ‘order, civilization, moralization and economic progress’. It facilitated population control, countering dispersion and nomadism. And it promoted economic focus and direction, through labour regulation, technical instruction, and productive specialization. Resettlement would also foster social stability through the reinforcement of traditional social hierarchies and the promotion of specific moral codes. Therefore, it combined security, political, and social aims, with a potentially positive economic outcome.39 For all this praise, however, the bill was never implemented—​although the project continued to linger in the imagination of the ‘official mind’. A decade later, Teófilo Duarte, then Minister of the Colonies, returned to these ideas. Duarte argued that experiments run by the Jesuits in Brazil and in Paraguay (from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century)—​the ‘aldeamentos’ and the ‘reduciones’—​offered a solution to the issue. Back in 1942, he published an article defending those earlier practices. Dispersed populations were a problem since they contributed to administrative inefficiencies and undermined efforts to consolidate socio-​ political control. The Jesuits’ experiments achieved ‘exceptional results’. In this reading, the ‘efficiency’ of colonialism was tied to a politics of demographic concentration. The ‘mistakes’ associated with both experiments (including economic exploitation and enslavement) were not ignored, but they were downplayed. The experiments contributed to ‘the material 36 Manuel

Pimentel dos Santos to Ministry of Overseas, 9-​ 3-​ 1974, AHD-​ MU-​ GM-​ GNP-​ RNP​0032-​07320. 37 Parecer nº44, dossier nº37, Overseas Council, on the ‘Organização social e económica das populações indígenas’; Draft bill, ‘Organização Social e Económica das Populações Indígenas’, Boletim Geral das Colónias, 16/​178 (1940), 173. 38  Parecer nº 44, in Pareceres do Conselho do Império Colonial, AHU, 1. The statement and the votes of the members were published in Boletim Geral das Colónias, 27/​191 (1941), 7–​98. The quotations are all from Teófilo Duarte’s exposition, in Pareceres. 39  Parecer nº 44, in Pareceres, 19 and 21–​22, 38, 44–​45 and 51.

The Labours of (In)security    511 and social progress of populations’, not least because they facilitated knowledge about ‘the processes of labour’.40 The resettlement of colonial populations is an important example of the intersections between development, securitization, and counter-​insurgency ideas and practices. Sometimes it was expedient to reorder rural societies and economies, but on other occasions the aim was ‘strategic’ military intervention, which could be either punitive or preventive in design. Each represented, in different ways, a combination of political, social, and economic rationales. Numerous officials acknowledged the aldeamentos’ heterogeneous utility before the outbreak of late colonial conflicts, seeing them as a way to prevent the escalation of dissent, protest, or open rebellion. These debates reveal that resettlement has a longer history than most studies of counter-​insurgency concede. Histories of counter-​insurgency tend to consider that resettlement schemes were a product of violent conflict and were designed to restore order once insurgency had begun.41 Not always: in the Portuguese case, officials debated resettlement schemes far in advance of social and political unrest and insurgency breaking out. They served interlocking objectives, including the reorganization of economic production, the control of labour, the (re)creation of moral communities, and the rationalization of administrative resources, all with a view to promoting social and political stability.42

Securing Labour, Aiming at Security Growing interest in resettlement coincided with increased concerns among authorities about colonial labour unrest. Partially, this was a result of an intensified administrative and diplomatic familiarity with prevailing social, economic, and political conditions in foreign colonies as part of wider efforts to satisfy mounting pressures for social reform in Africa. The resulting policy initiatives clashed with regime reluctance to change the ‘native’ labour system.43 As policy choices came under closer scrutiny, the labour question became more closely associated with political and securitarian rationales.44 The Belgian Congo 40 Teófilo

Duarte, ‘A concentração populacional indígena e os jesuítas’, 407-​415.e,9, 104-​105ra a compreens olvimento como instrumento de permamencus africano debate-​se internacionalmente, por exemopO Mundo Português, nº 102, 103, 104–​105, 106 (1942), 249–​259, 305–​314, 343–​357, 407–​415. See also Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and Hugo Dores, ‘On the “Efficiency” of Civilization: Politics, Religion and the Population Debates in Portuguese Africa in the 1940s’, Portuguese Studies Review, 25/​1 (2017), 179–​204. 41 Gerald Bender, Angola under the Portuguese (London: Heinemann, 1978); Coelho, ‘Protected Villages’; Diogo Ramada Curto, Bernardo Cruz, and Teresa Furtado, Políticas Coloniais em Tempo de Revoltas (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2016). See also Cláudia Castelo in this volume. 42  Samuel Coghe, ‘Population Politics in the Tropics’, PhD dissertation, European University Institute, 2014; Jerónimo and Dores, ‘On the “Efficiency” of Civilization’. See also Michel Cornaton, Les camps de regroupement de Ia guerre d’ Algerie (Paris: Harmattan, 1998), maxime 23–​41. 43 Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, 271–​ 385; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, ‘A Modernizing Empire? Politics, Culture and Economy in Portuguese Late Colonialism’, in Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto (eds.), The Ends of European Colonial Empires (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015), 51–​80. 44 José Pedro Monteiro, ‘ “A Very Delicate Position”: Portuguese “Native Labour” Policies in the Aftermath of the Second World War (1945–​1949)’, Portuguese Studies Review, 25/​1 (2017), 121–​149; Alexander Keese, ‘Proteger o Preto. Havia uma mentalidade reformista na Administração portuguesa na Africa Tropical (1926–​1961)?’, Africana Studia, 6 (2003)‚ 97–​125.

512    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro recurrently featured on the administrative radar, given its geographical proximity and social and political links with Angola. Information provided by the Belgian historian Charles Terlinden concerning the Belgian Congo was, for instance, assessed by the authorities in Luanda. Terlinden argued that the influx of African workers to urban centres created social agglomerates formed by a ‘black proletariat’ living in terrible housing conditions with chronic sanitation problems. ‘Dangers [regarding] moral and public order’ were evident, as the dissemination of ‘subversive ideas’ by ‘internal agitators’ was highly probable. The situation in the Portuguese colonies was considered less menacing. But, in towns like Luanda and Lourenço Marques (Maputo), the potentially disruptive consequences of rural-​to-​urban migration seemed obvious. ‘Prevention was better than cure’.45 In 1951, information derived from the Portuguese embassy in Brussels stressed a potential disadvantage of the ongoing Congo ten-​year development plan: the ‘grave risk of exodus’. According to Portuguese officials, a strategy to counter the ‘proletarianization’ of the masses was required, thereby preserving the ‘family framework’, itself a ‘powerful element of social stabilization’. One of the solutions advocated was the creation of colonatos, directing ‘natives’ towards agricultural work. Another was the transformation of labour conditions: reducing the duration of recruitment for private companies, increasing the low wages associated with cash-​crop programmes, and putting an end to the ‘abuses’ of ‘native labour’ on road works projects.46 All were identified as potential sources of unrest. There were, however, some reservations about the implications of initiating significant legal and socio-​political reforms. Belgian plans to reform colonial citizenship politics, widening political and civil enfranchisement of African subjects, were negatively assessed.47 ‘Natives’ (indígenas) of the Portuguese empire were prohibited from forming trade unions, and the right to collective bargaining was not recognized. Officials feared that enfranchisement would empower African subjects to demand greater rights and entitlements. Instead, they focused on limiting abuses, rather than promoting political and constitutional advancement. In 1947, in a well-​known episode, Henrique Galvão (Senior Inspector for Colonial Administration) delivered a critical report on labour conditions in Angola and Mozambique to the National Assembly, highlighting their economic, social, political, and diplomatic consequences. In 1949, Galvão acknowledged that, although social and labour reforms in neighbouring colonies were addressing workers’ grievances, political disorder continued. According to him, Portuguese colonies were not ready for comparable reforms due to their ‘backwardness’. If labour conditions could cause political turmoil, sweeping legal and social reform, entailing more participation and claim-​making from the ‘natives’, might produce unrest and disorder.48 Analogous concerns were raised in relation to São Tomé and Príncipe. For decades, thousands of workers from Angola and Mozambique had been 45 Report of the High Inspectorate for Native Affairs (hereafter HINA), 15-​ 12-​1947. Compilation of Reports of the High Inspectorate of Overseas Administration, Historical Archive of the Portuguese Institute for Development (hereafter Compilation, HAPID). 46  ‘Informação: Evolução económica e social das populações indígenas do Congo Belga’, 17-​3-​1951, HINA, Compilation, HAPID. 47  Daniel Tödt, The Lumumba Generation: African Bourgeoisie and Colonial Distinction in Belgian Congo (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021). 48  Report, 17-​ 1-​1949; Henrique Galvão, 23-​9-​1949, HINA, Compilation, HAPID. See also Douglas Wheeler, ‘The Galvão Report on Forced Labour (1947) in Historical Context and Perspective. Trouble-​ shooter who was “Trouble” ’, Portuguese Studies Review, 16/​1 (2009), 115–​152.

The Labours of (In)security    513 coercively transported to its plantations. Now, a report stated, the serviçais (as these workers were called) ‘worked and lived against their will’, suicide was rampant, and ‘rebellion against undesired work’ was a serious possibility. The solution, officials argued, could be found in the Transvaal, South Africa, where the work discipline of mining workers was maintained through the organization of labour according to supposedly stable, ethnic hierarchies, as a consequence of ‘retribalization’, and through a system that repressed absenteeism.49 The positive references to the South African example underscore the fact that Portuguese officials frequently looked to other colonial contexts when assessing the situation within their own empire. In part, this was because Portuguese African subjects also looked to other colonial situations. The provision of social welfare, higher wages, and less violent systems of recruitment attracted thousands of Angolans and Mozambicans to the Belgian Congo, Nyasaland, Rhodesia, Tanganyika, and South Africa. The consul in Leopoldville complained that this outward migration was not only a drain on manpower resources, but also endangered Portugal’s reputation as a ‘colonising nation’.50 In 1947, a Portuguese colonial inspector called for an inter-​colonial conference concerning labour and migration, arguing that education, ‘moral and intellectual uplift’, and propaganda were crucial to the formulation of a sustainable policy. But, as Galvão noted, inter-​colonial migration mostly benefitted foreign colonies. In 1950, when the Belgian government hosted an Inter-​African Labour Conference, Galvão lamented that the most desirable outcome for the Portuguese empire—​the inter-​colonial repression of cross-​border migration—​was unlikely to be considered.51 Galvão knew a good deal about migratory issues. In 1947 he was instructed to conduct a ‘study on native emigration from Mozambique’. For Galvão, migration had significant demographic, economic, and political consequences, which endangered the Portuguese ‘mission as colonizers in Africa’. Population depletion stemmed from multiple factors: among them, high rates of child mortality, low rates of fertility, diseases and epidemics, and the highly mobile character of labour. Other factors that contributed to ‘clandestine’ labour migration as Africans sought to evade the demands imposed upon them by the authorities included compulsory cotton cultivation schemes and ‘contract’ labour for public and private works. From the authorities’ perspective, the consequences of outward labour migration included the disruption of family ties, the growth of prostitution, and the weakening of the ‘black race’. The authorities regarded two other outcomes as particularly significant: the ‘denationalization of natives’ and the unchecked movement of political dissidents. The solution to these issues, Galvão argued, required greater investment in welfare, health, and education, plus the administrative and military infrastructure needed to police the otherwise porous frontiers of the empire. He also maintained that a coordinated propaganda campaign and the abandonment of compulsory cultivation were desirable, although he remained committed to the notion that work was a moral obligation of ‘natives’.52

49 HINA, 25-​ 8-​ 1947, Compilation, HAPID. See also Zachary Kagan-​ Guthrie, ‘Repression and Migration: Forced Labour Exile of Mozambicans to São Tomé, 1948–​1955’, Journal of Southern Africa Studies, 37/​3 (2011), 449–​462. 50  ‘Extracto do relatório do Consul em Leopoldville acerca da sua viagem a Angola em Dezembro de 1949’, Historical Diplomatic Archive, Portugal (AHD), 2P-​A49-​M21. 51  HINA, 6-​5-​1947; Henrique Galvão, HINA, 23-​9-​1949. Compilation, HAPID. 52  ‘Estudo de emigração indígena em Moçambique—​pelo Inspector Superior Henrique Galvão’, 30-​1-​ 1948, AHU-​MU-​GM-​GNP-​RNP-​0520-​01619. For the question of cotton, see Mary-​Anne Pitcher, Politics

514    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro In 1960, Inspector Joaquim Rodrigues scrutinized the situation in Santo António do Zaire, northern Angola. Rodrigues reported that ‘grave abuses and violence’ abounded against women of all ages. These women were provided by the ‘native chiefs’ to chefes de posto (the low-​level Portuguese authorities), for whom they worked as domestic servants. No salary or food was offered in return. At the same time, male workers were underpaid or ‘compelled’ to work for one year by local authorities. Such abuses had two principal consequences. Firstly, many workers opted to avoid labour demands in northern Angola by migrating to the Congo. Secondly, it was recorded that the use of coerced labour—​combined with knowledge of better working conditions across the border—​helped anti-​colonial activists foment opposition to colonial rule. In this reading, compulsory labour was the most effective ‘collaborator of agitators’. Many northern Angolans supported the Alliance of Bakongo (ABAKO) and were conscious of the ‘accusations’ made against the Portuguese at the UN due to the circulation of pamphlets and newspaper articles in the A Voz da Nação Angolana, the organ of the União dos Povos de Angola (UPA), which was printed in Léopoldville. Rodrigues also informed Lisbon that anti-​colonial activists were setting ‘various dates’ for the ‘independence of Angola’ and the start of the planned revolt against Portuguese rule. The date mentioned was 15 August 1960 (in fact, major disturbances in the north of Angola erupted on 15 March 1961, more or less coinciding with the UN Security Council debate on the Angolan situation). Rodrigues suggested several measures designed to address the causes of unrest and quash the anticipated insurgency. ‘Any abuses against the native’ should be impeded, and the ‘motives of discontent’ should be studied. Much like Galvão had stated before, Rodrigues argued that compulsory labour should be abolished in the provinces of Congo and in Lunda (where the mining company DIAMANG operated and recruited). It was crucial to ‘revise, courageously, the anachronistic legislation’ related to cotton production and labour in general, ‘the biggest and most dangerous causes of native discontent’. But, again echoing Galvão, Rodrigues defended continuing efforts to ‘make the native fulfil the moral and social duty of work usefully’. The result was that Rodrigues placed greater emphasis on intelligence gathering as a means to preserve order.53 In Mozambique, the situation was similar, as testimony from civil and military sources indicated. In July 1960, after an in situ inspection, General Carlos Nascimento e Silva (a member of the Military Command of Mozambique) evaluated the level of ‘unrest’ in Mocuba (Zambezia Province). The report concluded that whilst the situation was not one of open rebellion, animosity to compulsory cotton cultivation was ‘manifest’. ‘Passive resistance’, including Africans’ refusal to cultivate cotton, was a reality. Public order was fragile, and there was a growing need to deploy the armed forces. Urgent revision of government cotton policy and the improvement of labour conditions, identified as the roots of ‘disturbances’, were advocated. If nothing changed ‘more serious’ incidents would occur.54 in the Portuguese Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Allen Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty (Portsmouth: James Currey, 1996). 53 ‘Província de Angola—​ Inspecção dos Serviços Administrativos dos Negócios Indígenas’, 28-​2-​ 1961, AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.49.003/​45.00308. See also Alexander Keese, ‘The Constraints of Late Colonial Reform Policy: Forced Labour Scandals in the Portuguese Congo (Angola) and the Limits of Reform under Authoritarian Colonial rule, 1955–​1961’, Portuguese Studies, 28/​2 (2012), 186–​200. 54  Nascimento e Silva, ‘Acontecimentos em Mocuba’, 22-​7-​1960; Captain Vieira Araújo, ‘Perturbação do ambiente em Mocuba (distrito da Zambézia), 26-​7-​1960’, AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.050.03/​021.00132.

The Labours of (In)security    515 In August, another report blamed a specific company for many of the problems: Monteiro & Giro, one of the most important firms in Mozambique and owner of a concession in the Macuba area. In addition to the mistreatment of ‘native’ farmers, the firm was accused of purchasing cotton at below-​market value, with the ‘connivance’ of local authorities. It was also alleged that African women were being forced to work in the cotton economy. Such practices were contributing to the politicization of the local population, particularly those who were involved in migratory networks. Therefore, ‘effective control’ of local populations was crucial, because fixing them to the land would both secure labour and address security concerns. As General Beleza Ferreira stated, cotton policy, and its associated labour regime, was putting ‘the peace and the order in the province at risk’. General Júlio Botelho Moniz, at the time Minister of National Defence (and soon leader of an aborted coup connected to the eruption of the colonial war), wrote to Salazar stating that the ‘greed’ of some private companies, enabled by ‘reprehensible protections and connivances’ by some ‘unscrupulous’ authorities, needed swift rectification.55 Such criticisms prompted Adriano Moreira, Under-​ Secretary for Overseas Administration (until April 1961, when he became Overseas Minister), to instruct the Senior Inspector Mário Costa to investigate the ‘unrest’ in Mocuba in greater detail. Costa amassed several documents, from official reports to the ‘service diaries’ of administrative authorities. Underlining the ‘inexcusable irresponsibility’ of Monteiro & Giro, the report noted that the unrest in Mocuba was not occurring in isolation: it was just one example of social agitation connected to economic extraction, labour demands, abuses by foremen and cipaios (subaltern African police), low prices, fraudulent methods for land allocation, and the use of punitive labour practices. The context of the unrest was also worrying: a violent and deadly repression of a demonstration by Makonde nationalists had just occurred in Mueda (Northern Mozambique), on 16 June 1960. Costa argued that the ‘dark history of white cotton’ required policies designed to ameliorate the worst excesses of Portuguese colonialism. ‘Rebellions in Africa’ were ‘ignited’ by recurrent ‘abuses of power’. Prices should be increased, and mandatory cotton cultivation should be abandoned. Again, the African’s ‘moral duty of labour’ should be preserved, but labour conditions should change.56 Following Moreira’s instructions, Costa, an experienced inspector, conducted a wide-​ ranging inspection of Mozambique. It was completed over two years and resulted in a lengthy report about prevailing conditions throughout the colony.57 In the meantime, war erupted in Angola in early 1961 and substantial reforms were carried out. Despite the important political changes occurring during the inspection period, the idea that social and labour conditions were closely related to potential political disturbances remained central. It was judged essential to tackle the ‘social question’. Migration from the Tete district to Southern Rhodesia was, for instance, identified as a threat to political stability, while the scant administrative presence in the Niassa district, where few inhabitants spoke or

55  ‘Ocorrências em Mocuba com cultivadores de Algodão’, 1-​8-​1960; J. Beleza Ferreira, ‘Parecer’, 1-​8-​ 1960; Júlio Botelho Moniz, ‘Despacho’, 2-​8-​1960, AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.050.03/​021.00132. 56  Mário Costa, ‘Relatório sobre política algodoeira na Zambézia’ (first report), 15-​9-​1960, AHU-​MU-​ ISAU-​A2.050.03/​021.00132. 57 Mário Costa, ‘Inspecção à Província de Moçambique, Vol. 1’, AHU-​ MU-​ ISAU-​ A2.050.03/​ 021.00132; Costa, ‘Inspecção à Província de Moçambique, Vol. 2’, AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.050.03/​021.00133.

516    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro understood Portuguese, was underscored.58 Costa’s main concern remained the so-​called ‘native question’, broadly understood as the socio-​economic conditions prevailing in the territory. In this respect, his report included three specific enquiries: two into cotton policies in the district of Zambezia and another on the ‘social action’ required in the entire colony. Labour and social questions were considered the most critical domains of colonial rule in Mozambique. The Mocuba incident was not an outcome of ‘influences from Nyasaland’; it could have happened in ‘any other circunscrição within a cotton concessionary area’.59 According to Costa, the authorities could no longer repeat old tropes about ‘our good native policy’ or the ‘friendship of autochthonous peoples’. Any ‘tranquillity’, ‘harmony’, or ‘welfare’ was superficial at best. Wages were ‘negligible’ and ‘manpower [was] used abusively’, leading to political unrest. This state of affairs was aggravated by political emancipation in neighbouring territories. Changes were needed, starting with the cotton concessionaries and ending with an administrative overhaul. Like others, Costa suggested some important corrective measures: from raising the price paid for cotton to foster productivity to tighter legal restrictions on compulsory field labour. Otherwise, the results would be nefarious: ‘a) despair and poisoning of the relationship between blacks and whites, if not manifest hatred; b) drain [of labourers] to neighbouring territories’.60 A vigorous welfare policy was essential, as social assistance was meagre. In a single district, only four out of 146 companies met the legal minima regarding shelter and food provision; the majority of camps for ‘native’ workers were described as ‘bad’ or ‘awful’. Employers simply ignored legislation relating to basic health requirements. The number of existing nurses at workplaces was less than half the legal requirement. Employers were also failing to engage in ‘nationalization’ efforts. Nor did they provide leisure facilities or social events for their workers. This was a mistake: portable cinema was cheap and was judged effective in countering dissatisfaction among native workers. The report concluded that the ‘native question’ was ‘without doubt, the most delicate and pressing [issue] especially in Angola and Mozambique’. Moreira agreed, writing that ‘internal and external circumstances demand, more than ever, that our social policy be implemented without compromise. In several quarters one can see mounting distrust regarding our ability to make facts match the law. The consequences of the deterioration of this state of affairs will be extremely damaging for the government and the country’. He was right.61 Labour and social dynamics were thus seen as the principal cause of dissent. Costa’s focus on the social question would eventually lead to an acrimonious exchange with João da Costa Freitas, who replaced Moreira as Under-​secretary for Overseas Administration. Freitas asked Costa to assess ‘attitudes, reflexes, influences and reactions of natives in response to the cases of independence that are approaching, both in Nyasaland and Tanganyika’. Costa argued that such a task would take months, as it depended on a proper engagement with

58  Mário Costa, ‘Distrito de Tete e Curadoria dos Indígenas Portugueses de Salisbury’, 10-​ 7-​1961; Costa, ‘Ocupação administrativa do distrito do Niassa’, 30-​5-​1961, AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.050.03/​021.00133. 59 Costa, ‘Relatório sobre política algodoeira na Zambézia’ (1st report); Costa, ‘Relatório sobre política algodoeira na Zambézia’ (2nd report), 14-​10-​1960, AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.050.03/​021.00132. 60  Costa, ‘Relatório sobre política algodoeira na Zambézia’ (2nd report). 61  Mário Costa, ‘Assistência e protecção ao trabalhador indígena e fiscalização privativa do trabalho’, 6-​ 2-​ 1961; Adriano Moreira, ‘Despacho’, 27-​ 2-​ 1961; Costa, ‘Relatório sobre política algodoeira na Zambézia’ (2nd report), AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.050.03/​021.00132.

The Labours of (In)security    517 local communities. Furthermore, in Costa’s view, the causes of dissent were to be found inside Mozambique, in prevailing socio-​economic conditions and misguided policies, not in the activities of foreign agitators.62 Unsurprisingly, in 1961, when loosely coordinated violence erupted in Angola, the labour question emerged as a fundamental causal explanation for the insurgency. Despite the Portuguese government’s repeated claims that the revolt was foreign-​led and communist inspired –​a crucial argument to try to rebut UN attempts to internationalize the conflict -​ , imperial inspectors and local officials, while certainly blaming ‘agitators’, recognized that popular grievances had deeper, local roots. In 1960, Inspector José Ferreira Martins toured the key conflict zones in Northern Angola, especially in the Congo district. He warned that ‘no native policy was being carried out’ in Angola. The prevailing cultivation regimes of cotton and rice were particularly harsh, causing popular alienation. In assessing Huambo district, in the south, Martins also underlined the relationship between the emergence of local unrest and the degree of exploitation taking place. He argued that once ‘pacification’ was complete it would be possible to win back the local population’s allegiance through the implementation of remedial social policies, including those related to ‘native’ labour. From the perspective of these colonial inspectors, the entanglement between insurgency, social and political order, and labour policies was striking. When, for instance, the governor-​ general and district officials all agreed that in order to save the coffee harvests in northern Angola authorities should coercively recruit workers in Huambo to replace those that had fled as a result of the conflict. Martins objected, arguing that the political and social costs outweighed the potential economic gains: unless the well-​being of the indigenous population was addressed, economic and political stability would be impossible to achieve. Military efforts should intersect with social moralization, pari passu.63 Despite official claims that the causes of revolt were externally induced, these and many other reports clearly pointed to other explanations. Contributing factors included the increasing internationalization of the Portuguese colonial question, which instigated legal and political changes in local policy. Adding to the events in the north of Angola, attacks on Luanda police, military, and penal facilities in February 1961 aroused greater international attention, bringing Portuguese colonialism under closer scrutiny. The government of Liberia requested the UN Security Council to address the human rights record in Angola, leading to the establishment of the UN Angola sub-​committee. No in situ mission was allowed, but numerous testimonies were gathered from Angolan refugees in the former Belgian Congo, alongside a raft of evidence put forward by anti-​colonial activists and a worldwide network of NGOs. This evidence refuted the arguments of the Portuguese authorities and clearly stated that social and political grievances were the key causes of conflicts in northern Angola (as elsewhere).64 At the same time, at the ILO, Ghana’s representative filed a complaint

62  J. Costa Freitas, ‘Despacho’, 24-​8-​1961, High Inspectorate for Overseas Administration (hereafter HIOA), AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.050.03/​021.00133; Mário Costa to HIOA, 13-​7-​1961, AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​ A2.050.03/​021.00133. 63  José Ferreira Martins, ‘Relatório da Inspecção ao Distrito do Huambo—​1961’, 10-​ 5-​1961, HIOA, AHU-​MU-​ISAU-​A2.001.02/​008.00038. 64 Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘The Inventors of Human Rights in Africa: Portugal, Late Colonialism and the UN Human Rights Regime’, in Burke, Duranti, and Moses (eds.), Decolonization, Self-​Determination and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics, 285–​315.

518    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro against the Portuguese government for breaches of Convention 105 on the Abolition of Forced Labour, reinvigorating international criticism first aired during the inter-​war years. As a consequence, the Native Statute was abolished in September 1961. In April 1962, the 1928 Native Labour Code was finally repealed and replaced by a Rural Labour Code. Other decrees abolished all legal variants of forced labour, forbade administrative participation in recruitment, and cancelled cash-​crop compulsory programmes.65

The Labours of ‘Psychological Action’ Forced labour did not disappear overnight.66 As insurgency extended to the territories of Guinea (1963) and Mozambique (1964), counter-​insurgency schemes intensified and the remit of social policies widened. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, debates over the different ways in which securitarian and developmental rationales might be fruitfully combined, including in relation to labour issues, proliferated. In Angola, in 1967, the creation of a General Council for Counter-​Subversion was crucial to the further elaboration of securitarian and counter-​insurgency policy-​making. Multiple military and civil experts attended its meetings, in which political, military, social, economic, and even cultural dimensions were discussed, frequently in relation to one another. One of the most important debates centred on the ‘General Instruction of Counter-​Subversion in Angola’ (1972). Echoing issues that had been debated over the past several decades, the General Instruction stated that counter-​insurgency should rest on three main pillars: ‘social promotion’ (mainly education and sanitary assistance), economic development (agriculture and livestock farming), and security of rural localities and populations. In all this, the problem of labour unrest emerged as essential, particularly in terms of population control and the mobility of labour. This last problem was identified as a policy problem for three key reasons. Firstly, because the unstable supply of labour hampered efforts to increase production. Secondly, because labour had been a historic cause of unrest within Portugal’s African colonies and a magnet for international criticism. And, thirdly, the movement of labour within and between colonies was regarded as a security threat since it allowed activists to spread anti-​ colonial propaganda.67 The control of ‘native’ labour mobility was critical for another reason. The ‘instability’ of labour, connected to multiple migratory flows, created serious impediments to ongoing ‘psychological action’ programmes. Of the estimated 531,153 waged-​workers, approximately 173,200 spent less than one year working for the same employer. This created momentous economic and political problems. Labour ‘stabilization’, which was systematically debated 65  José Pedro Monteiro, The Internationalisation of the ‘Native Labour’ Question in Portuguese Late Colonialism (1945–​1962) (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Colonial Labour Internationalised: Portugal and the Decolonisation Momentum (1945–​1975)’, International History Review, 42/​3 (2020), 485–​504. 66  Zachary Kagan-​Guthrie, Bound for Work (Charlottesville/​ London: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 128–​148. 67  Actas da Sessão do Conselho Provincial de Contra-​Subversão (hereafter Actas da Sessão), 6-​4-​1972, Secret, AHD/​MU/​GM/​GNP/​RNP/​0048/​0088; Bender, Angola under the Portuguese; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Rural (In)securities: Resettlement, Control and “Development” in Angola (1960–​1970)’, Comparativ, 27/​2 (2017), 75–​97.

The Labours of (In)security    519 in international, inter-​imperial, and colonial meetings and organizations, became a priority in Portuguese developmental and security circles. Social, politico-​military, and economic factors coalesced, making it a recurrent concern of numerous administrative policies. Of the multiple answers to the problem, one was particularly relevant, because it came from perhaps the most important authority on labour issues, Afonso Mendes, in a report provided to the Council for the Orientation of Psychological Action (COPA, 1968) on 10 April 1969.68 Afonso Mendes was Director of the Institute of Labour, Social Security and Social Welfare of Angola (ITPASA) from 1962 to 1970 and participated actively in the ‘secret’ debates on counter-​ subversion held during a symposium (1968–​ 1969) organized by the General Council for Counter-​Subversion (created in 1967).69 In January 1969, he authored a confidential report that was highly critical of the state of social relations in Angola. The report confirmed that ‘errors and abuses’ were endemic within the ‘political and administrative structure’, from the wide discrepancies in living standards to those in labour conditions and wage rates. Low pay was a particularly important issue: problematic in itself and connected to the mobility of the African ‘rural’ worker. Traditional forms of exploitation, to which the civil authorities had long contributed, were now accompanied by restrictions justified on grounds of defence. ‘Military and para-​military’ rationales and schemes of population control were another significant ‘obstacle’ to the necessary improvement of working conditions. Routine ‘repression’ of workers by the administrative authorities, conducted ‘at the request’ of employers, compounded the problem. ‘Extreme physical violence’ was widespread. Seven years after the legal abolition of ‘forced labour’, these ‘interventions’ continued. And they multiplied during the counter-​insurgency. Land expropriation was another recurrent difficulty and a motive for unrest, one that was eagerly exploited by the ‘ENEMY’. Consequently, local populations, the report concluded, were ‘susceptible to a large degree to subversive doctrines’. Mendes proposed the delineation of a counter-​doctrine that ‘justifies the errors of the past and minimizes their consequences’des. It was crucial to ‘disseminate’ the argument that the discrepancy in living standards was attributable to ‘Africans’ lack of education, their disinclination to work, and their limited entrepreneurial spirit’. Regarding labour, Mendes argued that a ‘form of population control’ had to be found that did not inhibit ‘the freedom of mobility of the rural worker’. Moreover, ‘civil, military, police, and paramilitary authorities’ should be discouraged from intervening in the labour market. As Mendes summarized, ‘counter-​subversion can only be effective through extensive social, political, and administrative reforms’. Improving labour relations would minimize unrest and organized ‘subversion’, thus advancing counter-​insurgency efforts.70 In another report (April 1969), Mendes went further. He considered the problem of ‘native’ labour mobility a perfect laboratory for ‘psychological’ intervention. The problem should be turned into an opportunity. Mobile workers could either be ‘excellent carriers’ of the Portuguese ‘doctrine and cause’ or of ‘subversive ideology and techniques’. It all depended on the ability of the authorities to adapt to circumstances. Labour migrants were young (typically between the ages of 18 and 30), they were eager for ‘new ideas and knowledge’, and 68  Afonso Mendes, ‘Contra-​subversão/​Acção Psicológica’, Reserved, 10-​4-​1969, AHD/​MU/​GM/​GNP/​ RNP/​0440/​008. 69  Jerónimo, ‘ “A Battle in the Field of Human Relations” ’. 70  ‘Simpósio de Contra-​ Subversão. Comissão de Estudo da Secção I. Plano de Contra-​Subversão. Relatórios, AHD-​MU-​GM-​GNP-​RNP-​0570-​01234.

520    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro they circulated widely. They would surely welcome any kind of ‘entertainment’. The ‘poverty’ and ‘lack of comfort’ of worker villages was critical in this regard. Mendes offered some suggestions, some of which were already being implemented by the ITPASA. For instance, the existing and planned roadhouses (estalagens) should be places in which the propagandist voice of radio Voz de Angola was exclusively transmitted. Workers should also be provided with ‘simple literature’, with ‘a predominance of photographic images and instructive drawings’ aimed at ‘doctrinaire education’. The replication of clubes (social centres) for migrant rural workers, already existing in some medium-​size companies, was recommended too, and the ITPASA already owned four of these. According to Mendes, the ‘possibilities of propaganda and psychological action’ opened by these spaces were immense: ‘selected’ films and documentaries would become elements of a ‘circuit of political propaganda’ overseen by trained experts prepared for ‘engagement with rural manpower’. In all this, ‘political psychology’ was crucial: it would enhance political control of mobile rural workers and facilitate the territorial and social dissemination of the ‘counter-​subversion’ message. The development of ‘corporative sports’, the rollout of institutes’ holiday camps, and the progress of the two periodicals being published by the ITPASA—​Trabalho and Jornal do Trabalhador, with print runs of 3,000 and 10,000, respectively—​were additional instruments of these strategies of ‘indoctrination’ and control.71 Mendes’s proposals were not systematically enacted, but some of his ideas were put into practice, including by other actors involved in the counter-​insurgency effort. In a report covering its activity from 15 September to 31 December 1969, a working-​group focused on ‘psychological action through imagery’ (GTAPI) highlighted the importance of the ITPASA’s facilities (and their outreach) to the success of propagandist imagery about health and hygiene, nutrition, agricultural production, livestock, and rural cooperatives. The ongoing counter-​ insurgency schemes offered considerable resources and opportunities to diverse individuals and institutions aiming to affirm their importance in colonial societies. In this respect, labour-​related actors, institutions, and infrastructures could prove useful, politically as well as economically.72

Conclusion Colonial counter-​ insurgency cannot be understood by focusing solely on military, securitarian, and ‘strategic’ dimensions. Developmentalism and securitarization were articulated as preventive responses to political and social turmoil, albeit in distinct ways, with different consequences,. The developmentalization of security and the securitization of development were two deeply imbricated processes. Colonial populations demanded additional opportunities, rights, and liberties after the Second World War, and international and transnational processes, institutions and actors opened up new possibilities of claim-​making and public debate about colonial realities, while offering at the same time new incentives

71 

Mendes, ‘Contra-​subversão/​Acção Psicológica’. de Trabalho de Acção Psicológica pela Imagem (GTAPI), Relatório de Actividades AHD-​MU-​GM-​GNP-​RNP-​S056-​UI013505[1970]. 72 Grupo

The Labours of (In)security    521 for inter-​imperial and inter-​colonial cooperation.73 Efforts to preserve imperial and colonial sovereign integrity entailed solutions designed to improve social, cultural, and economic conditions of subject populations, at least on paper.74 With significant differences in scope and intensity from empire to empire, and from colony to colony, these dynamics shaped distinct trajectories of imperial demise. Accordingly, late colonial (counter)insurgencies were shaped by wider political circumstances, increasingly influenced by the definition of national self-​determination as the expected outcome of European overseas rule and, also, at least in theory, by the (proclaimed) universalization of a minimum set of rights to all human beings irrespective of race, origins, or gender.75 Clear evidence of political, economic, and social advancement of colonial societies and populations became crucial to strategies that aimed to preserve imperial formations. Even in colonies where organized insurgencies either did not occur, or only broke out belatedly, repression and social control went hand in hand with welfarist and developmentalist efforts in a number of aspects, from social provisions to sanitary activities. Questions regarding labour, health, or education were pivotal in gaining, or preserving, the allegiance of local populations, therefore potentially preventing social unrest and popular identification with ‘subversive’ movements. They were also powerful instruments to increase the ‘legibility’ of the state, for instance through information-​gathering and analysis, and to enhance its ability to control local populations, their movements and social and political mobilization. In a way, the disentanglement of the so-​called social question and of the securitarian one is not an easy task. The numerous concepts, arguments, and repertoires of action related to colonial repressive developmentalisms are telling in this regard.76 After a first section in which we addressed some of the abovementioned issues and dynamics, offering some comparative insights, in the second one we focused on one revealing case, the ‘native’ labour question in Portuguese late colonialism. We did so in different moments in time, gathering a rather diverse set of empirical sources, from newspapers clippings to diplomatic cables, from inspection reports to legal pieces. We showed how thoughts about the securitarian implications of socio-​economical grievances and initiatives to intersect securitarian and developmental rationales and policies predated the emergence of anti-​colonial organized violence and conflict. Ideas about the social and economic organization of ‘native’ populations always incorporated significant elements of population control. The need to use the former as a way to induce social discipline in order to prevent potential conflicts was always acknowledged, in one way or another. Since the late 1930s, Portuguese authorities, experts, and ideologues recognized the potential for social and, especially, political dissent entailed by violent, coercive, and exploitative social conditions. The chronologies of the historical intersections between labour control, social ordering, and preventive counter-​insurgency are wider (and richer) than the traditional focus on the ‘beginning’ of the colonial wars assumes. 73 Cooper,

Decolonization and African Society; John Kent, The Internationalisation of Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 74  It is, of course, crucial to highlight the discrepancies between discourses and practices, doctrines and actual interventions, aims and concrete, and often unintended, consequences. 75 Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire; Burke, Duranti, and Moses (eds.), Decolonization, Self-​ Determination and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics. 76  Jerónimo, ‘Repressive Developmentalisms’.

522    Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro The chapter also reveals how social unrest in other colonies and legal and political reforms in other empires contrasted with the continuing reliance on forced labour within the Portuguese ‘overseas provinces’. Such reliance was increasingly at variance with international normative frameworks, a fact that had significant diplomatic implications. Both dynamics, in other colonial empires and internationally had profound consequences within and between colonies, for instance fostering inter-​colonial, trans-​frontier migration. Substantial, uncontrolled, outward migration to neighbouring territories, including labour mobility, had significant implications in the economic activity of Portuguese colonies and helped cement new trans-​territorial and anti-​colonial solidarities. All these aspectscontributed to the expansion and intensification of the concerns of the Portuguese ‘official mind’ about the political, and securitarian, consequences of socio-​economic grievances, especially related to labour abuses. The nexus between social distress and labour malpractices and political and social disorder and mobilization was reiterated by several local inspectors and authorities just before 1961, when the conflict erupted in the north of Angola. The eruption of colonial wars, first in Angola then in Guiné-​Bissau and Mozambique, naturally amplified them. In an increasingly hostile international context, the Portuguese authorities’ ambition to resist decolonizing pressures, to combat anti-​colonial guerrillas, and to preserve a modicum of social order in the ‘overseas provinces’ produced a more expansive, and inclusive, approach to social policies, albeit more in theory than in practice, more de jure than de facto. In the process, the administration and use of ‘native’ labour continued to be a central aspect of securitarian and counter-​insurgency strategies, before and after the legal abolition of forced labour in 1962, which did not end labour-​related abuses or discrimination. But, at the same time, official resistance continued to the establishment of a more egalitarian and inclusive juridical, political, and social framework, which might have mitigated some of the pressing causes of unrest, protest, and violent dissent. More research needs to be done regarding the topics addressed in both chapter sections. The interaction, collaboration, or competition between actors regarding remedial action, appropriate, viable, and effective policies, and the resources needed, can be further understood by moving beyond a strict historical focus, promoting a more multidimensional approach, and generating new problems and investigations. The historical intersections between labour, education, health, or religion, and securitarian and counter-​insurgency ideas and schemes demand more thorough investigation. For instance, in counter-​insurgency contexts, vaccination programmes were not only important to monitor populations, but also to organize and administer labour supply; education and vocational programmes intersected with administrative thoughts and policies about ‘detribalization’, labour ‘stabilization’, migratory dynamics, and political restructuring. The analytical incorporation of international and transnational aspects also needs to be fostered. In different ways, idioms and repertoires of ‘social pacification’ and security, including counter-​insurgency and developmentalism, travelled across political borders, whether being assimilated, that is, nationalized, accommodated to local and regional contexts, or rejected. They were trans-​ imperial phenomena. So too were the political implications of the ‘native’ labour question, whose ramifications extended further than Loanda, Lourenço Marques, or Leopoldville and Dar-​Es-​Salaam. They reached New York and Geneva, and travelled back to Lisbon and the north of Angola, shaping reformist views and welfarist, securitarian, and developmental policies. The articulation of all these events and processes, scales of analysis and actors, is

The Labours of (In)security    523 difficult, but it is fundamental. A finer understanding of late colonialism and decolonization, including their varied (counter)insurgencies, depends on it.

Select Bibliography Bender, Gerald, Angola under the Portuguese (London: Heinemann, 1978). Cooper, Frederick, Decolonization and African Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Feichtinger, Moritz, ‘“A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72. Isaacman, Allen, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty (Portsmouth: James Currey, 1996). Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, ‘Repressive Developmentalisms: Idioms, Repertoires, Trajectories in Late Colonialism’, in Andrew Thompson and Martin Thomas, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 537–​554. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, The ‘Civilizing Mission’ of Portuguese Colonialism, 1870–​1930 (London: Palgrave, 2015). Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Colonial Labour Internationalised: Portugal and the Decolonisation Momentum (1945–​1975)’, International History Review, 42/​3 (2020), 485–​504. Kagan-​Guthrie, Zachary, Bound for Work (Charlottesville/​London: University of Virginia Press, 2018). Keese, Alexander, ‘Developmentalist Attitudes and Old Habits: Portuguese Labour Policies, South African Rivalries, and Flight in Southern Angola, 1945–​1975’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 41/​2 (2015), 237–​253. Monteiro, José Pedro, The Internationalisation of the ‘Native Labour’ Question in Portuguese Late Colonialism (1945–​1962) (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Owens, Patricia, Economy of Force; Counter-​Insurgency and the Historical Rise of the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Stucki, Andreas, Violence and Gender in Africa’s Iberian Colonies (London: Palgrave, 2019). Thomas, Martin, and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Chapter 27

( Un) set tli ng L at e C ol onial Nias s a , Moz am biqu e ( 19 6 6 –​1974 ) Social Knowledge, Development, and Counter-​Insurgency Cláudia Castelo Counter-​insurgency as a late-​colonial mode of warfare was developed after the end of the Second World War by the European empires in response to the surge of liberation movements in Asia and Africa. These counter-​insurgency campaigns combined both ‘destruction and development’, involving as they did military forces, who waged war against the insurgents, and civilian administrators, who sought to restructure colonial societies. This dual aspect to late colonial counter-​insurgency was designed to transform colonial society and thereby ensure that imperial rule endured.1 A number of scholars have documented how deeply intertwined counter-​insurgency and the history of development are.2 The role of social knowledge in the devising of counter-​insurgency ideas and practices and related trans-​ imperial and Atlantic exchanges has also attracted increased attention.3 In the case of Portuguese counter-​insurgency, path-​breaking research by João Paulo Borges Coelho on the villagization programme in Mozambique’s Tete district marks a rupture with earlier narrower military history approaches. Borges Coelho has situated the villagization programme in Tete within the wider global phenomenon of population resettlement in 1 On

the contemporary appropriation of the colonial concept of counter-​insurgency, see Moritz Feichtinger and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Transformative Invasions: Western Post-​9/​11 Counter-​insurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 3/​1 (2012), 35–​63, at 37. 2 Edward Miller, ‘Development, Space, and Counter-​ insurgency in South Vietnam’s Bên Ter Province, 1954–​1960’, in S. Macekura and E. Manela (eds.), The Development Century: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 150–​172, at 150. 3  Jessica Wang, ‘Colonial Crossings: Social Science, Social Knowledge, and American Power from the Nineteenth Century to the Cold War’, in Jeroen van Dongen (ed.), Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015), 184–​213.

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    525 the context of internal warfare, where strategic defence and development intersect.45 Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, exploring the ‘Robusta operation’ conducted between 1969 and 1974 in north Angola during the war of decolonization, has argued that it combined the forced removal and replacement of the African population from the districts of North Cuanza and Zaire with socio-​economic rationales premised on colonial understanding of development and modernization—​although the coercive aspects of the resettlement scheme were often prioritized at the expense of its socio-​economic objectives.6 An analysis of late-​colonial state ‘repressive developmentalism’—​the combination of securitization and welfare—​reveals the common traits and singularities of each European colonial empire.7 That said, although this chapter acknowledges that ‘repressive developmentalism’ constituted a distinct form of colonial warfare, it also argues that late-​colonial counter-​insurgency emerged from a longer history rooted in the relationship between science, knowledge production, and colonial rule.8 By highlighting the pre-​history of late colonial counter-​insurgency and the ways in which it was shaped by the production of colonial knowledge, the chapter documents the connections between the social sciences and population-​centric counter-​insurgency strategies, particularly with regard to resettlement and attendant efforts to initiate development through the provision of improved social services. The chapter is structured in three sections. The first addresses the connections between colonial knowledge production and colonial power, the second focuses on the evolution of the conflict in Niassa, and the final section discusses Raquel Soeiro de Brito’s research and the mismatch between the human geography knowledge she produced and the forced resettlement programme as it was conducted on the ground.

Colonial Knowledge Production for Counter-​Insurgency The nexus between colonial empires and knowledge production has been addressed from a myriad of perspectives, from the instrumentalist approach of science as a tool of imperial control, or the postcolonial depiction of science as a form of cultural violence and Western domination, to more comprehensive analyses, which highlight scientific and technical

4 

João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete (1968–​1982): A History of State Resettlement Policies: Development and War’, PhD Dissertation, University of Bradford, 1993. The author has revisited the theme recently: João Paulo Borges Coelho, ‘De la persistance des villages d’État au Mozambique’, Critique internationale, 79 (2018), 63–​83. 5  Gerald J. Bender, ‘The Limits of Counter-​insurgency: An African Case’, Comparative Politics, 4/​3 (1972), 331–​360, at 336. 6  Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘A Robust Operation: Resettling, Security, and Development in Late Colonial Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Itinerario, 44/​1 (2020), 55–​79, at 73. 7 Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Repressive Developmentalism’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 537–​554. 8  Miller, ‘Development, Space, and Counter-​insurgency’, 150–​151.

526   Cláudia CASTELO networks, international and inter-​imperial cooperation, and knowledge hybridization.9 The place of development discourse and practices in the equation has also attracted in-​ depth analysis.10 Modernization policies in the immediate post-​Second World War period have been characterized as a ‘second colonial occupation’ conducted by harassed colonial powers.11 Several authors have called attention to the British and French public investment in social and economic development in Africa and the unprecedented mobilization of specialist advisors and technical experts in areas such as agriculture and forestry, engineering, medicine, nutrition, social surveys, and urban planning—​all of which were designed to provide renewed legitimacy for European rule.12 The international repertoires and practices of modernization were appropriated and reshaped for that purpose at national, colonial, and inter-​imperial levels.13 The immediate post-​Second World War period was a unique moment, a time of ‘technical colonization’ through modernization, when imperial policymakers, guided by scientific expertise and technical experts, sought to reimagine the purpose and structure of the European empires.14 Of course, the application of expertise was nothing new. During the inter-​war period there was frequent collaboration between colonial administrations on the one hand, and anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientific experts on the other, with a particular focus on supposedly ‘traditional’ social structures, political institutions, customs, and habits of rural colonial populations. After 1945, however, social inquiries and investigations shifted from a focus on rural societies and peoples to the impact of social change, urbanization, industrialization, and large-​scale development programmes on colonial society. Although the imperial states sought to refashion colonial society through development programmes, which were guided by a wide range of experts and based on locally 9 Joseph M. Hodge, ‘Science and Empire: An Overview of the Historical Scholarship’, in Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge, Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 3–​29. 10  Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, ‘Introduction’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds.), International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1–​41; Joseph M. Hodge and Gerald Hödl, ‘Introduction’, in Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hödl, and Martina Kopf (eds.), Developing Africa: Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-​Century Colonialism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014), 1–​34. 11  Donald Anthony Low and John M. Lonsdale, ‘Introduction: Towards a New Order, 1945–​63’, in D.A. Low and Alison Smith (eds.), The Oxford History of East Africa, Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1–​63. 12  For instance, Frederick Cooper, ‘Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: The Examples of British and French Africa’, Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines, 1 (2004), 9–​38; Joseph M. Hodge, The Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007); Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–​1950 (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 13  Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Pasts to Be Unveiled: The Interconnections Between the International and the Imperial’, in Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro (eds.), Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World (London/​ New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 1–​29. 14  Benoît de L’Estoile, ‘Enquêter en “situation colonial”: Politique de la population, gouvernementalité modernisatrice et “sociologie engagée” en Afrique équatoriale française’, Cahiers d’études africaines, 228 (2017), 863–​919, at 911.

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    527 grounded knowledge, the European powers could not prevent the outbreak of rebellions and insurgencies. This did not deter imperial authorities, however, from drawing upon the social sciences to counter revolts by deploying knowledge about the colonized: their ethnicities, languages, religions, distribution, social organization, traditions, ways of living, feelings, antagonisms, attitudes, and aspirations. One could go so far as to say that colonial counter-​ insurgency strategies depended on the operationalization of the social sciences to plan and implement development-​orientated programmes, particularly with regard to resettlement.15 In fact, resettlement programmes had been the subject of study by social experts before they were understood in military-​strategic terms.16 The ‘village as a universal category of underdevelopment, capable of being remade by expert-​led social reform . . . had its roots in the inter-​war period’.17 The connection between knowledge and state power in the late Portuguese empire is being increasingly scrutinized to reveal how reform and repression were ‘two faces of the same coin’.18 Scholars have studied how social knowledge was mobilized to understand the threats to Portuguese sovereignty.19 The religious prophetic movements and the ethnic minorities in Mozambique and Angola, for instance, were the target of research missions, where the boundary between the production of social scientific knowledge and intelligence gathering was ambiguous.20 That said, prior to the outbreak of its wars of decolonization, Portugal was in possession of far less social knowledge concerning the peripheral regions of its empire, compared with the other European powers in Africa. This shortcoming was pointed out by Orlando Ribeiro, professor at the University of Lisbon and the most renowned Portuguese geographer of the second half of the twentieth century. In 1960, Ribeiro wrote to the Overseas Research Board—​which was answerable to the overseas minister and was responsible for the coordination of research in and about the Portuguese—​about the necessity of creating a mission for geographic research in the Portuguese overseas territories. He argued that geographic knowledge of the Portuguese colonies was important both to science and to the nation and was also in tune with growing international interest in the decolonizing world in general and sub-​Saharan Africa in particular. To support his claim, Ribeiro noted that Portugal had been unable to meet the Inter-​African Social Science Conference recommendation to provide maps indicating the density and distribution of population in Angola 15  Moritz

Feichtinger, ‘ “A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​63’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 45–​72. 16  In the late 1940s, George Balandier’s sociological inquiries on the Fang from Gabon analysed the conception and establishment of new villages. De L’Estoile, ‘Enquêter em “situation colonial” ’. On the civil administration antecedents of forced resettlement in the Portuguese colony of Angola, see Samuël Coghe, ‘Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1920–​45’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 16–​44. 17  Nicole Sackley, ‘The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction’, Journal of Global History, 6 (2011), 481–​504, doi:10.1017/​S1740022811000428. 18  Valentim Alexandre, Contra o Vento: Portugal, o Império e a Maré Anticolonial (Lisbon: Temas & Debate, 2017). 19  Rui Mateus Pereira, ‘Conhecer para dominar: o desenvolvimento do conhecimento antropológico na política colonial portuguesa em Moçambique, 1926–​1959’, PhD dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2005. 20 Sandra Araújo, ‘Um Império de Previsões: Os Serviços de Centralização e Coordenação de Informações de Moçambique e a Governança Colonial do Islão (1961–​ 1974)’, PhD dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2018.

528   Cláudia CASTELO and Mozambique (produced to a scale of 1:100.000), due to the lack of first-​hand knowledge and statistical data. Those maps were considered fundamental tools for economic and social development planning. In this specific document, Ribeiro argued that the function of the geographer was to do more than simply draw the public authorities’ attention to problematic spaces in need of government attention.21 Ribeiro claimed that other countries with ‘underdeveloped’ territories usually required the geographers’ expertise for regional and economic planning, including industrial development, population settlement, natural resource surveys, and land use policies. The French, British, and Belgians valued ‘Applied Geography’ and provided collaboration in this field even to their former colonies after achieving independence. Ribeiro concluded that practical and useful information for policy-​making could be provided by the geographer, and although he preferred to undertake pure research, he would be pleased to lend his services to meet any demand from the government.22 Ribeiro’s claims received a sympathetic hearing from the authorities. The Mission for the Study of Portuguese Overseas Physical and Human Geography was duly created in 1960 within the Portuguese Overseas Research Board. The mission’s aim was to ‘intensify or carry out studies of physical and human geography . . . in the Portuguese overseas provinces’, with a view to realizing the recommendations of the Inter-​African Conference of Social Sciences, sponsored by the Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara (CCTA) held at Bukavu, in 1955.23 The mission was directed by Orlando Ribeiro, and among its researchers was Raquel Soeiro de Brito. The mission’s first fieldwork project took place in the summer of 1961, in Angola and Mozambique, and consisted of a general survey undertaken by the whole team. The war in Angola had just broken out in March of that year but, in 1962, each team member would carry out individual research, except for the mission’s chief. In 1962 Orlando Ribeiro spent forty-​five days in Angola with the French geographer Pierre Gourou, who was preparing a book about the geography of Africa.24 Ribeiro’s hope was that he could convince Gourou to include Portugal’s African colonies in his book. To convince the president of the Portuguese Overseas Research Board and, ultimately, the Portuguese overseas minister of the importance of inviting Gourou to join the mission, Ribeiro argued that ‘His African experience and curiosity and sympathy for the Portuguese action in Brazil and India can only be useful for the understanding and clarification of our African

21  The team, headed by Orlando Ribeiro, considered that the role of the discipline of geography was ‘to ring the bell’ in the face of ‘inharmonious landscapes’, ‘so that others, in speciality and depth, could give remedy to evil deviations’. See Francisco José Tenreiro, ‘Angola: Problemas de Geografia Humana’, Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Política Ultramarina, Angola: Curso de Extensão Universitária: Ano Lectivo de 1963–​1964 (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1964), 35–​60, at 55. 22  Portugal, University of Lisbon, Arquivo do Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical [Archive of the Tropical Research Institute], File 829—​Missão de Geografia Física e Humana do Ultramar, vol. 1 (1960–​1963), doc. 1. 23  Maps of population density and distribution were recommended, based upon which it would be possible to plan regional social and economic development (communications infrastructure, schools, sanitary assistance, etc.). That tool was necessary from an agricultural, economic, and administrative standpoint. Also recommended were maps of agrarian types for the appraisal of land occupation and use, plus maps detailing the ethnic groups living near the political border. 24  Pierre Gourou, L’Afrique (Paris: Hachette, 1970).

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    529 problems’.25 Later, Ribeiro stressed: ‘It is important that, at a time when Portuguese action in Africa is so badly understood, a great spirit, independent and objective, may appreciate the virtues and shortcomings of our colonization’.26 In short, for Ribeiro scientific inquiry and national interests were interconnected, as was the case with many other Portuguese scientific endeavours of the time. Raquel Soeiro de Brito would carry out the 1962 fieldwork survey around Lake Niassa (also known as Lake Malawi or Lake Nyasa) and the Vila Cabral plateau (today’s Lichinga) to study two different communities: the Nyanja and the Yao (referred to as ‘Ajauas’ in the Portuguese sources). Ribeiro explained the reason for that choice in the mission’s 1962 Activity Plan: The interest of this region is manifest in its human aspect: magnificent climatic possibilities for the establishment of white population, development of the region by new access facilities by road and airplane, agricultural and fishing lifestyles around the edges of the lake and [the] existence of a population [that are] among the most original and curious in Mozambique. By practicing progressive farming in a European style, with irrigation and crop rotation systems, they are able to cultivate products that allow them to support their traditional vocation of traders. In the past, they used to visit the fairs and slave markets, and became Islamised through contact with the populations of the coast. The generalization of hygiene and domestic standards, through European influence, changed the shape and structure of their dwellings, without destroying the deep cohesion of the villages and the strength of traditional institutions. An in-​depth study may offer an example of a highly harmonious form of progression where indispensable elements of progress among the blacks are introduced without destroying traditional values.27

In other words, it was Ribeiro’s contention that the Niassa region made for an interesting case study because the local population had come into contact with European elements of progress and modernization but their institutions, values, and social organization had remained intact. This idea was illusory, but it appealed nonetheless because it spoke to Portuguese government assumptions concerning the exceptionality of Portuguese colonization. Ribeiro had probably read or knew about the book on the Yao by the British anthropologist and sociologist James Clyde Mitchell, one of the founders and a director of the Rhodes-​ Livingston Institute, Northern Rhodesia, and an associated member of the Scientific Council for Africa, the scientific advisory body of the CCTA.28 Clyde Mitchell had studied the Yao of Nyasaland because as a people they combined Islamic religious beliefs with a matrilineal social structure.29 Ribeiro might also have been aware that the British ethnologist, Thomas Price of the University of Glasgow, had entered Mozambique to study the Yao, even if the 25  Orlando Ribeiro, ‘Relatório Sumário da Missão em 1961 e Plano de Trabalhos para 1962’ (Summary Report of the 1961 Mission and Work Plan for 1962), Lisbon, 7.7.1962, 8. Unpublished document, Portugal, University of Lisbon, Centro de Documentação e Informação-​IICT. 26  Orlando Ribeiro, Relatório de Actividades do Chefe da Missão em 1962. Documento confidencial (Activity Report of the Mission’s Chief in 1962, Confidential Document), Lisbon, 2.9.1963, 1. Unpublished document, Portugal, University of Lisbon, Centro de Documentação e Informação-​IICT. 27  Orlando Ribeiro, Relatório Sumário da Missão em 1961 e Plano de Trabalhos para 1962, 6. 28 James Clyde Mitchell, The Yao Village: A Study in the Social Structure of a Nyasaland Tribe (Manchester: Rhodes-​Livingstone Institute by Manchester University Press, 1956). 29 Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), 82.

530   Cláudia CASTELO Portuguese government did not want to grant him permission to do so.30 By contrast, only one ethnographic monograph on the Yao had been published by a Portuguese national.31 It is worth stressing that the Inter-​African Conference of Social Sciences promoted by the CCTA had recommended that ‘Governments . . . should encourage and facilitate the execution of similar surveys [tribal monographs] at present being undertaken by the International African Institute’ and promote the study of inter-​territorial migrations.32 Although the Yao and the Nyanja had been involved in inter-​territorial migrations for several decades, the Portuguese government looked upon the IAI and UNESCO initiatives with suspicion, and it was not interested in encouraging foreign scientists to conduct potentially ‘sensitive’ research about labour migrations and people living on two sides of international borders.33 The fact that the Yao were Islamized, plus the fact that a part of the Nyanja lived under the influence of a Protestant mission, may also partially explain the heightened interest in studying them. The Portuguese authorities considered that both Islamic and Protestant influences tended to ‘denationalize’ colonial subjects and were a menace to Portuguese rule. I do not know if the geographer received precise instructions from the overseas minister or the president of the Overseas Research Board regarding potential political, and non-​scientific, aspects of her mission, comparable to those received by the Portuguese anthropologist Jorge Dias.34 Dias, as chief of the Mission for the Study of Ethnic Minorities in the Portuguese Overseas territories, had studied the Makonde of Northeastern Mozambique between 1957 and 1961. His work was valued from the governmental perspective chiefly because the promotion of the study of social, cultural, and political dynamics in the colonies was seen as crucial to the understanding and control of possible threats to the colonial order. Although I was not able to find precise evidence of government demands directly addressed to Orlando Ribeiro and his team related to counter-​insurgency in Mozambique, it is significant that, in 1969, the commission in charge of studying the general plan of counter-​ insurgency in Angola recommended that, in regard to land use and land concessions in particular, the research on spatial organization delegated to the Mission of Physical and Human Geography of Study of Portuguese Overseas territories ‘continues and is further extended’.35

30 

In fact, T. Price would publish ‘Yao Origins,’ Nyasaland Journal, 17/​2 (1964), 11–​16. António Sousa Lobato, ‘Monografia etnográfica original sobre o povo Ajaua’, Boletim da Sociedade de Estudos de Moçambique, 15/​63 (1949), 7–​17. Another monograph completed in 1956, but unpublished, certainly did not come to Ribeiro’s attention: Alexandre Eduardo, Pereira Carvalho, Monografia etnográfica original sobre o povo Ajaua (Dactilografado. Inhambane, 1956), Apud Mateus Rui Pereira, Conhecer para Dominar: O Desenvolvimento do Conhecimento Antropológico na Política Colonial Portuguesa em Moçambique, 1926–​1959, PhD dissertation, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2005. 32 Commission for Technical Cooperation in Africa South of the Sahara, Social Sciences. Inter-​ African Conference. 1st Meeting. Bukavu 1955 (London: CCTA, 1955), 14. 33 Frederico Ágoas and Cláudia Castelo, ‘Ciências sociais, diplomacia e colonialismo tardio: a participação portuguesa na Comissão de Cooperação Técnica na África ao Sul do Saara (CCTA)’, Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro), 32/​67 (2019), 409–​28. 34  On the Mission for the Study of Ethnic Minorities in the Portuguese Overseas, headed by Jorge Dias, and the preventive character of his research, see Mateus Rui Pereira, Conhecer para dominar. 35  Relatório, conclusões e sugestões da comissão de estudo da secção I—​ Plano Geral de Contra-​ Subversão, Luanda, 31.1.1969, 9. Simpósio da Contra-​Subversão, Arquivo da Defesa Nacional, PT/​ADN/​ SGDN/​2REP/​151/​555/​010. 31 

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    531

Evolution of the Colonial/​L iberation War in the Mozambican District of Niassa With respect to the general context in which Raquel Soeiro de Brito’s fieldwork took place, it is important to note that FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) was created on 25 June 1962 in Dar es Salaam (then capital of Tanganyika). FRELIMO’s youth mobilization and recruitment in the Niassa region gathered pace in 1963. Its political activities also intensified during this period, especially in Cóbuè and the Anglican mission of Messumba. The Portuguese colonial authorities were aware of these developments and monitored the situation closely.36 In September 1963, several teachers and students of the Messumba mission left for Tanganyika, then in October the régulos (leaders) of both Mataca posto in the Valadim circunscrição (administrative district) and Chitege in the Cobué posto, Lago circunscrição, sent fifty educated recruits to Tanganyika, where they distributed FRELIMO membership cards as part of a broader recruitment drive. In November, the Portuguese noticed that the populations of Massange, Mataca, and Chitege were being persuaded to leave Mozambique.37 The Portuguese authorities were of the view that the Nyanja population was receptive to FRELIMO messaging because the history of inter-​territorial migration meant that they had strong ties with people from the other side of the borders with Tanganyika/​Tanzania and Malawi.38 On the night of 24 to 25 September 1964, FRELIMO launched the first attack of the insurgency by targeting the administrative post of Chai, which was located on the Makonde Plateau. On the same date, an armed group commanded by a former student of the Anglican mission of Messumba, Daniel Polela, which had entered Niassa district by crossing its northern border, assaulted the administrative post of Cobué before retreating to Likoma island in Malawi. The following day, another armed group commanded by Mateus Malopa, a former teacher at the same mission, attacked the Castor motorboat anchored in Metangula Bay, and in December the administrative post of Olivença came under assault, although no casualties were incurred.39 In January 1965, FRELIMO forces based in Ngombe conducted a military operation, which did result in heavy casualties for Portuguese troops.40 Within two years, guerrilla activities had spread across border districts, all of which were particularly vulnerable from the colonial state point of view due to their lack of any substantial administrative, military, white settler, or commercial presence and their poor communication and transport infrastructures. The local population responded by either supporting FRELIMO’s campaign or by avoiding the conflict altogether, often by seeking shelter in the bush or fleeing to Malawi and Tanzania. A large number of refugees fled to Likoma island, where the United Nations declared a humanitarian emergency.41 From the Portuguese 36 

David Xadreque, A Luta de Libertação na Frente do Niassa, Vol. 1 (Maputo: JV Editores, 2009), 19. Verdasca, Memórias de um Capitão (Guerrilha em Moçambique) (Lisbon: Universitária Editora, 2003), 181–​182. 38  Abel Barroso Hipólito, A Pacificação do Niassa: Um Caso Concreto de Contra-​guerrilha (Lisbon: Ed. Autor, 1970), 36. 39  Hipólito, A Pacificação do Niassa, 37–​38. 40  Portuguese source quoted by Xadreque, A Luta de Libertação na Frente do Niassa, 215. 41  During the colonial war, Zambia hosted 220,000 refugees fleeing war and forced displacement to settlements set up by the Portuguese authorities to control the native population. See Aniceto Afonso 37 José

532   Cláudia CASTELO authorities’ perspective, securing the allegiance of the population was central both to its immediate military objectives and to the defeat of FRELIMO. Therefore, the Portuguese armed forces counter-​offensive attached considerable weight to the loyalty of the population and their psychological readjustment to the imperial cause (described as their ‘mentalização’) through resettlement. The objective was to insulate the population from FRELIMO propaganda and, in particular, to halt any contact between the civilian population and the guerrillas. The resettlement programme was initiated in Niassa in mid-​1966 by the district’s civil authorities, under whose jurisdiction the aldeamentos would remain. The local administration kept a precise census of population under their rule and deployed the coercive apparatus of the colonial state, in the shape of the police and paramilitary militias, to maintain order.42 Being essentially a security and control strategy, the village was presented to the population as a development tool for economic and social progress, a place where they could access material advantages, such as schools, an assured water supply, health clinics, canteens, agricultural facilities, roads, and communication structures. In spite of these promises, however, resettlement was imposed centrally, against the will of local populations, who did not want to be forced together, compelled to abandon their machambas (agricultural plots) and ancestral lands, not to mention losing their freedoms.43 The result was that resettlement produced significant economic and social disruption for local communities that experienced ‘stress and discomfort’ which, in turn, had damaging psychological consequences.44 In other words, the aldeamentos in Mozambique failed because the resettlement scheme was incapable of replacing the previous order with a more effective system that provided basic social services without coercion.45 The Portuguese political police, Polícia de Informação e Defesa do Estado (PIDE), however, considered the situation in northern Mozambique to be very difficult to reverse. This was because, contrary to what happened in northern Angola in March 1961—​a violent rebellion against colonial authority launched without the population’s prior support for the idea of independence—​in northern Mozambique, the local population’s support for liberation preceded the outbreak of the armed conflict. That

and Carlos de Matos Gomes (coord.), Os Anos da Guerra colonial 1961–​1974 (Matosinhos: QuidNovi, 2010), 251. 42  In Cabo Delgado district, the resettlement programme was proposed in 1965 by the Cabo Delgado governor, Colonel Basílio Seguro. Although military and police authorities also discussed resettlement and were involved in its protection, the aldeamentos were non-​military institutions directly dependent on the civilian authorities (posto administrators). See Thomas H. Henriksen, Revolution and Counter-​ revolution: Mozambique’s War of Independence, 1964–​1974 (Westport, Conn.; London: Greenwood Press, 1983), 154 and 157. Some aldeamentos, however, were created by military intervention in Maua, Marrupa, Muoco, Révia, Malapisia, and Catur (southern Niassa contention line of subversion). See Hipólito, A Pacificação do Niassa, 196. 43 Henriksen, Revolution and Counter-​ revolution, 161. João Paulo Borges Coelho, O Início da Luta Armada em Tete, 1968–​1969: A Primeira Fase da Guerra e a Reacção Colonial (Maputo: Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, 1989), 38–​9. 44 Henriksen, Revolution and Counter-​revolution, 156. 45  Brendan Jundanian, ‘Resettlement Programs: Counter-​insurgency in Mozambique’, Comparative Politics, 6/​4 (July 1974), 519–​540. The same had happened in Malaya, Vietnam, Algeria, and Kenya. See, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, ‘Paysans déracinés, bouleversements et changements culturels en Algérie’, Études rurales, 12/​1 (1964), 59–​94.

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    533 was why a counter-​subversion programme, predicated on winning the hearts and minds of the colonized, was doomed to fail in northern Mozambique.46 Regardless, the military command in the so-​called North Intervention Zone issued guidelines for the structure and defence of resettlement villages, after receiving information that conditions in the aldeamentos in the Niassa district better served the insurgents’ interests than the colonial administration’s original plan for restoring order and winning over the local population. The disturbing picture of the situation in Niassa transmitted by PIDE’s delegation in Mozambique to the central government in Lisbon was confirmed by the district’s governor, who reported the absence of the necessary security structures and social welfare infrastructure in many aldeamentos.47 Overcrowding was widespread. A number of aldeamentos housed more than 2,000 persons and some had around 3,000. Even with smaller numbers of aldeados (resettled villagers), such as the 800 or so residents of Montepuez (Cabo Delgado), it was impossible to guarantee permanent sanitation.48 The pace of the war undermined efforts to restructure the aldeamentos or to improve coordination between them.49 No proper consideration was given to the adverse effects of their varied ethnic composition, nor to the need for permanent access to water and agricultural land. The situation worsened with the arrival of more people in the aldeamentos (comprising individuals captured by Portuguese troops as well as those who presented themselves voluntarily to escape famine conditions in the bush) and the inability of the Portuguese authorities—​principally because of limited financial resources—​to respond to their basic human security needs for accommodation, food, and health care.50 Often the civilian authorities moved the resettled to other aldeamentos and, in some cases, resettled entire aldeamentos in other locations. The result was that the promised development was postponed indefinitely. The daily problems in the aldeamentos remained a frequent topic of policy discussion between the civilian and military authorities nevertheless.51 The outcome of these discussions was restricted even so to the production of propaganda that presented the aldeamentos as model villages with 46 Delegation of the PIDE in Mozambique, Information no. 788-​ SC/​CI(2) ‘Situação política no distrito do Niassa’ (Political situation in the Niassa district), 20.8.1966. PT/​AHD/​MU/​GNP, sr 32, ui 7320. 47  Official Letter no. 1235/​A/​34 of the governor of the Niassa district, Nuno de Melo Egídio, to the director of Mozambique Information Centralization and Coordination Services, Vila Cabral, 12.15.1966. PT/​TT/​SCCIM, no. 1639. 48  Report n. 1887/​67-​GAB, PIDE [Political Police]—​Mozambique Delegation, 21.11.1967, Montepuez (Cabo Delgado district), The sanitary problem of the aldeamentos. PT/​TT/​SCCIM, no. 1639. 49  The commander of the Land Forces of Mozambique (July 1969) and commander-​in-​chief of the Mozambican Operations Theatre (late March 1970 to late 1973) recognized that the aldeamentos in the north of the country were created in great quantity and too quickly, ‘sacrificing quality for quantity’. He considered that the relocation process ‘should not end with the construction of the settlements, but, on the contrary, this construction was only the initial phase to be followed by others in a continuous task of improvement’. Kaúlza de Arriaga, ‘Moçambique’, in J. da Luz Cunha, Kaúlza de Arriaga, Bethencourt Rodrigues, Silvino Silvério Marques, África: A Vitória Traída (Lisbon: Editorial Intervenção, 1977), 185–​ 249, 209–​210. 50  Monthly tables discriminating the existing villages in the Niassa district and the administrative forces (from 1967 until 1971). At the end of each table there is information on the ‘number of recovered population’, births and deaths, and population increase. In 1967, 6,843 persons presented themselves to the Portuguese authorities in Niassa (only in the March month, 1695). PT/​TT/​SCCIM, no. 1638. 51  After decolonization, Kaúlza de Arriaga would criticize the central government’s lack of interest in the aldeamentos programme. Arriaga, ‘Moçambique’, 210.

534   Cláudia CASTELO all the necessary facilities, where previously nomadic populations secured the advantages of material progress and integration with European civilization: what was characterized as ‘the only formula for the rapid promotion of underdeveloped populations’.52 Visitors were shown around the aldeamento of Chiulugo, located near Vila Cabral, the Niassa district’s capital, which was presented as a model of the exemplary work the Portuguese were doing in Niassa.53 By 30 September 1969, there were 156,803 aldeados. Among the largest aldeamentos were Malica, with 4,841 aldeados; Machomane and Chiulugo Cumisseca, with almost 3,000 each (in the Vila Cabral concelho); Nova Beira, with 3,070 (part of the Litunde posto, Vila Cabral concelho); Messumba, with 4,329 (in the Lago circunscrição); and Cantina Dias, with 3,098 (at Unango posto).54 By 31 August 1973, there were 154 aldeamentos in the Niassa district, with 227,647 registered inhabitants.55 By May 1974, 67.7% of the Nyasa population had been relocated.56 Portuguese military accounts state that the spread of the insurgency in Niassa region stopped at the end of 1966, after which Portuguese troops regained control of the territory. In 1969–​1970 FRELIMO was supposedly contained in the extreme north-​west pocket of Niassa district.57 The recollections of the Niassa bishop offer a different perspective, however. According to the bishop, the guerrillas in Niassa went through a progressive evolution between 1964 and 1972, both in their geographical distribution and with regard to the intensity of their operations.58 In any case, from 1971 until 1974, the evolution of the war redirected the Portuguese counter-​insurgency effort to the district of Tete, where the Cahora Bassa dam was being constructed, and increasingly a target of FRELIMO operations. With the intensity of conflict elsewhere in the region diminishing, the Portuguese authorities considered that the aldeamentos in Niassa and Cabo Delgado should go through a process of consolidation and improvement in the population’s living conditions.

The Geographer’s Fieldwork and the aldeamentos: A Case of (Mis)applied Knowledge? Raquel Soeiro de Brito’s fieldwork as a researcher affiliated to the Mission for the Study of Portuguese Overseas Physical and Human Geography was undertaken under the 52  Rodrigues Júnior, ‘Aldeamentos Retenção do terrorismo, defesa e promoção social das populações’, Notícias, 24 September 1969. 53 Henriksen, Revolution and Counter-​revolution, 156. 54  Government of Niassa district, administrative forces dispositive in 30 September 1969. PT/​T T/​ SCCIM, no. 1638, fl. 326-​331. Rodrigues Júnior, using data from the Niassa Government Report, records that there were 123 aldeamentos in Niassa and the all population, 276,795 people, was resettled. Júnior, ‘Aldeamentos’. 55 Data from the meeting, minutes of the Mozambique Military Defence Council, 9 October 1973, Apud Amélia Neves Souto, Caetano e o Ocaso do ‘Império’: Administração e Guerra Colonial em Moçambique durante o Marcelismo (1968–​1974) (Porto: Afrontamento, 2007), 231. 56 Henriksen, Revolution and Counter-​revolution, 155. 57 Hipólito, A Pacificação do Niassa. 58  Eurico Dias Nogueira, Episódios da Minha Missão em África (Braga: Tip. Diário do Minho, 1995).

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    535 institutional framework and with the financial support of the Portuguese Overseas Research Board. The late-​colonial ‘scientific occupation’ required local administrative support for transportation, supplies, and intermediaries, particularly in a region with a low population density and a minimal European presence. Vila Cabral, the most recently established Mozambican town at the time, had some 200 European inhabitants.59 Over a six-​week period in the summer of 1962, Raquel Soeiro de Brito surveyed a huge area of some 15,000 square kilometres, travelling more than 200 kilometres from Lipoche in the north to M’Ponda in the south. She was able to do so because she had the support of both the civilian and military authorities, which put at her disposal guides, interpreters (whom she described as ‘very competent and knowledgeable about the regions I had to go through’), and auxiliary personnel, ‘who facilitated [her] support network in different villages where [she] stayed and [provided] ‘caravans’ for investigation of the most remote and almost inaccessible places’.60 The fieldwork combined first-​hand observation with surveys and data collection on population distribution, village location and organization, household structure, and agricultural practices.61 To complete her survey, Soeiro de Brito relied on the collaboration of interpreters, a common requirement of Portuguese Africanists. She took photographs and produced a film on the Yao and the Nyanja. Her observations and the data gathered allowed her to describe, interpret, and compare the Yao and the Nyanja communities. In her 1962 report, Soeiro de Brito explained how the Yao villages in the Niassa plateau were grouped, identifying where the density of villages inhabited exclusively by the Yao people was highest. She underlined that the location of the plateau villages was determined by the availability of water. However, although reliable sources of water remained central to a village’s location, by the 1960s the inhabitants were increasingly situating their villages near to vehicle-​accessible paths, in part a response to administrative pressure but, in part, also a reflection of the growing trend among the local people to hitch rides when they did not have their own bicycle. The Yao lived in small villages structured around family clans, which gave the settlements a strong sense of internal cohesion. Their principal activity was agriculture. Soeiro de Brito described in detail the prevailing agricultural practices, the cultivated products (maize, beans, potatoes, tobacco), the fruit trees, and the dietary habits. She stated that ‘The Ajaúas [were] good farmers’.62 But they didn’t benefit from agricultural assistance, and when the soil was depleted they moved the village to another place. Soeiro de Brito not only described the structure of the village, but also household space (houses were described as rectangular, although older inhabitants remembered that their parents lived in round houses) and the evidence of various imported cultural practices (including Arab and later European influences). She mentioned the strength of family relationships, the frequency of family contact, as well as the friendships and commerce conducted with Yao residents living on the other side of the border. She also referred to the

59  Raquel Soeiro de Brito, ‘Aspectos Geográficos de Moçambique’, Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Política Ultramarina, Moçambique: Curso de Extensão Universitária (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965), 29. 60  Raquel Soeiro de Brito, Relatório da Missão (1962) (1962 Mission’s Report), unpublished document, no date, 1. University of Lisbon, Centro de Documentação e Informação—​IICT. 61  The tools of classic geography are first-​hand observation, mapping, and the integrated analysis of physical and human factors. 62  Brito, Relatório da Missão (1962), 2.

536   Cláudia CASTELO fact that the Islamic religion was introduced in the late nineteenth century, after which it had become the dominant religion amongst the Yao people. In contrast, the Nyanja’s settlement was dispersed. The Nyanja cultivated much less than the Yao and produced a less diverse range of products (cassava was the main agricultural product and the dietary staple) because the land at the margins of Lake Niassa was of poor quality. Nyanja fished the lake extensively, and the geographer described their fishing practices. There was a complementary economy between the Yao and the Nyanja: the former bought fish from the latter and sold them corn. To the north of Metangula, the population had lived under the influence of the local Anglican mission for more than a century. The mission provided religious services, but also education and health care. To the south of Metangula, Islam predominated, and in the larger villages the mosque was built in the best ventilated place. According to Soeiro de Brito, the Nyanja were a more developed ethnic group than the Yao, thanks to higher education levels—​although they lived in worse material conditions. She attributed Nyanja migration practices to these difficult local conditions, as well as to the Anglican influence upon them.63 As part of the wider 1963 fieldwork project, Raquel Soeiro de Brito concluded the general survey of the Niassa district where Yao and Nyanja occupation predominated, permitting her to survey the occupied area, including the location and the livelihoods of these peoples. She also spent three weeks in Nyasaland to compare living conditions among the equivalent ethnic groups living across the colonial border from Portuguese Mozambique. In the following year, during her 1964 fieldwork, Soeiro de Brito focused on the production of a map of the villages in Niassa by using the 1963 census data provided by the local colonial administration. She described it as difficult, time-​consuming work, since: 1) the cartographic base was out-​dated and, in a region of relative population mobility, most were no longer in the places referenced on the map; 2) the majority of the villages took the name of the chief, and this changed over the years; 3) a high percentage of villages remain in places inaccessible to any kind of vehicle and sometimes a few miles of awful roads from the nearest point that a land rover could venture; 4) the population does not collaborate and does not give provide the answers requested accurately, sometimes not even with an approximation of truth.64 Despite all the challenges and inevitable errors, Soeiro de Brito finished the map, presenting it in draft form to the district’s governor and the naval commander of Metangula, who had provided her with a guide and a support boat for locating some of the Nyanja villages. She was asked in return to send finished versions back to Niassa as soon as she had copies.

Soeiro de Brito then produced maps of two archetypal villages: Mataca (Yao) and Trimba (Nyanja). Mataca was one of the larger and best organized Yao villages (the most important was Muembe), and Soeiro de Brito identified residences, kitchens, granaries, and other facilities shared among family clusters. Again, this was not an easy task. The Mataca chief, ‘who had been very kind and helpful in the previous year’, was now described as 63 

Brito, Relatório da Missão (1962), 5–​6. Raquel Soeiro de Brito, Relatório da Adjunta da Missão de Geografia Física e Humana do Ultramar, Campanha de 1964 (Report of the Deputy of the Overseas Mission of Physical and Human Geography, 1964 Campaign), unpublished document, Lisbon, December 1964, 2. University of Lisbon, Centro de Documentação e Informação—​IICT. 64 

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    537 obstructive.65 This reveals the extent to which European social scientists were dependent on local intermediaries and indigenous informants when doing fieldwork in colonial communities. De Brito does not explain the reason for Mataca’s refusal to cooperate, nor did she imply that he actively collaborated with FRELIMO, but his reluctance to assist her suggests that his attitude may be understood as a form of resistance—​although he might also have been afraid due to the repression of traditional authorities by the Portuguese. Trimba, a large extended village at the margins of Lake Niassa inhabited by Muslims with close connections to the religious centre of Kota-​Kota, was the Nyanja village that Soeiro de Brito chose to map. She had already done a detailed study in 1963, and the map survey was completed in 1964, but exact descriptions of family distribution and the position of the chief ’s house in relation to the village and to the mosque remained unfinished. When she finally received the completed map, her guide had to leave on ‘a secret mission and the boat on which she travelled had to head north of Metangula with urgency’.66 She had also planned to study another Nyanja village—​Ngôo, where people lived in close collaboration with the Anglican mission of Messumba, whose former students had launched the first attack on the Portuguese in the Niassa region, but it proved impossible to go there because of the adverse security situation.67 The incompleteness of her 1964 fieldwork illustrates how much colonial knowledge production depended in practice on the colonized for information and guidance. Local insecurity prevented any resumption of fieldwork visits in the following years. Moreover, the region underwent a rapid and complete transformation due to the counter-​ subversion policy of forcible resettlement, which altered the spatial dispersal and social organization of its inhabitants. According to Soeiro de Brito, the main problems that the Yao and Nyanja faced before the war were their lack of communication facilities, the absence of incentives to increase agricultural production, and the chronic lack of schools and sanitary services. In her view the success of regional development rested on an effective transportation and communication network.68 In fact, the effort to improve communications, to build new roads, and to establish regular transport links both by land and across Lake Niassa, only began in earnest in the 1960s as a result of the second development plan for Mozambique, in 1959–​1964. The district also suffered from a lack of commercial diversification, with the result that the Yao and the Nyanja who lived near the border would cross into neighbouring territories to purchase goods and supplies. Young Nyanja men also left for neighbouring territories to receive an education that was impossible to obtain in Portuguese territory where, until 1964, there were only a limited number of state and mission schools. It was only in 1963, for example, that a technical school was established in Vila Cabral.69

65 Soeiro de Brito, Relatório da Adjunta da Missão de Geografia Física e Humana do Ultramar, Campanha de 1964, 3. 66  Ibid., 3. 67 Two primary school teachers in Ngôo were clandestine FRELIMO militants—​ Afonso Jorge Messossa and Carlos Katutula—​and the latter would be murdered by Portuguese troops the following year, on 25 May 1965. On that day the entire population of Ngôo fled, seeking sanctuary in the bush. See Xadreque, A luta de libertação na frente do Niassa, 94–​96. 68  Raquel Soeiro de Brito, No Trilho dos Descobrimentos (Lisbon: CNCDP, 1997), 209. 69  For an overview of the Niassa situation in the early 1960s, in particular regarding education, see Paul, Mozambique.

538   Cláudia CASTELO In 1969, Soeiro de Brito was finally able to return to the Niassa region, her declared aim being ‘to evaluate the transformations that had occurred since 1965’. From the available sources, it is impossible to tell if she had asked to return or was ordered to do so by the mission’s chief, the Overseas Research Board president, or even the overseas minister.70 During the intervening years, the Yao population had been forcibly removed from their former villages and resettled in large aldeamentos. In the area previously studied, forty-​ eight aldeamentos had been built in which the average population varied between 1,000–​ 2,000 inhabitants, and in Malica the population of the resettled sites was more than 4,000. A substantial portion of the population had taken refuge in Tanzania and Malawi when the counter-​insurgency programme began. Of the estimated 95,000 inhabitants living in the administrative divisions where the Yao predominated in 1964, by 1966–​1967 only 49,000 were still under Portuguese rule, and in 1968 the figure was 60,000, or approximately 60% of the population that had lived there four years earlier. From a report produced by the district administration, it is possible to infer that the actual percentage was even lower because some 25,000 inhabitants were Nyanja. In certain restricted areas the population decline was much more pronounced. For instance, in Muembe the population figure was cited as 9,000 in 1964, but in 1969 it was recorded as just 2,000. Soeiro de Brito does not mention Mataca and its people, but the Mataca post had remained deserted until November 1967 (on 30 November 1967 it had twenty-​eight aldeados) and on 30 September 1969 it still had only sixty-​nine inhabitants. Nor is there any guarantee that those residents were former inhabitants of Mataca, since the administrative authorities relocated the population according to political parameters rather than in reference to local origin. More likely is that the population resettled in the aldeamentos included both those that returned and others who were captured by Portuguese military forces. Soeiro de Brito considered that in some respects the new villages were better in comparison with the traditional villages since all had schools, water supplies, and meeting rooms, where sometimes films were shown. The most important villages had electricity, but none had toilets or collective washing facilities. The streets were large, and houses were aligned and slightly bigger than the old ones. The inhabitants had built their new houses themselves, military assistance being confined to transportation of the heavier materials. All the houses were numbered and the population registered. The villages were surrounded by barbed wire, and they all had defence systems with a police and militia presence. Machambas (agricultural plots), spread over a 3–​5 kilometre radius, surrounded the villages.71 Raquel Soeiro de Brito embodies the objective scientific persona and she attempted to provide a detached description of the ‘facts’, but she concluded that the aldeamentos were ‘cold’ and that they lacked the warmth of the beautiful traditional Yao villages with their leafy trees. She considered this stark contrast with the past a cause for concern.72

70  Raquel Soeiro de Brito, Relatório da Adjunta da Missão de Geografia Física e Humana do Ultramar, Campanha de 1969 (Report of the Deputy of the Overseas Mission of Physical and Human Geography, 1969 Campaign), unpublished document, no date, 1. University of Lisbon, Centro de Documentação e Informação—​IICT. 71 Soeiro de Brito, Relatório da Adjunta da Missão de Geografia Física e Humana do Ultramar, Campanha de 1969, 2. 72  Ibid., 3. Brito, No Trilho dos Descobrimentos, 211. In 1971, nursery papayas and orange trees began to be distributed in the aldeamentos. Relatório da Inspecção Ordinária ao Concelho de Vila Cabral, 1971

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    539 Of the 25,000 Nyanja inhabitants identified in 1964, by 1969 only 12,000 were classified as being under Portuguese control, meaning that half the population lived in the bush or in neighbouring countries. The Nyanja were affected by the war more than the Yao, and the aldeamentos confronted them with more complex problems because Nyanja settlements were traditionally dispersed and their cassava fields were either their private property or rented from people that had migrated elsewhere. These reasons explain why the Nyanja opposed resettlement. Their nutritional problems were also more difficult to solve because the aldeamentos lands only yielded small quantities of cassava, meaning that rations of corn had to be distributed to them. The large-​scale aldeamento made Soeiro de Brito’s previous work—​the map of population density and distribution—​useless for regional planning. Detailed and time-​consuming though it was, her mapping no longer accurately represented the population distribution of the Yao and the Nyanja peoples. However, the scientific knowledge of the Niassa ethnic groups, their history, culture, and previous political, social, and economic structures, could still be useful in the Portuguese authorities’ efforts to refine their resettlement programme and correct earlier errors. Some scholars and members of the administrative staff considered that socio-​economic development of rural communities was the only way to counter the nationalist threat to Portuguese rule and acknowledged that, in order to do so, it was important to ‘know’ the local population.73 The information services conducted a form of ‘military anthropology’, with a particular focus on different ethnic groups and their alleged predisposition to the insurgents’ cause.74 These studies did not result from first-​hand research, but in most cases were compilations of secondary source material, contributing to baseless stereotypes and groundless generalizations. In the archive of the Mozambique Information Centralization and Coordination Services, evidence abounds of the poor planning and policy choices that shaped the aldeamentos scheme, the scale of resistance to it from the local population, and the health problems to which the resettlement scheme contributed. As in Kenya, where initially resettlement was ‘an unplanned, often ad hoc affair’, so in Mozambique the constitution of the Niassa aldeamentos suffered from its uncoordinated character.75 The aldeamento programme can be defined as having two distinct phases. A first period, which ran until 1968, was ‘characterised by a hasty construction of aldeamentos’. This was followed by a second consolidation phase, which took place after 1968, whose aim was to provide ‘the villages with more permanent infrastructures and improved security systems’.76 But, contrary to what happened in Kenya, in Niassa there was no retrospective intervention from urban planners or health experts. Policy guidelines were instead determined by the civilian and military authorities in a process of trial and error. The reports from the administrative inspection service about the Niassa district in 1971 provide an example of how this haphazard approach to implementation affected populations subject to the

(Report of the Inspection to the Vila Cabral concelho). AHU/​MU/​ISANI. I cannot verify whether it was a consequence of Raquel Soeiro de Brito’s observation. 73  Coelho, ‘Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete’, 157. 74  Amélia Neves Souto, Caetano e o Ocaso do ‘Império’, 221–​225. 75  Feichtinger, ‘Strategic Villages’, 143. 76  Coelho, ‘Protected Villages and Communal Villages in the Mozambican Province of Tete’, 205.

540   Cláudia CASTELO resettlement scheme.77 Water was in short supply due to frequent problems with the extraction mechanisms, there was an absence of health services and qualified medical personnel, while a lack of any locally available maize milling meant that women had to take unprocessed grain to Malawi to be milled. The local population’s land was meanwhile appropriated by Portuguese settlers of the neighbouring Nova Madeira colonato, below-​ market prices were paid for cotton, and forced labour remained routine. In all her previous fieldwork visits, Soeiro de Brito had depended on the colonial civil authorities, but in her last visit to Niassa she found herself completely reliant on military protection and guidance. The strategic resettlements that she was able to visit were atypical in so far as they had been constructed for propaganda purposes (the case, for example, with Malica or Chiulugo). Her observations were completed in the face of heightened restrictions on scientific autonomy and freedom of movement. Nevertheless, in spite of such constraints, Soeiro de Brito witnessed the fact that the war and the relocation programme were having a devastating impact on the productive landscape of Niassa and on local people’s lives. Soeiro de Brito, although not openly critical of the resettlement scheme, found that even if the larger resettlements provided some amenities, the underlying practice of concentrated and forcible resettlement was at odds with the way both the Yao and the Nyanja peoples lived. As such, from Soeiro de Brito’s point of view, the aldeamentos stood out as artificial constructs in the local landscape. This perspective resonates with the findings of French geographer, Pierre Gourou. According to George Balandier, Gourou’s expertise rested on the importance he attached to ‘adjustment to place’ and his argument that post-​1945 modernization schemes in Africa placed too much emphasis on the ‘means of living’ and too little on the ‘art of living’.78 No publications resulted from Soeiro de Brito’s later fieldwork surveys among the Yao and the Nyanja. Soeiro de Brito did not publish anything about either group until the late 1990s. Both the dictatorship in metropolitan Portugal and the colonial war in Southern Africa inhibited any public presentation of the transformation that had occurred in the Niassa. Soeiro de Brito did make use of her field research in her courses at the Advanced Institute of Social Science and Overseas Policy and in two papers delivered at the University of Bordeaux in 1966 and 1970. The information provided in her reports was also reproduced in the 1969 report of the Niassa district governor, and was, in turn, quoted in the Lourenço Marques daily newspaper, Notícias.79 For all these limitations, Soeiro De Brito’s work has much to tell us about the lived experience of Portuguese counter-​insurgency among the populations most affected by it. 77 

PT/​AHU/​MU/​ISAU, Report of the Ordinary Inspection to the Vila Cabral concelho, by the administrative inspector Mário de Albuquerque e Castro Freiria, from 15 to 23 February 1971 and from 13 to 25 May 1971 (A2.01.02.01/​00048). Report of the Ordinary Inspection to the Lago circunscrição by the administrative inspector Mário de Albuquerque e Castro Freiria, from 17 June to 4 July 1971 (A2.01.02.011/​ 00057). Report of the Ordinary Inspection to the Valadim circunscrição by the administrative inspector Mário de Albuquerque e Castro Freiria, from 16 August to 9 September 1971 (A2.01.02.010/​00052). 78  ‘While many French geographers working in colonial situations neither rejected empire tout court, nor were committed to decolonisation in a political or theoretical sense, Balandier thought that their interest in the agrarian strategies of African communities portended a decolonisation of the scientific gaze’. Quotation from Gavin Bowd and Daniel Clayton, Impure and Worldly Geography: Pierre Gourou and Tropicality (London/​New York: Routledge, 2019), chap. 7. 79  Júnior, ‘Aldeamentos’.

(Un)settling Late Colonial Niassa    541

Conclusion During late Portuguese colonialism, the production of knowledge about the inhabitants of the Lake Niassa littoral and the Vila Cabral plateau responded to scientific and political aims connected with inter-​imperial scientific cooperation, the national affirmation of scientific prestige, and the reinvigoration of colonial rule. ‘The unknown Niassa’, tellingly, the title of a book published by the Overseas Research Board in the 1960s, had long been neglected by the colonial authorities, by white settlers, and by the scientific community.80 The fieldwork conducted by Raquel Soeiro de Brito in Niassa, as part of the Overseas Mission of Physical and Human Geography, took place within this context of long-​term marginalization. After the beginning of FRELIMO’s anti-​colonial insurgency, the Portuguese authorities considered that supplementary expert knowledge was essential to back up their counter-​ insurgency strategy. Village resettlement was intended to stabilize the population and provide them with basic social services and the material conditions for enhanced living conditions. Better knowledge of local ethnic groups, their culture, and political and social structures, was understood by the Portuguese authorities to be crucial to the implementation of a successful aldeamentos programme. But the war did not permit regular field research. The gap between the proclaimed intent of development through population grouping and control and the actual conditions in place was enormous. The aldeamentos were ad hoc and disruptive sites where securitization concerns generally took precedence over development intentions. Raquel Soeiro de Brito was able to visit Niassa when all the remaining Yao and Nyanja population was resettled. From her report, one may conclude that she did not regard the aldeamentos—​even the model ones—​as examples of progress and social development, no matter how they were being presented at the time by military and civilian authorities, the Portuguese press, and the imperial state’s propaganda machine. On the contrary, she considered them ‘inharmonious landscapes’. Soeiro de Brito discretely alerted the authorities in place and in Lisbon about her discomfort, stressing her concern with the aldeamentos’ shortcomings. It may well be that as a result of her warnings minor improvements were introduced in the most problematic aldeamentos, but the war context left no room for regional development planning, more humane population resettlement or better social welfare provision that took account of the scientific knowledge produced by sympathetic figures such as Soeiro de Brito.

Select Bibliography Ágoas, Frederico, and Cláudia Castelo, ‘Ciências sociais, diplomacia e colonialismo tardio: a participação portuguesa na Comissão de Cooperação Técnica na África ao Sul do Saara (CCTA)’, Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro), 32/​67 (2019), 409–​428.

80  Nuno Beja Valdez Thomas dos Santos, O Desconhecido Niassa (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1964).

542   Cláudia CASTELO Coghe, Samuël, ‘Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1920–​45’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2017), 16–​44. Cooper, Frederick, and Randall Packard, ‘Introduction’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, eds., International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Feichtinger, Moritz, and Stephan Malinowski, ‘Transformative Invasions: Western Post-​9/​11 Counter-​insurgency and the Lessons of Colonialism’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 3/​1 (2012), 35–​63. Hodge, Joseph M., The Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, and José Pedro Monteiro (eds.), Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World (London/​New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Miller, Edward, ‘Development, Space, and Counter-​insurgency in South Vietnam’s Bên Ter Province, 1954–​1960’, in S. Macekura and E. Manela, eds., The Development Century: A Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 150–​172. Sackley, Nicole, ‘The Village as Cold War site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction’, Journal of Global History, 6 (2011), 481–​504. Schumaker, Lyn, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001). Tilley, Helen, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–​1950 (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Wang, Jessica, ‘Colonial Crossings: Social Science, Social Knowledge, and American Power from the Nineteenth Century to the Cold War’, in Jeroen van Dongen, ed., Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015), 184–​213.

Chapter 28

M ass M edicin e , Di se ase C ontrol, and C onfl i c t Collective Health Security during Late Colonialism in Africa Philip J. Havik Introduction Over the last two decades, the topic of health and conflict has attracted the growing interest of the global academic community, owing to the global spread of emerging and re-​emerging communicable and non-​communicable diseases. The existence of persistent conflict foci on the African continent has been associated with outbreaks of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) such as Ebola and Marburg haemorrhagic fever, Lassa fever, as well as yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV-​AIDS.1 One of the threads to emerge from these debates is that of collective and individual health security, i.e. the providing of protection to populations and individuals by competent authorities against potential and existing health threats. Health security has been above all associated with the spread of infectious diseases through chains of transmission to areas close to or further removed from the epicentre of an outbreak or epidemic.2 International Sanitary Conventions (1851–​1938) laid the foundations for international frameworks for (infectious) disease control, which were further developed by the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) and the Health Division of the Rockefeller 1 See for example, Michelle Gayer et al., ‘Conflict and Emerging Infectious Diseases’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 13/​11 (2007), 1,625–​1,631; F. Fenollar and O. Mediannikov, ‘Emerging Infectious Diseases in Africa in the 21st Century’, New Microbes and New Infections, 26 (2018), S10–​S18; Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, ‘Violent Conflict and the Spread of HIV/​AIDS in Africa’, Journal of Politics, 72/​1 (2010), 149–​162. Stefan Elbe, ‘HIV/​AIDS and the Changing Landscape of War in Africa’, International Security, 27/​2 (2002), 159–​177. 2  David L. Heymann, ‘The True Scope of Health Security’, in D.L. Heymann et al., ‘Global Health Security: The Wider Lessons from the West African Ebola Virus Disease Epidemic’, The Lancet, 385 (2015), 1,884–​1,901, 1,884–​1,887.

544   Philip J. Havik Foundation during the inter-​war years. After 1945, the World Health Organization (WHO) continued the work of its predecessors by setting international health regulations (IHR) from 1969 onwards. They stipulate the notification of certain diseases such as bubonic plague, yellow fever, cholera, and smallpox, their prevention—​by means of vaccines—​monitoring, and control, as well as setting rules for international trade and travel, which have since been updated.3 The implementation of global collective security frameworks entails the setting of binding standards for health interventions and surveillance. However, owing to the lack of a common definition, alignment with national or local priorities might not be guaranteed. Common denominators underlining the need for collective arrangements include protection against threats, political instability, the role of armed forces, and the association with foreign policy interests.4 Overall, a well-​tuned relationship between collective and individual health security, i.e. personal access to safe and effective health services and products, is a key factor in the success and sustainability of health interventions.5 Finally, health security or the securitization of public health is not only relevant for the control and monitoring of communicable but also for non-​communicable diseases.6 In global terms, the Expanded Programme for Immunisation (EPI) launched by WHO and UNICEF in 1977, which followed the successful global smallpox eradication programme (1966–​1980), and the TDR programme (1973) for the control of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) such as hookworm, sleeping sickness, and leishmaniasis, all embrace the concept of health security. Epidemics such as Ebola have underlined ‘the importance of protecting people’s lives through disease control but also of the essentiality of a strong health-​care system embedded in a prosperous economy and a peaceful society’.7 However, in colonial settings, collective health security took on different meanings. Owing to the nature of the colonial state, coercion formed an integral part of the instruments and practice of rule. As colonial states sought to consolidate power and legitimacy after 1945, ideologies of rule, routinized hegemony, and the arbitrary exercise of authority also permeated developmentalist and welfarist rationales and practices.8 The pursuance of public health policies was inspired by demographic and economic concerns that translated into the medicalized management of populations.9 Collective health interventions were well-​ suited to achieve these aims. Their roots in Africa lie in the early 1900s when the first vertical programmes were put in place to deal with outbreaks and epidemics. Long before development planning took hold, they epitomized top-​down, coercive interventions on a large scale. 3 

Valeska Huber, ‘The Unification of the Globe by Disease? The International Sanitary Conferences on Cholera, 1851–​1894’, The Historical Journal, 49/​2 (2006), 453–​476; Norman Howard-​Jones, The Scientific Background of the International Sanitary Conferences (Geneva: WHO, 1975); International Health Regulations (1969) (Geneva: WHO, 1983). 4  William Aldis, ‘Health Security as a Public Health Concept: A Critical Analysis’, Health Policy and Planning, 23 (2008), 369–​375. 5  Heymann et al., ‘The True Scope of Health Security’, 1,884. 6  Ibid., 1,885. 7  Lincoln Chen and Keizo Takemi, ‘Ebola: Lessons in Human Security’, in Heymann et al., ‘Global Health Security’, 1,887–​1,888. 8 Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1994), 141–​181, 208–​217. 9  Veronika Lipphardt and Alexandra Widmer, ‘Introduction’, in Veronika Lipphardt and Alexandra Widmer (eds.), Health and Difference: Rendering Human Variation in Colonial Engagements (New York: Berghahn, 2016), 7.

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    545 Technological innovations, the discovery of new chemotherapies, antibiotics, and vaccines in the inter-​war years, were to bolster the rapid expansion of vertical interventions for disease control and eradication during the Cold War era. Deeply imbued with a bellicose terminology and imagery with regard to the ‘threat’ of and ‘combat’ against diseases and their ‘eradication’, mass medicine’s securitarian narrative built upon a ‘bio-​militaristic’ discourse emanating from the Pasteurian revolution and its focus on the immune system.10 Using weaponized language with reference to killer cells, alien organisms, anti-​bodies, phagocytes, etc., the encounter with pathogens was portrayed as battlefields between ‘ruthless invaders and determined defenders’.11 This narrative was further reinforced by the widespread use of antibiotics and vaccines, and by the rise of resistant microbial strains to treatment.12 The aforesaid terminology has been likened to that of society and the nation-​state itself, and its defence against internal and external threats posed by intruders and invaders crossing boundaries and undermining law and order.13 Racial differentiation served to underpin bio-​social distinctions determining access to public and private health services in urban centres aimed at settlers, while state and missionary facilities in rural areas mainly catered for Africans. ‘Mass medicine’ remained largely reserved for the latter, who formed the bulk of the population. With the granting of individual rights in French colonies in 1946, a debate emerged in colonial circles on the need for reinforcing state-​led coercion in disease control and immunization programmes. The application of sanctions to counter passive and active resistance to health interventions was juxtaposed with the avoidance of political and/​or economic disruption which could jeopardize colonial rule. However, in authoritarian political environments, such considerations were less acute. And once armed conflict erupted, ‘fighting’ human disease reservoirs became deeply entangled with counter-​insurgency (COIN) strategies, inferring strong analogies between political insurgency and resistant strains of invasive pathogens. The striking parallels—​and differences—​that can be drawn between the ‘war on germs’ and the martial metaphors of development and of counter-​insurgency will be explored further below. In view of the relevance of disease control for an understanding of approaches to development and conflict in late colonialism, this chapter first traces the emergence of vertical programmes for the combat against Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), or (African) sleeping sickness, from the early 1900s. After discussing their evolving design, methods, and impact and their key role in bio-​social population management, it looks at disease control strategies and their social dimensions in late colonialism. It addresses how 10 Abraham

Fuks, ‘The Military Metaphors of Modern Medicine’, in Z. Li and T.L. Long (eds.) The Meaning Management Challenge: Making Sense of Health, Illness, and Disease (Oxford: Oxford Inter-​ Disciplinary Press, 2009), 57–​ 68; Cristiana Bastos, ‘War Metaphors in Germ Theory and Immunology: In Search of a New Paradigm’, in C. Bastos (ed.), Global Responses to AIDS: Science in Emergency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 126–​144. 11 A. David Napier, The Age of Immunology: Conceiving the Future in an Alienated World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003); Joshua Lederberg, ‘Infectious History’, Science, 288/​5464 (2000), 287–​293. 12  Anne Marie Moulin, ‘The Immune System: A Key Concept for the History of Immunology’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 11/​2 (1989), 221–​236. 13 Emily Martin, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, 4/​4 (1990), 410–​426.

546   Philip J. Havik different biomedical, developmental, and securitarian narratives and practices overlapped and coalesced around ‘the village’ or village clusters as laboratories of control, prevention, and promotion in conflict situations during the late colonial era. Providing examples from Portuguese colonies, i.e. Angola and Portuguese Guinea, for the 1960s and early 1970s, the chapter shows how population management shifted during late colonialism as the militarized colonial state navigated between collective biosecurity and counter-​insurgency.

Mass Medicine: Organization, Methods, and Strategies The vertical approaches sponsored by health authorities in Africa from the early 1900s onwards, introduced to contain epidemics and outbreaks caused by communicable diseases such as cholera, bubonic plague, and yellow fever, were enshrined in emerging sanitary and epidemiological doctrines. They emanated from the microbiological revolution in the second half of the 1800s and the rise of the colonial state in the early 1900s. While the first established germ theory as the evidence-​based gold standard, the second set new benchmarks for population management and control. The First World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic—​which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide and almost two and half million in Africa14—​heightened demographic and economic anxieties among imperial nations whilst challenging ‘the superiority of Western medical science’.15 During the 1920s, colonial health services began to prioritize the reduction of high levels of child and adult mortality, broadening their coverage of rural areas where the bulk of the African populations resided. Hospitals, sanitary posts, and dispensaries were built to treat a range of communicable (e.g. cholera, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, measles, smallpox, STDs, yaws, etc.) and non-​communicable (e.g. yellow fever, malaria, sleeping sickness, schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis, etc.) diseases. These programmes boasted both compulsory elements contained in vertical programmes and persuasive interventions promoted by health services targeting improvements in preventive and curative care.16 Medical specialities such as social obstetrics, paediatrics, and nutrition, as well as rural hygiene, sanitation, and health promotion thus became key tools of pro-​natal policies to ‘win over’ local populations and counter the influence of traditional practitioners and midwives.17 As a result, African communities were confronted with the colonial state’s patronage of collective bio-​securitarian interventions combined with forms of horizontal assistance which aimed to medicalize the treatment of endemic diseases. Distinct in terms of origin, 14 Niall Johnson and Juergen Müller, ‘Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–​ 1920 “Spanish” Influenza Pandemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 76 (2002), 105–​115, 110. 15  Sandra M. Tomkins, ‘Colonial Administration in British Africa during the Influenza Epidemic of 1918–​19’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 28/​1 (1994), 60–​83. 16  Ulrike Lindner, ‘The Transfer of European Social Policy Concepts to Colonial Africa: The Case of Maternal and Child Welfare’, Journal of Global History, 9/​2 (2014), 208–​231. 17  Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization and Mobility in the Belgian Congo (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 237–​280.

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    547 approach, and methodology, while employing different infrastructures and personnel, these strategies merged over time, testing the boundaries of rule.

Vertical Campaigns: Sleeping Sickness One of the major epidemics prompting large-​scale scientific expeditions and interventions across Africa was that of Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT), or sleeping sickness. Mainly affecting Africans in remote rural areas, it is caused by a parasite transmitted by the tsetse fly or glossina. If left untreated, it is fatal, as the patient develops a tertiary or cerebral stage and subsides into a lethargic and finally a comatose state. It mainly affects populations living in the tsetse fly belt stretching from southern Senegal through Central Africa to southern Mozambique. At the time of the epidemic in the Great Lakes region, it is estimated that between 1901 and 1905 more than 250,000 people died of the disease in the Uganda area alone.18 Rapidly spreading throughout Central Africa in the wake of colonial occupation, HAT was seen to undermine Africans’ productivity and reproduction, provoking great concern among colonial authorities. Nevertheless, it took decades to complete the knowledge of the transmission cycle and aetiology, the different parasites (Tb. gambiense and Tb. rhodesiense), the vector (Glossina species and their behaviour), and the identification of foci (ecology). From the early 1900s, HAT control programmes were instrumental in turning Africa into a ‘living biomedical laboratory’.19 HAT was also the first disease which prompted the mapping of foci areas in Africa from the early 1900s. As such, it constituted a key test for biomedicine’s capacity to develop an effective response to a non-​communicable, fatal, vector-​borne disease20 exclusive to Africa and mobilize international scientific networks to develop effective responses.21 Hence, it was labelled ‘the colonial disease’,22 serving as a window for ‘national’ control programmes and projecting colonial science onto the regional and international stage.23 From the outset, HAT control was associated with coercive population management.24 Strict controls on people’s movements in foci areas as well as mass triage and treatment via ‘organized concentrations of populations’, medical censuses, and the creation of ‘delimited areas’ was coupled with the compulsory ID cards, medical passports, or visa.25 Forced 18  E.M.

Fèvre et al., ‘Reanalyzing the 1900–​1920 Sleeping Sickness Epidemic in Uganda’, Emerging Infectious Diseases, 10/​4 (2004), 567–​573. 19 Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory, 173–​181. 20  Daniel Headrick, ‘Sleeping Sickness Epidemics and Colonial Responses in East and Central Africa, 1900–​1940’, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases 8/​4 (2014), e2772. Ian Maudlin, ‘African Trypanosomiasis’, Annals of Tropical Medicine and Parasitology, 100/​8 (2006), 679–​701; 21  Deborah Neill, Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890–​1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 3–​4. 22  Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–​ 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 23 Neill, Networks in Tropical Medicine, 12–​43. 24 Sarah Ehlers, Europa und die Schlafkrankheit: Koloniale Seuchenbekämpfung, Europaische Identitäten und moderne Medizin 1890–​1950 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 147–​220. 25  F.K. Kleine, L. Van Hoof, and H. Lyndhurst Duke, ‘General Recommendations for the Control of Sleeping Sickness in African Dependencies’, Final Report of the League of Nations International Commission on Human Trypanosomiasis, Geneva: League of Nations Health Organisation, 1928), 391–​392.

548   Philip J. Havik relocation, the removal of entire villages, and village regroupings were justified on the grounds of collective health security, surveillance, and efficiency.26 Passive resistance of local populations to relocation, invasive screening, and treatment aggravated their stigmatization along racialized, ethnic, or political lines, being accused of ‘jeopardising and ridiculing the state’.27 Belgian, French, and Portuguese health authorities shared common approaches to controlling human reservoirs, whereas their British counterparts favoured environmental and veterinarian approaches to vector and game control. Nevertheless, the latter also imposed strict controls over population movements in affected areas and resettlement schemes, for example in Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Northern Rhodesia.28 By the inter-​war years, imperial powers had embraced the concept of model villages, i.e. of integrating agricultural, educational, social, and health services in artificial environments by detailed planning, control, and surveillance to reshape villagers’ lives, giving rise to a variety of schemes.29 As authorities abandoned ‘models of total confinement’, and mobile case-​finding and epidemiological mapping became strategic tools, colonial governance embraced mass medicine. The narratives of mass medicine were based upon notions of fighting ‘enemy agents’, which needed to be ‘isolated . . . contained and eliminated’.30 Pioneered by Belgian and French medical officers from 1916 onwards, mass medicine centred upon highly organized campaigns in areas of economic interest.31 Vertical HAT campaigns relied on mass triage, invasive diagnostic techniques (such as blood samples and lumbar punctures), microscopic analysis, (experimental) prophylactic chemotherapies (intramuscular injections with potentially serious side effects), demographic censuses, and detailed mapping of foci areas. Using a combination of mobile teams and fixed posts, they aimed at sterilizing existing human disease reservoirs (‘blanchiment’), a concept derived from Robert Koch’s research on HAT in German Cameroon in the early 1900s.32 A reservoir presupposed longitudinal evidence on a target population (human or animal) demonstrating the continuity of a pathogen in terms of its transmission, virulence, and persistence in a particular ecosystem, which required in loco field and laboratorial research.33 Neutralizing reservoirs thus implied exerting strict control 26 

E. Balfour et al., Further Report on TB and Sleeping Sickness in Equatorial Africa (Geneva: League of Nations Health Organisation, 1925), 27  Jacques Schwetz, Rapport Mission Médicale Kwango-​Kasai, Kikwit (Belgian Congo), June 1923; Africa Archives, 334 Correspondance Génerale, 4407, Diplomatic Archives, Brussels. 28  Balfour et al., Further Report, 73–​ 115; also see, Helen Tilley, ‘Ecologies of Complexity: Tropical Environments, African Trypanosomiasis, and the Science of Disease Control in British Colonial Africa, 1900–​1940’, Osiris, 2nd Series, 19 (2004), 21–​38. 29  Samuel Coghe, ‘Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola, 1920–​45’, Journal of Contemporary History, 52/​1 (2016), 16–​44; Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930–​1970’, Osiris, 15 (2000), 258–​281; Marc Poncelet, ‘Colonisation, développement et sciences sociales. Éléments pour une sociologie de la constitution du champ des “arts et sciences du développement” dans les sciences sociales francophones belges’, Bulletin de l’APAD, 6 (1993), 1–​23. 30 Lyons, The Colonial Disease, 102–​103. 31 Jean Paul Bado, Eugène Jamot: (1879–​ 1937): Le Médecin de la Maladie du Sommeil ou Trypanosomiases (Paris: Karthala, 2011), 151–​159. 32  Facil Tesfaye, ‘Medical Expeditions and Scramble for Africa: Robert Koch in Africa, 1896–​1907’, PhD dissertation, McGill University, 2013; Neill, Networks in Tropical Medicine, 114–​115. 33 Luisa K. Hallmaier-​ Wacker, Vincent J. Munster, and Sascha Knauf, ‘Disease Reservoirs: From Conceptual Frameworks to Applicable Criteria’, Emerging Microbes & Infections, 6 (2017), e79.

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    549 over population movements, systematic obligatory screening through mass gatherings, and (invasive) diagnostics, prophylaxis, and treatment34 for the scientifically planned preventive ‘inoculation’ of entire populations in a given area. The large-​scale administration of new anti-​HAT drugs was instrumental in introducing African populations to the era of mass medicine, i.e. the systemic use of tools of demographic and epidemiological mapping and surveillance on a mass scale through vertical campaigns in pre-​delineated sectors.35 It was there to stay, being extended to other disease control efforts in the far corners of empire, drawing ever increasing populations into the orbit of the colonial state in the ongoing ‘war on germs’. The standardized use of the drug pentamidine from 1948 onwards appeared to bring the perspective of eradication within reach. The same technological optimism fed into a reliance on ‘total’ therapies, extended to other endemic diseases (such as yaws, STDs, tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, etc.).36 Despite pentamidine’s potentially crippling and fatal secondary effects and administrative and pharmaceutical scandals, intensive prophylactic campaigns were mounted in the Belgian Congo, the AOF and AEF, Angola, and Portuguese Guinea from the mid-​1940s.37 The apparent ‘collective benefits’ of reduced HAT prevalence and incidence informed the extension of vertical programmes to combat other endemic diseases such as yaws, syphilis, tuberculosis, schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis, leprosy, ancylostomiasis, and hookworm. By the 1950s, a network of specialized services had firmly established itself in empire alongside regular health services and aided by colonial administrations and metropolitan institutions, with the support of international and regional organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), its regional office (AFRO), and the Commission for Technical Cooperation South of the Sahara (CCTA).

Social Dimensions of Disease Control The efficacy of mass medicine was conditional upon the close collaboration between colonial administrations at all levels, medical (and veterinary) services, and metropolitan academic institutions,38 as well as private enterprises and religious missions. Given their agility, vertical programmes were well-​suited to prophylactic and vaccination campaigns through rapid mobile interventions to control epidemics and outbreaks and raise levels of herd

34 Guillaume Lachenal, ‘Médecine, comparaisons et échanges inter-​ impériaux dans le mandat camerounais: histoire croisée franco-​allemande de la mission Jamot’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 30/​2 (2013), 23–​45. 35  Guillaume Lachenal, The Lomidine Files: The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 42–​56; Lyons, The Colonial Disease, 102–​161. 36 Lachenal, The Lomidine Files, 81–​84. 37  Ibid., 57–​7 7; Jorge Varanda and Josenando Théophile, ‘Putting Anthropology into Global Health A Century of Anti–​Human African Trypanosomiasis Campaigns in Angola’, Anthropology in Action, 26/​ 1 (2019), 31–​41; Samuel Coghe, ‘Between Inter-​imperial Learning and National Prestige: The Politics of Mass Chemoprophylaxis Against Sleeping Sickness in Portuguese Colonial Africa’, Portuguese Studies Review, 25/​1 (2017), 57–​89; Philip J. Havik, ‘Public Health and Tropical Modernity: The Combat against Sleeping Sickness in Portuguese Guinea (1945–​1974)’, História, Ciências, Saúde-​Manguinhos, 21/​2 (2014), 641–​666. 38 Lyons, The Colonial Disease, 102–​161; Bado, Eugène Jamot, 152.

550   Philip J. Havik immunity. Owing to their single disease approach, they complemented the broad-​spectrum approach of general health services. However, for largely ignoring local social and cultural dimensions, they were ill-​suited to community-​related interventions. Pushing the limits of population management, they enacted demographic, economic, racial, ethnic, and hygienist differentiation.39 Whilst enacting an ‘ephemeral commitment to public health’,40 they operated as de facto gatekeepers of health systems, from which traditional practitioners were—​formally—​excluded. Social medicine and public health nursing with a strong focus on reproductive, child, and community health rapidly expanded in empire after 1945, through networks of health centres, dispensaries, maternity clinics, and kindergartens, where vaccines, antibiotics, and powdered milk were provided. The emphasis on preventive medicine was reflected in vaccination drives promoted by regional bodies such as the WHO-​AFRO and CCTA, as well as inter-​African cooperation to coordinate programmes.41 Inoculation against tuberculosis, diphtheria, tetanus, typhus, yellow fever, smallpox, cholera, and poliomyelitis became a key tool for basic health services, as did antibiotics to treat endemic diseases. As they contacted with vulnerable populations in rural areas, health services aimed to lower child and maternal mortality rates, but also focused on (chronic) health conditions often left untreated by vertical programmes. At the same time, individual health care was expanded for settler populations, above all in urban areas.42 The paternalist approach towards African communities and the ‘African family’ would serve as a prop for a community-​centred approach in late colonialism, thereby giving continuity to the colonial ‘civilizing mission’. The persuasive dimensions of social medicine, health education, and promotion contrasted with mass medicine’s invasive diagnostic techniques, experimental chemotherapies, and close surveillance, which were by no means consensual.43 From the outset, villagers showed reluctance to undergo lumbar punctures, have blood samples taken, or receive a succession of (prophylactic or therapeutic) injections; rumours circulated about malevolent practices as protests were voiced against these and other eradication schemes.44 The environmental and social engineering associated with these programmes would also clash with local traditions in terms of settlement, cultivation, animal husbandry, and cosmologies.45 Several incidents associated with treatment failures 39 

Lipphardt and Widmer, ‘Introduction’, 1–​19. Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and South-​ East Asia, 1920–​ 1965 (Basingstoke, 2006), 22. 41 Philip J. Havik, ‘Regional Cooperation and Health Diplomacy in Africa: From Intra-​ colonial Exchanges to Multilateral Health Institutions’, História, Ciências, Saúde—​ Manguinhos, 27 (2020), 123–​144. 42  Philip J. Havik, ‘Public Health, Social Medicine and Disease Control: Medical Services, Maternal Care and Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Former Portuguese West Africa (1920–​63)’, Medical History, 62/​4 (2018), 485–​506. 43  Coghe, ‘Between Inter-​imperial Learning and National Prestige’, 85; Lachenal, The Lomidine Files, 57–​76; Havik, ‘Public Health and Tropical Modernity’, 660–​661. Jorge Varanda, ‘Um cavalo de Troia na colónia? As missões de profilaxia contra a Doença do Sono da Companhia de Diamantes de Angola (Diamang)’, in Luís Silva Pereira and Chiara Pusetti (eds.) Os Saberes da Cura: Antropologia da Doença e Práticas Terapêuticas (Lisbon: ISPA, 2009), 79–​110, 90–​91. 44 Bado, Eugène Jamot, 77–​80; Luise White, ‘Tsetse Visions: Narratives of Blood and Bugs in Colonial Northern Rhodesia, 1931–​9’, Journal of African History, 36/​2 (1995), 219–​245. 45 Lyons, The Colonial Disease, 162–​198. 40 Sunil

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    551 were recorded over the decades, above all in former French colonies where mass prophylaxis was widely practised, provoking distrust and dissent.46 Early on, authorities realized that vaccinations were better accepted by populations than quarantines, prompting them to focus on improving medical care, coverage, and delivery.47 As political change swept colonial Africa from 1945 onwards, new political platforms emerged for civic and nationalist aspirations.48 Once citizen’s rights were granted to African populations in French colonies in 1946, they began to exercise health citizenship. The potential loss of authority of institutions and increasing local resistance to routine operations such as obligatory vaccinations, disease control, and surveillance raised serious concerns among colonial authorities.49 The negative consequences were seen as ‘particularly serious’ above all in the case of HAT control programmes, ‘the results of which could be reduced to zero following twenty years of hard work and of considerable human and pecuniary sacrifice’.50 As HAT or any other disease could face an ‘explosion’, authorities sought to overcome passive resistance and non-​compliance by enshrining ‘rassemblements obligatoires’ or compulsory concentrations in law for purposes of vaccination, screening, and consultations, enforced by dissuasive sanctions. Thus, authorities were obliged to acknowledge tensions between the rationales of ‘prophylaxis and hygiene (incl. vaccination and screening)’ and ‘individual and therapeutic medicine’.51 These were to intensify during late colonialism, not only on account of political resistance, but also with the proliferation of specialized services and campaigns. As populations in other colonies gained civil and political rights—​for example in the Belgian Congo in 1956—​coercive interventions were challenged. In Portuguese colonies, such as Angola and Portuguese Guinea, appointed, paramount chiefs were instrumentalized to overcome local resistance, while African health workers were recruited to facilitate relations with local populations.52 Once health became entitlement rather than patronage, the intrinsic bonds between disease control and population management consolidated over decades of colonial rule were called into question. Thus, the balance between vertical and horizontal services, between coercion and persuasion and between collective and individual health security, was up for debate. The greater proximity to communities also begged the question of altering populations’ health-​seeking behaviour and devising strategies to retain populations within the orbit of colonial medicine, while maintaining social cohesion in areas affected by civil strife and disruption. 46  On the Bafia scandal of 1926, see Bado, Eugène Jamot, 261–​230: on the Bafia and Yokadouma (1954) cases in Cameroon, the Nkoltang (Gabon, 1952), and the Goro case (Tchad, 1965) involving prophylaxis-​ related deaths, see Lachenal, The Lomidine Files, 115–​130, 177–​181. 47  Georges Trouillot, Report on dissemination of vaccination in French colonies, Minister of Colonies to Governors-​General and governors AOF and AEF, Paris, November 1910; ANOM, 1AFFPOL 3239, Carton 2. 48  Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 38–​65. 49  Dispatch, Governor-​General AOF, Dakar, 1-​8-​1947, to Ministère de la France d’Outre Mer (MOM); Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (ANOM), 1AFFPOL, 2164. 50 Dispatch, 8918, Minister of Overseas Affairs to GG-​ AOF, Paris, 30-​10-​1948; 1AFFPOL 2164. Handwritten note (n.d.) with comments on the Project Decret sur la Régulamentation de la Protection de la Santé Publique. 51  Francis Borrey, Commission des Affaires Sociales, Assemblée de L’Union Francaise, Report nº. 150, Paris, 16-​5-​1951; ANOM, 1AFFPOL 2164, Carton 5. 52  Havik, ‘Tropical Modernity’, 660; Varanda, ‘Um cavalo de Troía’, 97–​98.

552   Philip J. Havik

Development, Public Health, and Armed Conflict: Overlapping Narratives and Networks By the 1950s as the end of empire drew near, international health agencies such as the WHO were ‘narrowing’ their perspective on public health and disease control, largely relying on technology and technical assistance. This ‘technological optimism’ inaugurated a new phase in the ‘war on disease’ and inspired WHO’s ill-​fated Global Malaria Eradication Programme (1955–​1969) and the successful Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme (1967–​1980).53 Based upon a single disease approach, these programmes adopted detailed mapping based upon house-​to-​house case-​finding and close monitoring but differed in their implementation. Whereas the former relied on a top-​down approach, planned cycles of residual spraying with insecticides and large-​scale administration of anti-​malarials, the latter was characterized by a more flexible approach subject to local adjustments by local health workers operating inoculation and health promotion schemes. As new invasive control and surveillance techniques entered families’ homes, malaria campaigns encountered serious obstacles, such as resistance to indoor spraying and blood sampling, local (out)migration patterns, vector and drug resistance, as well as fragile and ill-​prepared health services and low levels of health literacy.54 In the case of smallpox vaccination, socio-​cultural traditions (including variolation) limited funding, and armed conflict affected implementation.55 The failure of WHO’s global malaria eradication programme in the late 1960s and the success of smallpox vaccination underlined the need for close collaboration between vertical and horizontal health services. It also prompted rethinking vertical models, which eventually resulted in the primary health care (PHC) concept adopted at the Alma Ata meeting in 1978.56 One of the key sites for these programmes which aimed at interrupting transmission was the village—​or village clusters—​and peri-​urban wards. Area mapping based on case-​ finding resulted in concentric rings being drawn to progressively eradicate foci areas and their immediate surroundings. WHO-​led smallpox campaigns developed ‘ring vaccination’ techniques, to create buffers by inoculating and monitoring those who had contacted with infected persons. Although concentration points were favoured by state authorities for vaccination, the agility of mobile teams facilitated community and house-​to-​house case detection, treatment, and surveillance. To that effect, African auxiliaries were trained to administer injections, inoculations, indoor spraying, and laboratory work, for the systematic prospection and treatment of social diseases such as HAT, yaws, STDs, TB, and leprosy. As colonial authority was challenged by civil resistance and insurgencies, these planned 53 Randall

M. Packard, A History of Global Health: Interventions into the Lives of Other Peoples (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 152–​179. 54  James L.A. Webb, The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 69–​95; Socrates Litsios, ‘Re-​imagining the Control of Malaria in Tropical Africa during the Early Years of the World Health Organization’, Malaria Journal, 14 (2015), 178. 55  William Schneider, ‘Smallpox in Africa during Colonial Rule’, Medical History, 53 (2009), 193–​227. 56  Litsios, ‘Reimagining the Control of Malaria’.

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    553 interventions came under closer scrutiny. Distinct war metaphors and analogies—​‘preparatory, attack, consolidation and maintenance’ (malaria) and ‘attack, containment and surveillance phases’ (smallpox)—​illustrated their intrusive and disruptive character. The growing concerns over ‘cultural gaps in perception’ in modern disease control in Africa57 thus infused debates and policy shifts during late colonialism towards population health. As these socio-​ political changes inspired a progressive securitization of health while developmental models engaging with welfare gained ground, in a move reminiscent of HAT-​related strategies they were to converge on ‘the village’ or village clusters as their key nexus.

Villages as Privileged Sites of Intervention With the continent falling under the spell of developmental and welfarist projects, colonial rule faced political challenges owing to popular discontent and claims for self-​determination. Therefore, towards the end of empire the social dimensions of colonial rule gained relevance for shaping policies and practices. Spanning different areas of activity from agriculture to sanitation, they centred on planned interventions supported by scientific mapping, the targeting of areas and populations, and systems of surveillance, which were meant to raise the productivity, reproduction, and integration of populations into a modernizing colonial state. The introduction of development plans in British, French, Belgian, and Portuguese empires from the 1940s accelerated the ‘scientisation’ of modernization.58 ‘The village’ has been characterized as one of the key sites for developmental and securitarian interventions during the Cold War period. The resettlement and mobilization of rural populations navigated the tense relationship between coercive population management and policies of persuasion; depending on the context, authorities would opt for a combination of both. As COIN strategies were tested in colonial contexts in Asia and Africa, the concept of the ‘strategic village’ emerged as a ‘martial metaphor of development’ which guided reordering programmes from the 1950s.59 Forming part of planned types of intervention funded by medium-​term development plans, resettlement or ‘population concentration’ schemes in Africa have gained increasing attention in published research over the last decades.60 The perceived need for rural 57 Webb, The Long Struggle, 93–​95.

58  Cláudia Castelo, ‘Developing “Portuguese Africa” in late Colonialism: Confronting Discourses’, in Joseph Hodge, Gerald Hödl, and Martina Kopf (eds.) Developing Africa: Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-​Century Colonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 63–​86; Tony Chafer, The End of Empire in French West Africa: France’s Successful Decolonization? (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Guy van Hemtsche, Genèse et portée du Plan Decenal du Congo Belge (Brussels: Academie des Sciences d’Outre Mer, 1994); Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1950–​1960 (London: Routledge, 1993). 59  For an overview, see Martin Thomas, ‘Violence, Insurgency, and Ends of Empire’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 60  See, for example, Moritz Feichtinger, ‘Strategic Villages: Forced Relocation, Counterinsurgency and Social Engineering in Kenya and Algeria, 1952–​1962’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparison and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Bernardo Pinto Cruz and Diogo Ramada Curto, ‘The Good and the Bad Concentration: Regedorias in Angola’, Portuguese Studies Review, 25/​1 (2017), 2015–​231; Miguel Bandeira Jeronimo, ‘Ordering Resistance: the Late Colonial State in the Portuguese Empire (1940–​1975)’, in Søren Rud and Søren Ivarsson (eds.)

554   Philip J. Havik reordering was based upon perceptions of disorder, poverty, a lack of hygiene, and education and inefficient production that symbolized underdevelopment. ‘The village was the problem; it was also the solution. Through expert knowledge and state power, the reconstructed village (or the model village built from the ground up) appeared bolster secure and legitimate empires, Cold War alliances, and new nation-​states’. Post-​1945 interventions viewed ‘the village as a laboratory increasingly under the microscopes of specialised experts’.61 The enactment of this ‘repressive version of the developmentalist colonial state’, ‘repressive developmentalism’, or ‘coercive development’ required the collaboration of agronomists, social scientists, sanitary engineers, public health specialists, and epidemiologists to design and manage rural development schemes.62 WHO-​AFRO reports in the late 1950s mention projects for ‘the transfer of large agglomerations’ in the Belgian Congo and Portugal’s continental colonies, in order to create ‘artificial communities’. Health education was ‘imposed’ and ‘control being close and direct, the participation of the community itself tended to be less important’.63 Armed conflicts emerging in Africa, in Kenya and Algeria during the Cold War in the 1950s, called into question existing models of social and economic development, whilst serving as a means of re-​examining the legacy of colonial projects. By the time anti-​colonial resistance and armed insurgency erupted in continental Portuguese colonies, Angola (1961), Guinea (1963), and Mozambique (1964)—​but also in Rhodesia (1964)—​the focus on rural communities had crystallized into a securitarian approach, testing and refining COIN military and psyops techniques. Competing with liberation movements for populations’ political allegiance, the militarization of colonial regimes redirected planning inputs to suit defensive, anti-​insurgency, and propagandistic purposes. The confinement of rural communities in model rectangular, deforested, hygienized, productive, and secure settlements, the so-​ called aldeamentos, promoted by the Portuguese colonial state and private enterprises, which proliferated after 194564—​inspired by inter-​war proposals65—​required extensive inputs in planned infrastructures, services, coordination, and surveillance systems. The term aldeamento—​distinct from colonatos or European rural settlements—​was used for these villages, for HAT infirmaries, modern leper colonies, securitized villages, and penal settlements built during the colonial wars.66 Rethinking the Colonial State (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2017), 109–​128; Nicole Sackley, ‘The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction’, Journal of Global History, 6 (2011), 481–​504. 61 

Sackley, ‘The Village as Cold War Site’, 482. Africa Since 1940, 62; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Repressive Developmentalisms: Idioms, Repertoires, Trajectories in Late Colonialism’, in Thomas and Thompson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 537–​554; Leonard L. Bessant, ‘Coercive Development: Land Shortage, Forced Labor, and Colonial Development in the Chiweshe Reserve, Colonial Zimbabwe, 1938–​1946’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 25/​1 (1992), 39–​65. 63  WHO-​AFRO, Report 8th Session Regional Committee for Africa, Annex III, 2; WHO Archives, Geneva, AFRO Meetings, EB23/​26, 3-​12-​1958. 64  Cruz and Curto, ‘The Good and the Bad Concentration’, 206–​207; John P. Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa: The Portuguese Way of War, 1961–​1974 (Solihull: Helion, 2012), 148–​169. 65  Coghe, ‘Reordering Colonial Society’, 29. 66  Luís Alberto Pais de Carvalho, Relatório dos Serviço de Combate a Lepra de Angola, 1964–​1967, Luanda, March 1968; AHU, MU, DGSA, RSH-​007, Cx. 3; Alberto Cardoso Neto, Memo 177 to G-​G Angola, Serviços de Saúde e Assistência, Luanda, 14-​7-​1961; AHU, MU, DGSA, 3230; Bernardo Pinto da 62 Cooper,

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    555 In areas where colonial authority was openly contested, the concept of strategic hamlets or aldeamentos estratégicos (which formed part of regedorias) in COIN approaches aimed to separate insurgents from populations.67 Whereas in Angola and Mozambique villagers were forcibly removed from their chão or ancestral homeland and resettled in securitarian villages, in Portuguese Guinea (PG) the strategy relied on the fortification, modernization, and expansion of existing villages and the building of new settlements by relocated populations.68 As a result, their diverse spatial organization and architecture encompassed both ‘modern’ rectangular and circular endogenous building styles.69 The question of traditional governance, crop cultivation, and territorial belonging generated reticence to such radical changes. The emergence of popular resistance against forced assimilation caused social scientists to be recruited to glean communities’ receptiveness to subversion and COIN strategies.70 Depending on the level of subversion, the aldeamentos broadened their role from ‘laboratories of control and containment’ to ‘laboratories of eradication and prevention’, pioneered by epidemiological control programmes. The use of war metaphors, i.e. ‘attack’, ‘control’, ‘combat’, ‘eradication’, and ‘elimination’, common in vertical programmes shows notable analogies with COIN terminology. Reference to neutralizing subversive ‘cells’ which multiplied and caused destructive chain reactions in society further underlined bio-​ securitarian affinities. By contemplating invasive pathogens causing bacterial or parasitic infections as ‘biological insurgents’, these parallels gained a trans-​disciplinary dimension.71 Given that the concept of sterilization corresponded to a declaration of an all-​out war on human disease reservoirs, it highlighted a key dimension of this militarized biomedical martial metaphor. Indeed, the close collaboration between microbiologists and military cadres set new benchmarks for control and eradication strategies in Africa against a single disease to defeat the pathogenic threat of deadly HAT reservoirs.72 The introduction of the Portuguese COIN doctrine in 1960, with distinct social and psychological dimensions reminiscent of French interventions in Algeria, heralded a strong reliance on military–​civil coordination.73 Thus, a combination of military, political, and social inputs was seen as crucial to counter-​insurgency strategies which were not only designed to combat and end popular rebellions, but also to deal in loco with underlying social causes of discontent or ‘gaps’ enabling insurgent activity. Hence, operations for the ‘security’, ‘control’, Cruz, ‘The Penal Origins of Colonial Model Villages: From Aborted Concentration Camps to Forced Resettlement in Angola (1930–​1969)’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47/​2 (2019), 343–​371. 67 D. Ramada Curto and B. Pinto da Cruz, ‘Destribalização, regedorias e desenvolvimento comunitário: notas acerca do pensamento colonial português’, Práticas da História, 1 (2015), 113–​172. 68 Rui Aristides Lebre and Tiago Castela, ‘Aldeamento de guerra no colonialismo português na Guiné-​Bissau’, e-​cadernos CES, 37 (2022), available at: http://​journ​als.open​edit​ion.org/​eces/​7 122, accessed 4 November 2022, 69 Manuel Braga Dias, Mudança Sócio-​ Cultural na Guiné Portuguesa (contribuição para o seu estudo), MA thesis, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, 1974: 215–​218; 248–​253. 70  Cruz, ‘The Penal Origins’, 355–​357. 71  Benjamin C. Kirkup, Jr., ‘Counterinsurgency Doctrine Applied to Infectious Disease’, Research Paper, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, 2014 (PrePrint accessed 6 July 2019). 72 Jean Pierre Dozon, ‘Pasteurisme, médecine militaire et colonisation en Afrique noire’, Michel Morange (ed.), L’Institut Pasteur: Contributions á Son Histoire (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), 269–​278. 73 Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa, 63–​65; Alfredo Pereira da Conceição, ‘Inter-​relação das acções militar e política na contra-​subversão’, Revista Militar, 20/​2–​3 (1968), 147–​192 and 194, 226–​273.

556   Philip J. Havik and ‘social development’ of populations were depicted as long-​term processes; medical services were regarded as a key tool to address these ‘gaps’.74 Clearly, ‘medicine was politics as the Portuguese struggled to save their empire’.75 The colonial emphasis on rural reordering, mass medicine, and vertical disease control was indeed challenged by nationalist movements in Angola, PG, and Mozambique, exploiting these ‘gaps’ by giving priority to primary health care, preventive medicine, and health literacy campaigns. The first such campaigns in the ‘battlefield of health’76 were carried out by FRELIMO in Mozambique from 1966 onwards (against cholera, smallpox, and tetanus) and by PAIGC in liberated areas in PG on a large scale (against cholera, smallpox, and TB) from 1970 onwards.77 These movements also maintained medical services for refugees in neighbouring countries (Tanzania, Senegal, and Guinea Conakry). Colonial efforts to win over local populations by means of mass inoculations should thus be viewed in the context of counter-​subversion strategies, which responded to these movements’ frontline actions. The progressive militarization of health services in theatres of war also enabled the gathering of health and social intelligence through regular visits by mobile teams and clinics to outlying villages.78 Such civil and military programmes evidenced strong similarities between narratives and practices of rural reordering, planned community development, and economic modernization on the one hand, and counter-​insurgency and collective biosecurity on the other. These overlaps were laid down in legal reforms in 1964 which redefined rural resettlement in COIN terms.79 Starting in the north-​west and later extended to eastern and central Angola, COIN strategies set out to retain populations in rural areas and promote their productive potential following the exodus of 500,000 inhabitants to neighbouring independent Congo by resettling communities in secure hamlets. Aid response, set up by nationalist movements such as the MPLA in 1961, and supported by international agencies such as the Red Cross and NGOs, provided medical assistance (mainly vaccinations, antibiotics, anti-​malarials, and anti-​parasitic treatments) to refugees in the Congo and within Angola itself. Operating with limited human and material resources, teams were active in frontier areas in the south-​ east and north-​west of Angola (including the Luanda region) backed up by rear-​guard facilities in neighbouring countries.80 The rapid spread of aldeamentos under military and civil control, encompassing 3,000 units with over one million African residents (or approximately 20% of the population) by 1974 in Angola, illustrates the impact of rural reordering. Whereas the state’s capacity 74  Carlos Gomes Bessa, ‘Angola: a luta contra a subversão e a colaboração civil militar’, Revista Militar, 24/​8–​9 (1972), 407–​443. 75  Frederick Shapiro, ‘Medicine in the Service of Colonialism: Medical Care in Portuguese Africa (1885–​1974)’, PhD dissertation, University of California, 1983, 345. 76  Ibid., 35. 77  PAIGC, Évolution et bilan pendant dix années de lutte, Conakry: Département de la Santé, 1974, 9; Helder Martins, Porquê Sakrani? Memórias dum médico duma guerrilha esquecida (Maputo: Editorial Terceiro Milénio, 2001), 279/​80, 333/​34. 78 Cann, Counterinsurgency in Africa, 154. 79  Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Rural (In)Securities: Resettlement, Control and “Development” in Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Comparativ, 27/​2 (2017), 75–​97. 80  Eduardo Santos, L’assistance médicale dans les maquis angolais, Lusaka, December 1969; SOAS Archives, UCL, MS 346184/​1-​10 (Box 1), Serviço de Assistência Médica (SAM).

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    557 for population control was enhanced, the social and economic disruption of dislocated communities and the lack of sustained community interventions illustrated the limits of social engineering.81 In PG, COIN strategies introduced in 1968 lead to the fortification of more than ninety villages until the end of the war, involving over 100,000 inhabitants (approximately 20% of the population) mainly located in the densely populated north-​west and in and around the island of Bissau. Rather than rural resettlement, it aimed to modernize community infrastructures while organizing local militias (milícias de regedoria) to ‘Africanize’ village security, first introduced in Angola. By associating the concept of self-​defence with anti-​insurgency strategies, these schemes attempted to legitimize and ‘dilute’ the coercive nature of interventions. As the boundaries between collective and individual spheres on the one hand and coercion and persuasion on the other were redrawn to reduce risks of political and epidemiological ‘contagion’, COIN and biosecurity became deeply entangled.82

The Militarization of Mass Medicine in Conflict Zones The eruption of armed conflict in the north of Angola in 1961 came as many African countries had already achieved independence or were in the throes of decolonization. Portuguese metropolitan and colonial authorities were well aware of the political changes occurring on the continent, and anxiously followed the activities of liberation movements such as FNLA, MPLA, and UNITA on the regional and international stage. Other territories soon followed, such as Portuguese Guinea, where PAIGC launched its first insurgent campaigns in 1963 and soon occupied strongholds in liberated territories in the south of the colony. By that time, despite the welfarist narrative adopted by New State dictatorship (1926–​1974) and the implementation of successive Development Plans (1953–​1958; 1959–​1964), only limited progress had been achieved in developing education, health, and community services.83 In the early 1960s, WHO consultants identified some problems affecting Portugal’s continental colonies, including under-​staffing, a lack of sanitary facilities, and non-​compliance with key health indicators. Whereas networks of health posts and dispensaries were in place, they did not conform to the public health standards set by WHO for being ill-​equipped (e.g. rural maternities), insufficient auxiliary personnel, and non-​existent basic rural sanitation campaigns. Regular vaccinations—​against smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, and tetanus—​were introduced in PG on a limited scale in the late 1950s, and BCG inoculation was only initiated in the early 1960s. In Angola however, inoculations for smallpox and yellow fever were compulsory, while others commonly administered in state-​and privately-​ run dominions.84 The WHO report praised the efficacy of HAT control efforts in Angola, where about a million villagers were screened every year and mass prophylaxis administered 81 Gerald

Bender, ‘The Limits of Counterinsurgency: An African Case’, Comparative Politics, 4/​3 (1972), 331–​360. 82  T.M. Wilkinson, ‘Contagious Disease and Self-​defence’, Res Publica, 13 (2007), 339–​359. 83  Cláudia Castelo, ‘ “Novos Brasis” em África: desenvolvimento e colonialismo português tardio’, Varia História, 30/​53 (2014), 507–​532. 84  Private companies such as DIAMANG operating in the North-​East of Angola, were responsible for health services, screening and inoculation campaigns in areas under its control; see, Jorge Varanda and Todd Cleveland, ‘(Un)healthy Relationships: African Labourers, Profit and Health Services in Angola’s Colonial-​Era Diamond Mines (1917–​75)’, Medical History, 58/​1 (2014), 87–​105.

558   Philip J. Havik in high-​risk areas. It noted that the HAT Commission in the colony had anticipated the ‘recent events’, i.e. insurgencies, in 1961, which occurred in the principal foci areas in northern Angola. Fearing setbacks owing to the suspension of programmes, they were ‘strongly impressed’ with the commission’s accomplishments in PG, which not only covered the whole territory, even during the rainy season, but had also observed the entire population by 1961.85 In PG the commission had extended its role far beyond its initial brief. It had set up a rural assistance programme that treated a wide range of diseases owing to deficient coverage by regular health services and ‘because they provided the Commission with considerable prestige in indigenous communities and encouraged them to collaborate with the [mobile] teams’.86 In contrast, its equivalent in Angola limited its medical assistance to yaws and leprosy campaigns but worked closely with local health services.87 By the mid-​1960s, despite a lack of personnel, sleeping sickness had been brought under control in Angola and PG by selective ‘pentamidinization’, with teams visiting every village in medical sectors while rural assistance programmes were making inroads on the prevalence of other diseases. The two commissions developed a dense network of bush infirmaries, some of which had to close due to armed conflict, while mobile teams avoided no-​go areas. By the early 1970s, in PG the commission’s mobile teams had been replaced by military services in conflict zones whilst personnel shortages affected its operations elsewhere.88 In Angola, HAT case detection and surveillance was tightened in the late 1960s with the influx of refugees in northern Angola from neighbouring Zaire, originating from areas where HAT control had been discontinued.89 Once cross-​border cooperation in disease control (between PG, Guinea Conakry, and Senegal; Angola and Zaire) was interrupted or broke down following the outbreak of insurgencies, disease and population control ceased to overlap. Commissions in Angola and PG were also charged with other tasks, such as mass vaccination campaigns against smallpox and malaria control campaigns in close collaboration with regular services, as recommended by WHO consultants. They did so in conflict areas with the aid of the Armed Forces who programmed their itineraries. Health service officials and experts showed a marked interest in exploring militarized aldeamentos estratégicos in PG, which had proliferated around the capital Bissau and contingent areas, for malaria control. These settlements with modern sanitary facilities were thought to be well-​suited to indoor spraying campaigns with insecticides and administration of anti-​malarials, hitherto generally aimed at colonial settlements.90 But, whereas the commission in PG was the only such organization in the colony and covered its entirety, in Angola it centred on HAT foci areas in the north and south-​east. Health reforms in the mid-​1960s set out to transform the latter into polyvalent units carrying out mass screening and treatment of leprosy, yaws, and TB, 85  Ernâni Braga, Ruperto Casanueva and Jean-​ Simon Cayla, Rapport de la Mission de l’OMS sur la Situation Sanitarie dans la Guinée Portugaise, l’Angola et Le Mozambique, December 1962; WHO Archives, Geneva, P8-​451-​4 JKT-​1. 86  Havik, ‘Public Health and Tropical Modernity’, 652–​656. 87  Coghe, ‘Between Inter-​imperial Learning and National Prestige’, 86. 88  Manuel Gardette Correia, ‘Relatório da Missão de Combate as Tripanossomíases na Guiné’, Boletim Cultural da Guiné Portuguesa, 27/​108 (1972), 678–​751. 89 A. Hutchinson, Confidential letter to N. Ansari, WHO Geneva, 23-​ 9-​1968; WHO Archives, TRYPANO1-​AFRO-​Angola, WHO 07.0269. 90  Maurício Lecuona, Bissau, 14-​9-​1970; AHU-​UM-​DGSA-​RSH-​013, Cx. 3, Sub-​processo 4; Francisco Cambournac, Relatório de uma Visita a Provínica da Guiné, 17-​24/​3/​1970; AHU-​MU-​RSH-​007, Cx 10.

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    559 and mass vaccinations against smallpox.91 Despite the commission’s limited capacity, by the late 1960s special services had multiplied: besides the so-​called pentamidinization brigades, mobile brigades coordinated from the capital Luanda circulated for leprosy, TB, and malaria control. To facilitate implementation in ‘areas of terrorist activity’, the work of brigades was eventually transferred to military medical services.92 Given that schedules for mass screening and treatment were not necessarily synchronized in Angola, team visits sometimes overlapped, calling upon populations in the same areas in short succession. To reach these ‘concentrations’, villagers from distant areas travelled, often on foot, to meeting points. In the case of the TB brigade, they were subjected to successive concentrations, first for the Mantoux test and thereafter for BCG inoculation. By the early 1970s, owing to logistical problems and social factors, these procedures were simplified in rural areas by carrying out mass BCG vaccination without screening. Senior health officials admitted that ‘although it was for the benefit of populations, these were sometimes driven to saturation point’.93 In certain areas, ‘manifestations of displeasure’ were common, with women protesting against detailed examination procedures; despite propaganda exercises, local animosities were also impacting upon other campaigns, causing villagers to ‘reject compliance’. Indeed, health officers commented that without a legal basis for coercing populations into appearing at ‘concentrations’, ‘great care was required to maintain activities operational at sector level and offer perfectly acceptable conditions for populations’ adherence’.94 The implementation of this sensitive task was hindered by the lack of equipment and medical and nursing staff to provide basic medical services to communities. Mass vaccination drives against smallpox (facilitated by freeze dried vaccines and the bifurcated needle) and polio (with an oral vaccine introduced in the 1960s) became more frequent from 1965 onwards. Inoculation campaigns to stem cholera and yellow fever outbreaks were conducted in the early 1970s.95 Angola formed an exception compared to Mozambique and PG, given the intensity of vaccination drives during the latter stages of the conflict (see Figure 28.1). Despite its low incidence, between 1965 and 1970 more than fifteen million smallpox inoculations were administered, three times the total population of the colony. At the time, MPLA had started vaccination campaigns inside Angola as colonial authorities stepped up their efforts to ‘counter-​weaponise’ inoculation.96 The use of model villages in Angola for large-​scale propaganda exercises of mass smallpox and polio vaccinations in the late 1960s97 underscores political sovereignty as a prime driver of health

91 Silvino Silvério Marques, Projecto de Portaria, Serviço de Estudo e Combate as Endemias de Angola, November 1965; AHU-​MU-​DGSA-​RSH-​007, Cx. 10, Processo 35/​11-​1, I Vol. 92 Maria Julieta E. Carmona Teixeira, Relatório Serviço de Combate a Lepra, Luanda, 25-​ 7-​1971; AHU-​MU-​DGSA-​RSH-​007, Cx. 3. 93  Amadeu Martinho Picanço, Relatório das Brigadas Itinerantes, in: Relatório Anual dos Serviços de Combate a Tuberculose, Luanda, 1970: 81-​83; AHU-​UM-​DGSA-​RSH-​007, Cx. 4. 94 Serviços de Saúde e Assistência de Angola, Relatório Anual, Missão de Combate as Tripanosomíases Luanda, 1972, 13. 95  Ibid., 53. 96  Eduardo dos Santos, L’assistance médicale dans les maquis angolais, Lusaka, 1969; Portuguese Colonies Collection, MS 346184/​9, Box 1, SOAS Archives, London. 97  Bernardo Pinto da Cruz, ‘Vaccination and Resettlement in Angola’, paper, workshop ‘The History of Tropical Medicine’, IHMT-​UNL, Lisbon, 14–​15 December 2017.

560   Philip J. Havik Vaccination Angola, Guinea and Mozambique, 1945-72 600 000 500 000 400 000 300 000 200 000 100 000

19 4 19 5 4 19 6 4 19 7 4 19 8 4 19 9 5 19 0 5 19 1 52 19 5 19 3 5 19 4 5 19 5 5 19 6 5 19 7 5 19 8 5 19 9 6 19 0 6 19 1 62 19 6 19 3 6 19 4 6 19 5 6 19 6 6 19 7 6 19 8 6 19 9 7 19 0 7 19 1 72

0 Angola

Moçambique

Guiné

Figure 28.1   Total vaccinations Angola, PG and Mozambique, 1945-​1972. Source: Anuários Estatísticos do Ultramar, 1945–​1973 interventions,98 outweighing the potential disruption and resistance provoked by preventive militarized campaigns in conflict prone areas.

Conclusions Three overlapping trends have been identified above: the evolution of mass medicine and public health, the affirmation of the developmentalist colonial state, and securitarian interventions in late colonialism. Tension and conflict has been linked to a notion of African exceptionalism by means of the selective application of securitization to the ‘underdeveloped’ continent. Being ‘colonially scripted’, securitization is imbued with echoes of a persistent imperial past rooted in ethnocentric perceptions of political rationale, governance, and popular traditions.99 Bio-​and militarized securitarian strategies share common epistemes originating in the natural sciences, relying on basic universal laws guiding pathogen and human behaviour to inform policies and practices of control and surveillance to neutralize a perceived threat. Placed in the developmental and modernizing context of late colonialism, they were also guided by the notion of strategic scientific planning to create 98 Shapiro,

‘Medicine in the Service of Colonialism’, 399. The weaponization of vaccination for purposes of state legitimacy was also practiced during the civil war (1975–​2002) in post-​colonial Angola; see Virginie Tallio, ‘Vaccination Policies and State-​Building in Post-​War Angola’, Gender and Research, 20/​1 (2019), 106–​127. 99 Maria Ericsson Baaz and Judith Verweijen, ‘Confronting the Colonial: The (Re)production of “African” Exceptionalism in Critical Security and Military Studies’, Security Dialogue; 49/​1–​2 (2018), 57–​69.

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    561 a capacity for intervention to effectively organize and direct actions in pre-​defined spatial and social settings. But fighting germs and insurgents would severely test authorities’ capacity to devise and implement effective, overlapping strategies. The growing importance that health security has gained over the last decades owing to successive global outbreaks and epidemics shows to what extent public health and disease control are deeply entwined with notions of population management and surveillance. As this chapter has shown, these metaphors and the policies they induced were plainly evident during the late colonial period in Africa in a Cold War setting. The organic thinking that inspired disease control and rural reordering programmes manifested itself in counter-​ subversive strategies and interventions from the 1950s onwards in different conflict zones in colonial territories. Nevertheless, the relationship between armed conflict, (rural) development, and bio-​securitarian approaches during late colonialism on the continent has so far remained under-​researched, but for few exceptions.100 Similarly, published research on the situation in urban settings harbouring populations fleeing from war zones remains limited.101 The potential for collective health security to clash with individual health security in the context of disruption and dissent was present in colonial policy-​makers’ minds, to the point of resorting to civic and ‘national’ narratives to promote cooperation.102 The combination of repressive developmental and welfarist approaches begs the question of the shaping of health citizenship as epidemiological, economic, and securitarian rationales converged during late colonialism. Historical evidence suggests that the polarization and mistrust rooted in the colonial legacy of collective biomedical interventions can be traced to their weaponization in militarized environments during late colonialism.103 Based on the principle of speeding up prevention and treatment through greater reliance on technology and mobility, these actions were increasingly subsumed by militarized interventions. The latter aimed at countering perceived socio-​political disorder and insurgency, as populations gained access to alternative discourses on social, political, and human rights. Early benchmarks for collective health security in empire were set by vertical disease control programmes to sterilize human disease reservoirs, such as HAT. Mass medicine epitomized the largely coercive securitization of public health within the broader colonial response to widespread and often fatal endemic diseases in remote rural areas. Being exclusive to the continent, HAT fomented a narrative of African exceptionalism and colonial expertise. Using novel diagnostic techniques and treatments, mass medicine greatly expanded its coverage after 1945, extending its range to other endemic diseases with the support of international agencies such as WHO, AFRO, and UNICEF. They coincided with the emergence of rural reordering programmes aiming to modernize ‘traditional’ African societies, to reshape their economic and social potential by means of agricultural extension, better housing, education, health and sanitation, and communications. Planned 100  Donald

Henderson, ‘The Siren Song of Eradication’, Lily Lecture, Royal College of Physicians, April 1998, http://​www.zero-​pox.info/​da_​s​pch/​c27​_​199​8_​li​lly.pdf, accessed 27 July 2019. 101  Juliana de Cordeiro Farias Boslett, ‘A Cidade e a Guerra: relações de poder e subversão em S. Paula Assunção de Luanda, 1961–​1975’, Post-​Doctoral thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminmense, 2014. 102 Lachenal, The Lomidine Files, 106–​108. 103  Richard C. Keller, ‘Geographies of Power, Legacies of Mistrust: Colonial Medicine in the Global Present’, Historical Geography, 34 (2006), 26–​48.

562   Philip J. Havik development envisaged idealized ‘modern’ village communities to raise living standards and facilitate the integration of more accessible, cohesive, efficient, and ‘sanitized’ communities into the colonial economy, while enhancing the state’s spatial and social control. Once armed ethnic and nationalist insurgence challenged colonial rule from the 1950s, the relations between modernization, welfare, public health, epidemiology, and security were recalibrated as the ‘strategic village’ became the dominant organic model for population management, socio-​economic development, and public health interventions. As calls for self-​determination and decolonization intensified, the importance of combining coercive with persuasive strategies and practices in varying combinations was essential for the maintenance of colonial authority.104 However, vertical disease programmes and regular health services in Africa had rarely been tested under conflict conditions or for their compatibility with modern military COIN techniques. Once a community approach to public health was formalized in Portuguese colonies with the 1964 health reforms, services in rural areas were held to prioritize frontline medicine by means of ‘close contact with populations’ through a network of primary facilities upon which ‘the success of failure of sanitary policies’ depended.105 Evidence from two Portuguese colonies, Angola and Portuguese Guinea, confirm conceptual proximities between modus operandi in terms of its developmental, welfarist, and military interventions during late colonialism. Thinking on the securitization of health and counter-​insurgency resorted to updated models of confinement and surveillance inspired by vertical disease control programmes. Their emphasis upon planning, focus on territorial mapping, technological solutions, operation manuals, the gathering of (epidemiological and socio-​political) intelligence, (bio-​social) population management, and enhancing defences against external threats, all suggest compatible rationales of intervention. The greater involvement of the Armed Forces in case detection and epidemiological control and surveillance operations indicates progressive synergies, while illustrating the diminishing lack of efficacy of regular and specialist civil services. The focus on smallpox and polio inoculations also suggests a bio-​securitarian rationale built around a concentric approach to spatial and social control and surveillance, which encompassed local and regional dimensions.106 It also demonstrates the weaponization of surveillance-​containment strategies and contact tracing techniques developed in WHO-​led smallpox eradication campaigns.107 By the late 1960s, as liberation movements were making significant inroads into colonial dominions while promoting social medicine, health officers were acknowledging the importance of obtaining the collaboration of ‘populations, administrative and tribal authorities, community and religious organizations’ in disease control campaigns’.108 Data on the social and ethnic composition of communities, their mobility patterns, socio-​economic and sanitary conditions, and cooperation which required multidisciplinary inputs, were now seen 104  Stephen

Pampinella, ‘The Effectiveness of Coercive and Persuasive Counterinsurgency Practices since 1945’, Civil Wars, 17/​4 (2015), 503–​526. 105  Decree 45541, ‘Regulamento dos Serviços de Saúde e Assistência do Ultramar’, 23 January 1964, in: Diário do Governo, 1st series, 19, Lisbon, 23-​1-​1964: 73–​95, 74. 106  Keller, ‘Geographies of Power’, 39. 107  Schneider, ‘Smallpox in Africa’. 108  L. Santos Garcia, Relatório, Problemas e Métodos de Cooperação na Luta Contra as Grandes Endemias, Lourenço Marques, 3-​ 9-​ 1962; AHU-​ MU-​ DGSA-​ RHS-​ 015, Cx. 17, Processo 7/​ 4, sub-​ processo 2.

Mass Medicine, Disease Control, and Conflict    563 to be of vital importance to campaign planning and implementation.109 Colonial health authorities were acutely aware of popular anxieties and discontent on account of multiple and overlapping ‘concentrations’ practised by stand-​alone vertical campaigns; such ‘gaps’ could be exploited by liberation movements. They recognized that ‘populations’ tended to ‘misunderstand most preventive interventions’, submitting themselves to them with great reluctance, whilst demanding curative responses to immediate health needs. Besides vertical interventions, strategies encompassed medical and sanitary assistance to villages in the vicinity of military bases, based upon a radial model. However, the lack of qualified health personnel and mobile units formed serious impediments to healthcare provision in conflict zones.110 The advocacy of the regional hospital as a centre for medical and socio-​ medical activity equipped with integrated, itinerant services in health reforms and rural reordering strategies in the late 1960s illustrates a shift towards an approach based upon operational elasticity111 and decentralized decision making. Prioritizing ‘close contact with local communities . . . whose active support was vital’, they embraced integrated approaches to population management based upon overlapping dimensions of health security, development, surveillance, and countersubversion in conflict situations at the end of empire.112

Acknowledgements Funding for the research undertaken for this chapter was provided by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), grant number IF/​01130/​2013/​CP1165/​CT0002.

Select Bibliography Aldis, William, ‘Health Security as a Public Health Concept: A Critical Analysis’, Health Policy and Planning, 23 (2008), 369–​375. Coghe, Samuel, ‘Between Inter-​imperial Learning and National Prestige: The Politics of Mass Chemoprophylaxis against Sleeping Sickness in Portuguese Colonial Africa’, Portuguese Studies Review, 25/​1 (2017), 57–​89. Cruz, Bernardo Pinto, and Diogo Ramada Curto, ‘The Good and the Bad Concentration: Regedorias in Angola’, Portuguese Studies Review, 25/​1 (2017), 2,015–​2,231. Fuks, Abraham, ‘The Military Metaphors of Modern Medicine’, in Z. Li and T.L. Long, eds., The Meaning Management Challenge: Making Sense of Health, Illness, and Disease (Oxford Inter-​ Disciplinary Press, 2009), 57–​68.

109 

Fernando da Cruz Ferreira, ‘O combate às endemias e a sua planificação no Ultramar Português’, Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1/​3 (1967), 57–​67. 110  Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘A Robust Operation: Resettling, Security, and Development in Late Colonial Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Itinerário, 44/​1 (2019), 1–​25. 111  Serviços de Saúde e Assistência de Angola, Missão de Combate as Tripanosomíases, Relatório Anual de 1968, Luanda, 1969: 29. 112  A. Cardoso de Albuquerque, ‘O Hospital Rural nas Províncias Ultramarinas: suas características e meios de acção’, Luanda, September 1966: 14/​15; Guilherme A.A. Abranches Pinto, ‘O Hospital Regional em Angola’, IV Coloquio Nacional de Trabalho. Luanda, 18–​23 August 1966; AHU-​MU-​DGSA, Cx.159.

564   Philip J. Havik Havik, Philip J., ‘Public Health and Tropical Modernity: The Combat against Sleeping Sickness in Portuguese Guinea (1945–​1974)’, História, Ciências, Saúde-​Manguinhos, 21/​2 (2014), 641–​666. Heymann, David L., ‘The True Scope of Health Security’, in D.L. Heymann et al., eds., ‘Global Health security: The Wider Lessons from the West African Ebola Virus Disease Epidemic’, The Lancet, 385 (2015), 1,884–​1,901. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, ‘Rural (In)Securities: Resettlement, Control and “Development” in Angola (1960s–​1970s)’, Comparativ, 27/​2 (2017), 75–​97. Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira, ‘Repressive Developmentalisms: Idioms, Repertoires, Trajectories in Late Colonialism’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 537–​554. Lachenal, Guillaume, The Lomidine Files: The Untold Story of a Medical Disaster in Colonial Africa (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017). Lyons Maryinez, The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–​1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Martin, Emily, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, 4/​4 (1990), 410–​426. Sackley, Nicole, ‘The Village as Cold War Site: Experts, Development, and the History of Rural Reconstruction’, Journal of Global History, 6 (2011), 481–​504. Thomas, Martin, ‘Violence, Insurgency, and Ends of Empire’, in Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Chapter 29

Refu gees in V i ol e nt Dec ol oniz at i ons Phi-​Vân Nguyen Violent decolonizations generate massive population displacement. Studies often treat refugee crises as one among many consequences of an armed conflict. But winning over the population has always been central to victory. Population displacement should therefore become a major concern, rather than a subplot within late colonial insurgencies and counter-​ insurgencies. With this in mind, what is the role of refugees and their protection in violent decolonizations? Population displacement is more than a byproduct of the contest of arms. Insurgents and states also use refugee flows as a military, socio-​economic, and symbolic weapon against their enemy. Access to a surrounding population is key to the insurgents’ supply of food, information, and human resources. Yet refugee protection also serves as the perfect excuse to justify violence or continue the struggle against an enemy. This chapter first analyses the politics of refugee movements. It then studies Vietnam after the 1954 ceasefire with France, the colonial power, during the subsequent war with the United States, and after the final American pullout from Saigon in 1975 to show that refugee protection was central to how belligerents pursued wartime strategies, rather than just a humanitarian crisis that unfolded in the war’s aftermath.

Refugees in Violent Decolonization General understanding of who is a refugee typically derives from the 1951 Geneva Convention. This document defines a refugee as a person seeking protection in a foreign country because of a well-​founded fear of persecution.1 However, refugee movements are more complex than this definition suggests.

1 

United Nations (hereafter UN), ‘Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees’, http://​ www.unhcr.org/​3b6​6c2a​a10, accessed 28 August 2018.

566   Phi-Vân Nguyen States granted asylum for humanitarian reasons.2 But they also sheltered newcomers for their own purposes. Both the Roman Empire and later Catholic kingdoms, for instance, used refugees for their armies, trade networks, and agricultural projects.3 Refugees also became liabilities. They sometimes increased the risk of insurrection. During the Atlantic revolutions in the nineteenth century, ‘émigrés’, ‘exiles’, and ‘refugees’ connected with fellow natives within and across political borders to share ideas, including revolutionary ones.4 This holds true for nineteenth-​century insurrectionary leaders such as Mazzini and Garibaldi and for anonymous fighters volunteering in revolutionary wars throughout the Mediterranean region as well as in America from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.5 In their efforts to manage refugee matters, states introduced surveillance using identity documents and harmonized expulsion procedures. They targeted allegedly subversive elements, got rid of unwanted foreigners, or claimed authority over their nationals abroad.6 Counter-​insurgents also recruited refugees.7 The Portuguese monarchy fought liberals using loyalist refugees. Rome formed the papal zouaves from across Europe to protect the city against hostile revolutionaries. The end of empires followed the same dynamic. Population movement was both a consequence of territorial disputes and an opportunity to provide new recruits for the fight. Religious or ethnic identification often catalysed population movements and galvanized

2  On the Greek polis, Samuel N.C. Lieu, ‘Captives, Refugees and Exiles, a Study of Cross-​Frontier Civilian Movements and Contacts Between Rome and Persia from Valerian to Jovian’, in Philip Freeman and David Kennedy (eds.), The Defence of the Roman and Byzantine East: Proceedings of a Colloquim Held at the University of Sheffield, 1986 (Oxford: BAR Publishing, 1986), 474-​506. Benjamin Grey, ‘Exile, Refuge and the Greek Polis: Between Justice and Humanity’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 30/​2 (2017), 190–​ 219. On Christian caritas and other religious traditions, see Susanne Lachenicht (ed.), Religious Refugees in Europe, Asia and North America, 6th–​21st Century (Berlin: Verlag, 2007). 3  Peter J. Heather, ‘Refugees and the Roman Empire’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 302 (2017), 220–​242. Cecilia Tarruel, ‘Circulations entre chrétienté et Islam: Quelques réflexions à propos des “méritos y servidios” Au service de la monarchie hispanique (XVIe-​XVIIe Siècle)’, Diasporas, 25 (2015), 45–​57. 4  ‘Émigrés’ were traitors, ‘exiles’ were banned from their home country, while ‘réfugiés’ required protection to survive, according to Sylvie Aprile and Delphine Diaz, ‘Europe and Its Political Refugees in the 19th Century’, https://​booksa​ndid​eas.net/​Eur​ope-​and-​its-​Politi​cal-​Refug​ees-​in-​the-​19th-​Cent​ury.html, accessed 17 March 2020, 2–​3. Sylvie Aprile, Un Asile pour tous les peuples? Exilés et réfugiés étrangers dans la France au cours du premier XIXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014). 5  I am grateful to Grégoire Bron for his recommendations on political exiles. On Garibaldi, Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-​Victorian Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1979), 203. On political exiles, Maurizio Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile. Italian Émigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-​ Napoleonic Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Grégoire Bron, ‘The Exiles of the Risorgimento, Italian Volunteers in the Portuguese Civil War (1832–​34)’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 14/​4 (2009), 427–​444. 6 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Pierre Piazza, Histoire de la carte nationale d’identité (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004); Gérard Noiriel, État, Nation et Immigration (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). On expulsion and extradition procedures, James Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations, a Treatise of the Jural Relations of Separate Political Communities (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1883), 334–​345. 7 Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, ‘From Europe to the Andes and Back: Becoming “Los Ayacuchos”’, European History Quarterly, 41/​3 (2011); Simon Sarlin, ‘The Anti-​Risorgimento as a Transnational Experience’, Modern Italy, 19/​1 (2013), 86.

Refugees in Violent Decolonizations    567 the creation of additional fighters.8 Yet the rise of nationalism also invested refugee flows with a new rhetoric. Since nation-​states ipso facto sought to uphold sovereignty over a territory, the physical presence or movement of nationals had a symbolic impact on their legitimacy. Both insurgents and colonial authorities adapted their strategy to this new premise. Population transfers following territorial partitions are a case in point.9 These measures were supposed to end centuries of hostilities. But the experiences and representations of these movements generated alternative forms of violence, sometimes making victims of persecution more visible targets, sometimes making claims for asylum the flashpoint for new forms of persecution. The rise of human rights movements did not make asylum universal. Refugee protection mainly applied to Western, Christian, and affluent people. After the Paris Commune of 1870, international law specialists worried that commoners—​and not just intellectuals and activists with a bourgeois background—​would seek asylum.10 Hence they recommended that states develop their legislative armoury of expulsion provisions and extradition agreements.11 Racial barriers proved even harder to overcome. Refugee protection rarely applied to people of African descent.12 Following the outbreak of the Saint-​Domingue (Haitian) revolution in 1791, the United States provided financial help to white refugees, but remained cautious about black ones. Asylum laws in Britain excluded people of colour altogether.13 Chinese migrants and refugees encountered the same colour line in America.14 France increasingly distinguished between nationality and citizenship to prevent colonial subjects in Algeria, who carried French nationality, from securing full rights.15 The first international

8 On

twentieth century cases, Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (eds.) Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 9  Dirk Moses, ‘Partitions and the Sisyphean Making of Peoples’, Refugee Watch, 46 (2015), 36–​ 50; Thomas G. Fraser, Parition in Ireland, India and Palestine, Theory and Practice (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1984); Radha Kumar, ‘The Troubled History of Partition’, Foreign Affairs, 76 (1984). 10 Renaud Morieux, ‘La prison de l’exil Les réfugiés de la Commune entre les polices françaises et anglaises (1871–​1880)’, in Marie Claude Chaléard, Caroline Douki, and Nicole Dyonet (eds.), Police et Migrants, France 1667–​1959 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001), 133–​150; Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–​ 1914, Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 11  Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations, The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–​ 1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 68. 12  Louisiana allowed certain slaves to come as a favour granted to their masters, but refused Free Blacks altogether: Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-​Domingue to New Orleans, Migrations and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 41, 43–​44. Former refugees, such as the Acadians, lobbied Louisiana to grant asylum to Free Catholic Blacks so that they could become a Catholic majority, ibid., 100. 13 Lucy Mayblin, Asylum After Empire: Colonial Legacies in the Politics of Asylum Seeking (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 14  Glen Peterson, ‘Forced Migration, Refugees and China’s Entry into the “Family of Nations”, 1861–​ 1949’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 31/​3 (2018), 274–​291. 15 Emmanuelle Saada, ‘Citoyens et sujets de l’empire français, Les Usages du droit en situation coloniale’, Genèses 53/​4 (2003), 4–​24; Emmanuelle Saada ‘Nationalité et citoyenneté en situation coloniale et post-​coloniale’, Pouvoirs, 160/​1 (2017), 113–​124.

568   Phi-Vân Nguyen law standards reproduced the same limitations.16 As a result, refugee protection seldom applied to populations displaced outside Europe. The Nansen passport, instituted in 1922, allowed the population from the Russian and Austro-​Hungarian empires to transit across a freshly redrawn Europe of nation-​states. It was only in 1928 that Christian minorities, such as the Armenians and the Assyrians, became eligible for such documentation. The rise of a human rights regime after the Second World War did not protect individuals from forced displacement either. It gave states an additional reason to organize population transfers so that, one day, territories hosting a more homogenized population would uphold these new human rights standards.17 The creation of the UNHCR in 1950 allowed individuals—​but not entire groups—​to be protected.18 Yet unlike other conventions drafted around the same time, refugee protection did not become an individual right.19 Alterations to the draft transformed it into an exceptional and discretionary power that states might choose to invoke.20 Its provisions only applied to those populations displaced by events in Europe before 1951.21 Except for a few exceptions, the UNHCR did not protect non-​Western populations elsewhere.22 And forced displacement continued to be used in counter-​ insurgency operations.23 As this implies, the international community failed to address the colonial bias of international law.24 International refugee standards did not create an effective 16 International

law found its origins in imperialism, and international organizations showed continuities with Western empires. Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 17 Dirk Moses, ‘Cutting Out the Ulcer and Washing Away the Incubus of the Past: Genocide Prevention through Population Transfer’, in Dirk Moses, Marco Moranti, and Roland Burke (eds.), Decolonization, Self-​Determination, and the Rise of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 18 Louise Holborn, Refugees: A Problem of Our Time: The Work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 1951–​1972, Vol. I (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1975); UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees 2000: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action (Geneva: UNHCR, 2000), 24. 19 Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers, Refugees and Displacement of Statecraft (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 20  Aristide Zolberg, Astri Suhrke, and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 25. 21  Vitit Muntarbhorn, The Status of Refugees in Asia (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1992). 22  The UNHCR extended its mandate to Hong Kong, after much pressure from the United States, Meredith Oyen, The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-​Chinese Relations in the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). On the failure to address a colonial bias, Glen Peterson, ‘The Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime in Postwar Asia: Evidence from China, Hong Kong and Indonesia’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 25/​3 (2012), 326–​ 343; Glen Peterson ‘Colonialism, Sovereignty and the History of the International Refugee Regime’, in Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch (eds.), Refugees in Europe, 1919–​1959, a Forty Years Crisis? (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 213–​228. 23  On the expulsion of squatters during the Malayan Emergency, see Huw Bennett, ‘“A Very Salutary Effect”: The Counter-​Terror Strategy in the Early Malayan Emergency, June 1948 to December 1949’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 32/​3 (2009), 415–​444; Choo Chin Low, ‘The Repatriation of the Chinese as a Counter-​Insurgency Policy During the Malayan Emergency’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 45/​3 (2014), 363–​392. 24  The 1969 protocol removed these restrictions but did not address the issue of discretionary power from states. The African Union recognized asylum as a right in 1969 : ‘African Union Convention Governing Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa’ (1969), http://​www.achpr.org/​inst​rume​

Refugees in Violent Decolonizations    569 set of instruments protecting vulnerable aliens. In fact, it codified a process which allowed states, by pointing to the protection of individuals, to suggest that other governments lacked legitimacy in a world substantially remade into nation-​states. Ironically, only the Cold War overcame the bias of international law standards—​albeit on a highly selective basis.25 Refugee protection helped undermine communist states’ claim of a superior democratic model and isolate insurgents in guerrilla warfare. Cold War politics, for instance, explained why the UNHCR extended its mandate to the Chinese refugees in Hong Kong.26 While the United States wanted to denounce the expansion of communism, the UNHCR understood it could secure a stronger commitment from Washington if it dealt with refugees from mainland China.27 In the following decades, pro-​Western states opened their borders to people fleeing communist regimes.28 From a military point of view, refugees became recruits to carry out covert operations in enemy territory, and forced displacements depleted the human environment in which insurgents thrived.29 The three Vietnam wars show how refugee protection was extended not only out of a greater concern for the protection of individuals, but also because it served as a useful weapon against communism.

Voting with Their Feet During the First Indochina War, population control was essential to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) because local people provided vital sources of food, information, and manpower.30 So the Viet Minh harmonized relief distribution and organized the nts/​refu​gee-​con​vent​ion/​; Bahame Tom Mukirya Nyanduga, ‘Refugee Protection Under the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa’, German Yearbook of International Law, 47 (2004), 85–​106; Marina Sharpe, The Regional Law of Refugee Protection in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 22–​23; Cristiano d’Orsi, ‘The AU Convention on Refugees and the Concept of Asylum’, Pace International Law Review Online Companion, 220 (2012), 231–​233. The Cartagena Declaration increased the number of situations to become eligible for refugee protection. ‘Cartagena Declaration on Refugees, Colloquium on the International Protection of Refugees in Central America, Mexico and Panama, 22 November 1984’, https://​www.refwo​rld.org/​docid/​3ae6b3​6ec.html; Susan Kaufman Purcell, ‘Demystifying Contradora’, Foreign Affairs, 64/​1 (1985), 74–​95; ‘The Contadora Process for Peace in Central America’, International Legal Materials, 24/​1 (1985), 182–​245. Yet none of these initiatives brought the international community to completely revise the 1951 Convention. 25 

Guy Goodwin-​Gill, ‘The Politics of Refugee Protection’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 27/​1 (2008), 8–​23. Meredith Oyen, The Diplomacy of Migration, Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-​Chinese Relations in the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 159. 27  Glen Peterson, ‘To Be or Not to Be a Refugee: The International Politics of the Hong Kong Refugee Crisis, 1949–​1955’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 36/​2 (2008), 171–​195. 28  Carl Bon Tempo, Americans at The Gate, The United States and Refugees during the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Simo Mikkonen, ‘Exploiting the Exiles: Soviet Emigrés in U.S. Cold War’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 14/​2 (2012), 98–​127; Emma Haddad, The Refugee in International Society, Between Sovereigns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 151. 29  On the Korean war, Charles Amstrong, ‘The Cultural Cold War in Korea, 1945–​1950’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 62/​1 (2003), 92, 94. After the Cuban Revolution, Hideaki Kami, Diplomacy Meets Migration, US Relations With Cuba During the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 30 Christopher E. Goscha, Vietnam: Un État Né De La Guerre, 1945–​ 1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011); Alex G. Holcombe, Mass Mobilization in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1945–​ 1960 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020). 26 

570   Phi-Vân Nguyen resettlement of evacuees (di cư, tản cư) and others displaced during the early stages of the Indochina War in July 1947.31 People could return to areas far from the enemy’s reach, after receiving identification documents and instructions on where to report. Anyone else had to resettle in buffer zones and become self-​sufficient. However, after the French imperial authorities created the Associated State of Vietnam in 1949, displacement acquired a new significance. Both Vietnamese states claimed sovereignty over Vietnam but only ruled over small patches of territory. Control over the population movement between these areas was key. Nationalist publications reported the number of persons entering, and interviewed Viet Minh officials joining, the southern nationalist zone.32 Every returnee (hồi cư) became living proof that Saigon constituted the authentic political expression of the Vietnamese nation. The representation of displaced people became more strategic after the 1954 ceasefire.33 The DRV accepted that Vietnam could be temporarily divided, and the United Kingdom and the USA imagined that civilians would regroup to the zone of their choice.34 French General Ely believed a large population movement towards the south would inflict a symbolic blow to the DRV.35 Two years before the referendum scheduled for 1956 to determine whether Vietnam should be reunified, Saigon could already claim victory in its campaign against unification. It could show that people were voting with their feet.36 With French forces preparing their final withdrawal, Paris and Saigon relied on a more direct intervention from Washington. The US Navy’s ‘Operation Passage for Freedom’ transported civilians to the south.37 CIA operatives supported black propaganda activities and dropped leaflets by plane warning that an atomic bomb might be dropped on Hanoi, or claiming that the Virgin Mary had fled to the south in the expectation that Catholics would seek refuge to protect their religious freedom.38 Ultimately, though, propaganda had 31  ‘Chỉ thị về việc thi hành kế hoạch giúp đỡ đồng bào di cư tản cư, 13-​7-​1947’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), Văn kiện Đảng [hereafter VKĐ], Tập 8 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2000), 234–​247. 32  ‘Tin đồng bào hồi cư tại miền Bắc’, Gió Việt, 25 (1951); ‘Số dân hồi cư trong tháng 6/​1950’, Gió Việt, 9 (1950); ‘Số dân trở về với chính phủ quốc gia tại Nam Việt từ khi Đức Quốc Trưởng Bảo Đại hồi Loan’, Gió Việt, 10 (1950). 33  James Cable, The Geneva Conference of 1954 on Indochina (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986); Robert F. Randle, The Settlement of the Indochinese War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). 34 Philip Catton, ‘“It Would be a Terrible Thing if We Handed These People Over to the Communists”: The Eisenhower Administration, Article 14(d), and the Origins of the Refugee Exodus from North Vietnam’, Diplomatic History, 39/​2 (2015), 331–​358; Pierre Grosser, ‘La France et l’Indochine (1953–​1956): Une “carte de visite” En “peau de chagrin”’, PhD dissertation, Institut d’études politiques, 2002). 35  Paul Ély, Mémoires. L’Indochine aans la tourmente, Tome I (Paris: Plon, 1964), 437. 36  On the importantce of numbers in giving the impression that people were voting with their feet, John Prados, ‘The Numbers Game: How Many Vietnamese Fled South in 1954?’ The VVA Veteran (The Official Voice of the Vietnam Veterans of America) January–​February 2005, http://​www.the​vete​ran.org/​ arch​ive/​The​Vete​ran/​2005​_​01/​feat​ure_​numb​ersG​ame.htm, accessed 11 November 2012; Phi-​Vân Nguyen, ‘Le Regroupement De 1954: La Signification d’un phénomène’, in Éric Guérassimoff et al. (eds.), Travail, migrations et culture au Viêt-​Nam, du début du 19e s. à nos jours (Paris: Maisonneuve Larose, 2020), 185–​204. 37  Robert B. Frankum, Operation Passage to Freedom, The United States Navy in Vietnam, 1954–​1955 (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007). 38 ‘Excerpts From Lansdale Team’s Report on Covert Vietnam Mission in ’54 and ’55: Lansdale Report Gives Details of Assistance to Diem’, The New York Times, 5 July 1971; Chester Cooper, The Lost

Refugees in Violent Decolonizations    571 minimal impact on the civilian population. The prime reason why over 800,000 people left the north lay elsewhere. Past alignments during the war, fear of retribution, and a determination to resume the fight against the DRV explained why people left.39 The displaced population did not qualify as refugees according to the 1951 Convention because the northern and southern halves of Vietnam formed two temporary zones and not sovereign countries. But Western media claimed that people had chosen ‘Free Vietnam’. Novels depicted those fleeing as victims of communist persecution.40 NGOs and religious charities provided relief to the evacuees. They were, in their view, refugees of communism. At first, the DRV did not realize the seriousness of the situation and insisted on its determination to respect the ceasefire.41 But the situation worsened. Violent confrontations erupted between civilians and DRV authorities. Between 12 and 17 October 1954, the French navy rescued 700 Catholics on small river junks from the province of Thanh Hóa to the south of the port of Haiphong.42 In February 1955, the International Control Commission (ICC), responsible for monitoring the ceasefire, investigated an incident in the village of Ba Làng, where the North Vietnamese army had opened fire on civilians barricaded in their church.43 Worse yet, an even broader coalition now stood against Hanoi. In December 1954, three months after the US-​led anti-​communist regional alliance, the South East Asian Treaty Organization, was established, US General Collins arrived in Saigon.44 Cardinal Spellman’s

Crusade: America in Vietnam (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co, 1970); Edward G. Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars, an American Mission to Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 39 Oral

interviews showed that northern refugees today have no memory of these propaganda messages: Peter Hansen, ‘The Virgin Heads South: Northern Catholic Refugees in South Vietnam, 1954–​ 1964,’ PhD dissertation, Melbourne College of Divinity, 2008. On the northern refugees, Peter Hansen, ‘Bắc Di Cư: Catholic Refugees from the North of Vietnam, and Their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954–​1959’, The Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 4/​3 (2009), 173–​211. Many parishes had transitioned from an alliance with the Viet Minh to an overt confrontation, see Claire Thị Liên Trần, ‘Les catholiques vietnamiens pendant la guerre d’indépendance (1945–​ 1954) entre la reconquête coloniale et la résistance communiste’, PhD dissertation, Institut d’études politiques, 1996. Ronald H. Spector, ‘Phat Diem: Nationalism, Religion, and Identity in the Franco-​Viet Minh War’, Journal of Cold War Studies, 15/​3 (2013), 34–​46. On Catholic refugees, see Phi-​Vân Nguyen, ‘Fighting the First Indochina War Again? Catholic Refugees in South Vietnam, 1954–​1959’, SOJOURN, 31/​1 (2016), 207–​246. 40  Thomas A. Dooley, Deliver Us from Evil (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1956). In American press and cultural outlets, Seth Jacobs, America’s Miracle Man in Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem, Religion, Race and U.S. Intervention in Southeast Asia, 1950–​1957 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 41  ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư, về việc chấp hành lệnh đình chiến, 30-​7-​1954’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 15 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2001), 248–​50. ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư về việc đấu tranh chống Pháp và bọn Ngô Đình Diệm dụ dỗ và bắt ép một số đồng bào ta vào miền Nam, 5-​9-​1954,’ in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 15 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2001), 263–​270. For an analysis of Hanoi’s assessment of peace prospects in 1954 and 1955, Pierre Asselin, ‘Choosing Peace, Hanoi and the Geneva Agreement on Vietnam, 1954–​1955’, The Journal of Cold War Studies, 9/​2 (2007), 95–​126. 42  Bernard Broussole and Lucien Provençal, ‘L’évacuation des catholiques du Tonkin en 1954–​1955’, Bulletin de l’Association amicale santé navale et d’Outremer, 125 (2013), 24–​30. 43 Service historique de l’Armée de terre/​ 10H/​967, ‘Affaire Ba Lang, Nom des personnes et des chrétientés qui avaient déjà fait leur demande aux autorités locales V.N. et n’avaient pas encore la réponse lorsque nous avons quitté Vinh, le 20 décembre 1954’. 44  ‘Chỉ thị của ban chấp hành trung ương, truyên tuyền, vận động, đẩy mạnh đấu tranh chống đề quốc Mỹ can thiệp vào Đông Dương và phá hoại Hiệp định đình chiến, 17/​12/​1954’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 15 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2001), 409–​419.

572   Phi-Vân Nguyen visit in early 1955 also suggested that Western Catholics would focus still more heavily on alleged attacks on refugees instigated by the Hanoi regime.45 The departure of civilians from northern Vietnam had grave implications. The more skilled people leaving for the south, the stronger the State of Vietnam became, and the greater the number of votes that would count in its favour in a future referendum.46 Yet ‘spreading lies’ about the DRV proved more damaging in the short term. It weakened the DRV’s standing within the international community.47 It also undermined its ability to carry out the land reform that was its central policy objective at the time.48 Thus, the weaponization of refugee movements constituted a major attack on the regime itself. It sapped the DRV’s legitimacy and compromised the revolution’s chances of success. According to the ruling Vietnamese communist party, Catholic refugees were an easy prey for foreign propaganda. The party criticized attempts to use a portrait of the Virgin Mary, her eyes blinking and hands outstretched to the faithful coming to pray, as a sign that she was leaving for the south.49 They believed Catholics were so superstitious that they feared damnation if they did not follow her.50 Hence, the party took several measures to counter this offensive, including some targeting of Catholic communities. Besides organizing photo opportunities, an information campaign, and calls for a national coalition, the party organized prayers in all communities from which the priest had departed. Religious artefacts, which had been damaged or removed when people fled to the south, were either restored or replaced.51

45  ‘Điện của ban bí thư gửi xứ ủy Nam Bộ và Liên khu ủy V, về chống âm mưu địch dụ dỗ và cưỡng ép giáo dân di cư vào Nam’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 16 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2002), 52–​55. On instructions denouncing the initiatives of ‘reactionary members in the international Catholic community’, ‘Chỉ thị của bộ chính trị số 07-​CT/​TW Đẩy mạnh đấu tranh phá âm mưu mới của địch trong việc dụ dỗ và cưỡng ép giáo dân di cư vào Nam’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 16 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2002), 70. On Spellman’s visit and other Catholic communities’ support of Vietnamese refugees, Phi-​Vân Nguyen, ‘Victims of Atheist Persecution, Catholic Solidarity and Refugee Protection in Vietnam 1954–​ 1958’, in Peter Van der Veer and Birgit Meier (eds.) Refugees and Religions. Ethnographic Studies of Global Trajectories (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), 51–​67. 46  ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư, về việc đấu tranh chống Pháp và bọn Ngô Đình Diệm dụ dỗ và bắt ép một số đồng bào ta vào miền Nam, 5-​9-​1954’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 15 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2001), 263–​270. 47  ‘Điện của ban bí thư gửi xứ ủy Nam Bộ và liên khu ủy V, về chống âm mưu địch dụ dỗ và cưỡng ép giáo dân di cư vào Nam’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 16 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2002), 53. 48  ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư số 16-​CT/​T W Tăng cường chỉ đạo tích cực đấu tranh phá âm mưu địch cưỡng ép và dụ dỗ giáo dân di cư, 21/​4/​1955’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 16 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2002), 268–​276. 49  ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư về việc đối phó với âm mưu của địch lừa phỉnh và áp bức đồng bào công giáo di cư vào Nam, 6-​11-​1954’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 15 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2001), 361–​369. 50  Ibid., 362. 51  On instructions to reach out to Catholics that are ‘progressive or not too reactionary’, ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư về việc đối phó với âm mưu của địch lừa phỉnh và áp bức đồng bào công giáo di cư vào Nam, 6-​11-​1954’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 15 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2001), 365. On organizing prayers, ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư về việc tổ chức ngày lễ Noên cho đồng bào công giáo, 14/​12/​1954’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 15 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2001), 403–​405. On Easter, ‘Thông tư của ban bí thư số 19-​TT/​TW về việc tổ chức lễ Phúc sinh cho đồng bào công giáo và đề phòng địch lời dụng dịp này để dụ dỗ cưỡng ép đồng bào di cư, 24/​3/​1955’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 16 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2002), 234–​236.

Refugees in Violent Decolonizations    573 The central committee also ramped up its surveillance. Anyone violating its instructions would be punished. Local cells established in Catholic communities had to report every seven days. Yet, while the party’s urge to increase the number of cadres sent to Catholic communities showed its determination to stop the haemorrhage, it also revealed that the battle over the representation of the refugees’ situation was being lost.52 Ho Chi Minh had embodied the goal of a nationalist struggle against colonial rule. But the party did not fully master how population movements affected the legitimacy of the nascent nation-​state.

Nation-​Building and Deconstruction The conflicting representations of population displacement at the end of the Indochina War highlighted the connection between authorities’ ability to care for nationals and claims to sovereignty. Belligerents paid particular attention to population resettlement, both in their own nation-​building efforts, and in sabotaging the enemy’s attempts to create a legitimate government. The DRV tried to counter the terrible publicity arising from the 1954 ceasefire’s evacuation to the south by offering effective protection to the 150,000 regrouped civilians (tập kết ra Bắc) who had gone northwards to join the DRV.53 Their arrival offered the Hanoi regime an opportunity to demonstrate its ability to care for its new citizens. A specialist governmental committee resettled them.54 In anticipation of eventual reunification, in subsequent years the same institution recruited agents to reinfiltrate southern Vietnam and create an administrative apparatus for the south.55 Saigon’s exploitation of population movements for economic and military purposes was far more ambitious. The Republic of Vietnam resettled its refugee arrivals in over 300 villages, assisted by the United States, NGOs, think tanks, and international organizations.56 52  The party added 2,700 to the 1,500 existing cadres, reaching a total of 4,000 cadres, ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư số 16-​CT/​TW’, 274. For earlier announcement of new cadres sent to Catholic communities, ‘Chỉ thị của bộ chính trị số 07-​CT’, 67–​79. ‘Trung ương gửi các Liên khu ủy, 20/​3/​1955’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 16 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2002), 232–​233. 53  Only indispensable cadres would have to regroup to the north, ‘Chỉ thị của ban bí thư về việc đón tiếp bộ đội, thương bình, một số cán bộ và đồng bào miền Nam ra Bắc, 31-​8-​1954’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 15 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2001), 259–​262. On the regroupees, Joseph Zasloff, ‘Political Motivation of the Viet Cong: The Vietminh Regroupees’, RAND Memorandum RM-​4703/​2-​ISA/​ARPA (Santa Monica: RAND, 1965). 54  Thị Xuân Yến Phan, Ban thống nhất trung ương trong cuộc kháng chiến chống Mỹ cứu nước (1954–​ 1975) (T.P. Hồ Chí Minh: NXB tổng hợp, 2011). 55  David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War, Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta 1930–​ 1975, Concise Edition (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003). 56  Hansen, ‘The Virgin Heads South’. Jason A. Picard ‘“Fertile Lands Await”, The Promise and Pitfalls of Directed Resettlement, 1954–​1959’, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 11/​3–​4 (2016), 58–​102. On US involvement in this resettlement, James M. Carter, Inventing Vietnam, The United States and State Building, 1954–​1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Seth Jacobs, Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and The Origins of the America’s War in Vietnam (Lanham: Roman & Littlefield, 2006). On NGOs and think tanks, Jessica Elkind, Aid Under Fire, Nation Building and the Vietnam War (Lexington: Unviersity Press of Kentucky, 2016); Delia T. Pergande, ‘Private Voluntary Aid and Nation Building in South Vietnam: The Humanitatian Politics of CARE, 1954–​1961’, Peace and Change, 27/​2

574   Phi-Vân Nguyen These village sites became the perfect laboratory for economic modernization initiatives, which, it was believed, would help contain communist expansion and provide exemplars of poverty relief to the Third World.57 The resettlement of refugees also served pacification purposes. Many resettled alongside demobilized soldiers in areas which had been under Viet Minh control before 1954.58 One such village was headed by Father Nguyễn Lạc Hóa, who had twice fled communism, first from China and then from northern Vietnam. He convinced Saigon President Ngô Đình Diệm to let him head a village, whose paramilitary group, composed of other Chinese and Nùng refugees, became the subject of a short training film for the US Army.59 Later, the consolidation of the agrovilles and strategic hamlets integrated these economic and military objectives further.60 The concentration of the rural population in agrovilles facilitated the distribution of goods and services. When the communist insurgency resumed in late 1959, previous experience of French and British counter-​insurrection in Indochina, Algeria, and Malaysia was used to transform these rural centres into strategic hamlets, adding fortifications and surveillance measures to these population clusters.61 The Communist Party strongly reacted to this attempt to gather, relocate, or capture the people (gom dân, dồn dân, nắm lại dân). Eliminating strategic hamlets became one of the party’s top priorities for 1962.62 Party cadres were warned that the destruction of strategic hamlets was not an end in itself. It was also essential to ensure they could ‘keep the population and keep the resources’ under control after the hamlets were destroyed.63 Winning popular allegiance was therefore key for both sides in the war. After the intervention of American ground forces in 1965, refugee resettlement remained crucial. The Honolulu conference of US and South Vietnamese governmental leaders in February 1966 proved a turning point, after which the US military command considered refugees an asset, rather than a burden in their war effort. The US Army and Saigon (2002), 165–​197; John Ernst, Forging a Fateful Alliance: Michigan State University and the Vietnam War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998). 57  Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On divisions about how to carry out this economic modernization in Vietnam, Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). On President Ngô Đình Diệm’s own political vision, Edward Miller, Misalliance, Ngo Dinh Diem, The United States and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 58  Phi-​Vân Nguyen, ‘Les Résidus de la guerre, La Mobilisation des réfugiés du nord pour un Vietnam non-​communiste, 1954–​1965’, PhD dissertaion, Université du Québec à Montréal, 2015. 59 CARE Archives/​471. ‘Binh Hung: A Counter-​ Guerrilla Case-​ Study By Edward Lansdale, 1 February 1961’. 60  Philip Catton, Diem’s Final Failure: Prelude to America’s War in Vietnam (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002). 61 Miller, Misalliance; Elie Tenenbaum, Partisans et centurions, Une Histoire de la guerre irrégulière au XXe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2018). 62  ‘Nghị quyết hội nghị bộ chính trị về tình hình, phương hướng và nhiệm vụ công tác trước mắt của cách mạng miền Nam, 10/​12/​1962’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 23 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2002), 812–​838. 63  ‘Biên bản Hội nghị anh Trọng [Trung ương cục miền Nam], Nghiên cứu và đặt kế hoạch thực hiện nghị quyết anh Tư [Trung ương đảng lao động Việt Nam], từ 20/​4 đến 5/​5/​1962’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 23 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2002), 851–​906; ‘Nghị quyết của Trung ương cục miền Nam về công tác chống, phá khu, ấp chiến lược, gom dân, 7-​1963’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 24 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2003), 912.

Refugees in Violent Decolonizations    575 continued to use representations of population movements to undermine its opponents’ claims that it represented the will of the population. Yet it also engineered population movements to relocate the population away from communist insurgents.64 Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington even praised the benefits of aerial bombing as an efficient way to bring the population closer to the benefits of modern urban life, drawing them away from the egalitarian chimera of communism.65 Almost a third of the population of southern Vietnam—​some sixteen million people—​received assistance from the government as ‘refugees of communism’.66 Civilians working for the main pacification initiative, the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), often realized the population they resettled had been forcibly displaced by Vietnamese, American, or South Korean troops, rather than by communist attacks. The number of dispalced persons not only revealed the destruction caused by the war. It also uncovered the contradictions within Washington’s and Saigon’s strategies. Hanoi responded decisively to these attempts to win the population over. Its failure to win the support from the entire population or to gain recognition for its legitimacy at the negotiation table inspired a new and more direct initiative. On 8 June 1969, it created the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) in southern Vietnam and issued instructions on conquering people (giành dân), identifying effective population control as the ‘cornerstone’ of any victory.67 Ironically, by creating an alternate government in the south, the DRV did the same as France when it had established the Associated State of Vietnam twenty years earlier in 1949. Creating a state and seizing control over the population was the fastest way to achieve, by force, national sovereignty. As this indicates, population displacement, refugee communities, and the attendant focus on development and sovereign control were not a mere consequence of the armed conflict. They were central to the conduct of war in Vietnam.

The War After the War In April 1975, the Vietnamese communists finally achieved the reunification of Vietnam. The country slid into another armed conflict three years later in what scholars have dubbed the Third Indochina War.68 But refugee flows remind us that there was yet another war after this latest war. This time, the United States could rely on new partners, including the UN, to carry out its counter-​insurgency campaign. After its final withdrawal in 1975, the United States used Prisoners of War (POWs), Missing in Action (MIA), and the flight of refugees as bargaining chips to refuse the normalization of relations with Vietnam, avoiding payment of the $3.25 billion dollars that 64  Sam

Vong, ‘“Assets of War”: Strategic Displacements, Population Movements, and the Uses of Refugees During the Vietnam War, 1965–​1973’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 39/​3 (2020), 75–​100. 65  Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Bases of Accommodation’, Foreign Affairs, 46 (1968), 642–​656. 66 US Senate Ninety First Congress, ‘Hearings of the Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected With Refugees and Escapees of the Committee on the Judiciary, 24 and 25 June 1969’. 67  ‘Nghị quyết Hội nghị Khu ủy V lần thứ chín, về công tác giành dân vùng ven và giữ dân xây dựng vùng giải phóng ở nông thôn, 4/​1969’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 26 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2004). 68  For the first major historical analysis of this confrontation, see Nayan Chanda, Brother Enemy: The War After the War (New York: Harcourt Publishing, 1986).

576   Phi-Vân Nguyen President Nixon had promised in 1973.69 Other countries also realized that Vietnam’s refugee crisis could be exploited to punish the DRV. China resented Hanoi for concluding a treaty of friendship and cooperation with Moscow. Worse yet, Vietnam’s December 1978 invasion of Cambodia, its overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in Phnom Penh, and subsequent occupation of the country signalled the beginning of Soviet expansionism on China’s southern flank.70 China carried out a limited military campaign in Vietnam’s northern highlands in response, but with no success. Hanoi did not abrogate its alliance with the Soviet Union. Nor did it withdraw its troops from Cambodia. As a result, China asked the UN Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, to do everything in his power to end the occupation of Cambodia. All this coincided with a humanitarian crisis in South East Asia, to which publics around the world responded by calling on their governments to protect the ‘boat people’.71 Kurt Waldheim proved attentive to the concerns of humanitarian organizations, the United States, China, and Britain’s newly elected Thatcher government. He organized a conference on South East Asian refugees, which brought together over sixty nations in July 1979.72 Officially, the meeting outlined measures with the unfolding refugee crisis, its major result being to coordinate temporary asylum in neighbouring countries, such as Thailand and Malaysia, with provision for permanent resettlement in third countries.73 But the conference also served political objectives. US, Chinese, and British representatives variously blamed Vietnam for the crisis and the worsening political instability in the region.74 They did not hesitate to compare Vietnam’s expansionism to the Nazis’ conquest of Europe and its treatment of the Jewish population.75 Sustained international concentration on the protection of South East Asian refugees maintained the hostile pressure on Hanoi as long as Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia. Vietnam became the only country that was asked to prevent the illegal departure of its citizens and implement an Orderly Departure Program.76 In contrast, any person 69  H. Bruce Franklin, ‘Missing in Action in the Twenty-​First Century’, in Scott Laderman and Edwin Martini (eds.), Four Decades On: Vietnam, the United States and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 259–​296. 70  Odd Arne Westad and Sophie Quinn-​ Judge (eds.), The Third Indochina War: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–​1979 (London: Frank Cass, 2006). 71 Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge, The Indochinese Exodus and International Response (New York: Zed Books, 1998); Louis A. Wiesner, Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-​Nam, 1954–​1975 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). 72  Phi-​Vân Nguyen, ‘The Politics of the Southeast Asian Refugee Crisis, 1978–​1979’, The Journal of Cold War Studies (forthcoming). 73  UN/​ Kurt Waldheim Files/​S-​0901/​0007/​02, ‘United Nations Press Release Meeting on Refugees and Displaced Persons in Southeast Asia Concludes in Geneva with Remarks by Secretary-​General Kurt Waldheim, 21 July 1979’. 74  UN/​ Kurt Waldheim Files/​S-​0987/​0009/​17, ‘Press Release, Secretary-​General Opens Meeting on Refugees and Displaced Persons in South-​East Asia, 20 July 1979’. UN/​Kurt Waldheim Files/​S-​0901/​ 0007/​02, ‘United Nations Press Release Meeting on Refugees and Displaced Persons in Southeast Asia Hears 15 Statements at Saturday Morning Session, 21 July 1979’, UN/​Kurt Waldheim Files/​S-​0901/​0007/​ 02, ‘United Nations Press Release Meeting on Refugees and Displaced Persons in Southeast Asia Hears More Statements, 20 July 1979’. 75  Apart from Walter Mondale’s speech in the previous source, see China’s statement at the ECOSOC meeting, UNHCR/​F11/​2/​39_​391_​46_​CHI, ‘Note for the file, ECOSOC Second Regular Session 1979, Reference of interest to the UNHCR in the General Debate’. 76 Judith Kumin, ‘Orderly Departure from Vietnam: Cold War Anomaly or Humanitarian Innovation?’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 27/​1 (2008), 104–​117.

Refugees in Violent Decolonizations    577 reaching special processing centres across South East Asia became a de facto refugee and did not need to prove that they faced the threat of persecution to justify their refugee status.77 This gave the impression that the Vietnamese regime constituted the only source of danger—​ and not poverty, decades of war, and the refusal of other states to open their borders—​and that it was so threatening that virtually anyone leaving the region was identified as a victim of persecution. This arrangement remained unchanged, although the numbers of refugees declined. Twice in the 1980s the Reagan administration increased or maintained the resettlement quotas despite concerns, within Congress, that many persons obtaining asylum could be economic migrants.78 Hanoi reacted strongly to this diplomatic offensive. According to official documents, the enemy was carrying out a psychological war and taking advantage of Vietnam’s poverty to divide the population.79 The party meanwhile adopted new protocols when dealing with foreign delegations and international officers within Vietnam.80 In 1981, measures to prevent ‘people fleeing overseas’ included information campaigns, surveillance of the transportation of gold and gasoline, and the punishment of smugglers and individuals inciting departure.81 Hanoi realized that this offensive involved both traditional enemies, such as Washington, and a larger coalition motivated by humanitarian concerns. The consequences were certainly far-​reaching. Aside from the adverse impact on Vietnam’s international reputation, its ability to carry out a socialist revolution was impaired. Southerners were not the only ones fleeing. People in the north, who had lived with the revolution for over twenty years, also departed. Counter-​insurgency resumed in the Indochinese peninsula as well. Thailand feared that the hundreds of thousands pouring across its eastern border could cause instability or provoke a secession.82 The Khmer Rouge, ousted from power but still fighting a guerrilla war, used refugee camps to obtain shelter, food, and armaments.83 Refugee camps formed non-​sovereign enclaves within Thai territory and became recruiting grounds or training camps for the Khmer Rouge.84 Humanitarian organizations had little choice but to work 77 This expression comes from Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics, A Perilous Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 179. 78  In 1984, Washington raised the quota by 1,000: ‘U.S. Agrees to Accept More Vietnam Refugees’, The New York Times, 27 June 1984. The following year, despite criticism from the Congress, the White House maintained the same quotas: United States Ninety-​Ninth Congress, ‘U.S. Refugee Program in Southeast Asia: 1985, Appendix: Refugee and Migration Problems in Southeast Asia: 1984’. B. Gwertzman, ‘The Debt to the Indochinese Is Becoming a Fiscal Drain’, The New York Times, 3 March 1985. 79  ‘Thông tri của Ban bí thư số 95-​T T/​T W về việc chống chiến tranh tâm lý của địch, 23/​8/​1979’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 40 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2005), 411–​413. 80  On foreign delegations, ‘Thông tri của Ban bí thư số 99-​T T/​T W về việc cản tiến công tác đón tiếp các đoàn khách nước ngoài vào thăm Việt Nam, 27/​10/​1979’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 40 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2005), 471–​474. 81  ‘Chỉ thị của Ban bí thư số 106-​CT/​T W về việc ngăn chặn người trốn ra nước ngoài, 22/​4/​1981’, in ĐCSVN (ed.), VKĐ, Tập 42 (Hà Nội: NXBCTQG, 2005), 174–​177. 82 William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust, and Modern Conscience (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984). 83  Adam Roberts, ‘Refugees and Military Intervention’, in Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher (eds.), Refugees in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 84  Stephen John Stedman and Fred Tanner (eds.), Refugee Manipulation: War, Politics, and the Abuse of Human Suffering (Washington D.C: Brookings Institution, 2003). Roberts, ‘Refugees and Military Intervention’.

578   Phi-Vân Nguyen with military groups, which were the only working authorities within these camps. In private, UNHCR officers also wondered whether they had become travel agents. Some did not understand why people leaving Indochina would be resettled, whereas Africans and Latin Americans would have to prove that they had a well-​founded fear of persecution.85 It was only when Vietnam withdrew from Cambodia in 1989 that the UN convened another conference to end the system of refugee protection put in place a decade earlier.86 After May 1989, people reaching the special processing centres had to demonstrate that they had been a victim of persecution. Since Vietnam had ended its occupation of Cambodia, there was no reason to consider Indochinese as de facto refugees anymore.

Conclusion States have always devised policies towards their nationals resident both within and beyond their political borders.87 But in the context of violent decolonization, ruling over nationals became crucial. Control over the population influenced the viability of insurgencies and allowed insurgent authorities, in the absence of a political settlement, to impose national sovereignty. And the representation of population movements, whether hostile or favourable, affected a state’s legitimacy. Population movements were therefore key to the making and unmaking of a nation. Three other conclusions emerge from this overview. First, the timing of refugee protection was fundamental. Resettlement and other economic and social aspects of refugee protection proved crucial as the armed conflict was being fought. But representations of refugee flows became critical after the armed struggle came to an end. Arguments about refugee flows and the blame games they involved show that war continued by other means. Second, the instrumentalization of humanitarian intervention for political purposes not only reveals the flaws of refugee protection standards, but also shows how international organizations and humanitarian movements have tended to reinforce, whether unconsciously or reluctantly, a counter-​insurgency offensive. After 1979, as we have seen, South East Asian refugees became unwitting agents of the political campaigns led by the United States and China to ostracize Vietnam in the 1980s. The use of humanitarian assistance in global counter-​insurgency initiatives is not unique to Vietnam. But the protection of the Indochinese refugees was so broad and long-​lasting that it pushed the logic of refugee protection to the limit. Both policy-​makers and humanitarian officers wondered if the definition of a refugee was still useful.

85 Pierre

Jambor, ‘Voluntary Repatriation of the Indochinese Refugees’, Refuge, 9/​ 3 (1990), 7–​ 9; Alexander Casella, ‘Managing the “Boat People” Crisis: The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees’, International Peace Institute, October 2016, https://​ssrn.com/​abstr​act=​2893​267, accessed 7 July 2018. 86 Charles Keely, ‘The International Refugee Regime(s): The End of the Cold War Matters’, International Migration Review, 35/​1 (2001), 303–​314. 87 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998); Rogers Brubaker and Kim Jaeeun, ‘Transborder Membership Politics in Germany and Korea’, European Journal of Sociology, 52/​1 (2011), 21–​75.

Refugees in Violent Decolonizations    579 Finally, refugee protection has many moving parts, which include different interests and multiple actors. Another important aspect, which remains to be analysed, is how displaced populations experience and make use of this instrumentalization to pursue their own interests.

Select Bibliography Asselin, Pierre, ‘Choosing Peace, Hanoi and the Geneva Agreement on Vietnam, 1954–​1955’, The Journal of Cold War Studies, 9/​2 (2007), 95–​126. Casella, Alexander, ‘Managing the “Boat People” Crisis: The Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees’, International Peace Institute, October 2016, https://​ssrn.com/​abstr​ act=​2893​267, accessed 7 July 2018. Goodwin-​Gill, Guy, ‘The Politics of Refugee Protection’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 27/​1 (2008), 8–​23. Haddad, Emma, The Refugee in International Society, Between Sovereigns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 151. Hansen, Peter, ‘Bắc Di Cư: Catholic Refugees from the North of Vietnam, and Their Role in the Southern Republic, 1954–​1959’, The Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 4/​3 (2009), 173–​211. Kumin, Judith, ‘Orderly Departure from Vietnam: Cold War Anomaly or Humanitarian Innovation?’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 27/​1 (2008), 104–​117. Nguyen, Phi-​Vân, ‘Le Regroupement De 1954: La Signification d’un phénomène’, in Éric Guérassimoff, Thi Phuong Ngoc Nguyen, and Emmanuel Poisson, eds., Travail, migrations et culture au Viêt-​Nam, du début du 19e s. à nos jours (Paris: Maisonneuve Larose, 2020), 185–​204. Oyen, Meredith, The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S.-​ Chinese Relations in the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). Peterson, Glen, ‘The Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime in Postwar Asia: Evidence From China, Hong Kong and Indonesia’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 25/​3 (2012), 326–​343. Robinson, Courtland, Terms of Refuge, The Indochinese Exodus and International Response (New York: Zed Books, 1998). Trần, Claire Thị Liên, ‘Les catholiques vietnamiens pendant la guerre d’indépendance (1945–​ 1954) entre la reconquête coloniale et la résistance communiste’ (PhD dissertation, Institut d’études politiques, 1996). Wiesner, Louis A., Victims and Survivors: Displaced Persons and Other War Victims in Viet-​ Nam, 1954–​1975 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988).

Chapter 30

Ind onesian St rat e g i c Reset tlem e nt a nd Dev el opment P ol i c i e s i n East T i mor Christian Gerlach There are discussions as to whether ‘development’ is something violent, and yet scholars of violence and scholars of development talk too little to each other. This chapter offers an example of what happens if one makes the connection. In the twentieth century, dozens of countries were devastated by brutal anti-​guerrilla campaigns combined with forced resettlement, establishing pro-​government militias, and offers of development. Globally, at least four million people died and over twenty million lost their homes in the process. Such policies were pursued by colonial and post-​colonial regimes, by old empires, new imperialists and a variety of nation-​states, by right-​wing authoritarian, bourgeois-​democratic, and communist-​led systems.1 But largely this was about capitalist societies, and in many cases it happened in the attempt to defeat and persecute communist or other leftist insurgencies.2 This chapter is about a case of counter-​insurgency that claimed a very high number of lives. However, the Indonesian activities in occupied and annexed East Timor included aspects of development, not only rhetorically but also in terms of practices. This raises the questions central to this chapter: What relationships were there between development and violence in Indonesian East Timor? What made East Timor an especially grave example of counter-​insurgency? And how did Indonesian policies in East Timor compare to other hunger-​related practices in the history of the Republic of Indonesia? In light of the resultant

1  See Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century World (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177–​234; Patricia Colombo, ‘Réménagements territoriaux, contrôle des populations et stratégies contre-​insurrectionelles’, Critique internationale, 79 (2018), 9–​24. 2  See Christian Gerlach, ‘Introduction’, in Christian Gerlach and Clemens Six (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Anti-​Communist Persecutions (Basingstoke et al.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 23–​25.

Indonesian Strategic Resettlement    581 findings, does Indonesian action in East Timor appear distinctively colonial, or imperial, or should it rather be placed in a tradition of domestic policies? These questions will be approached through the following steps. After providing an overview of the Indonesian occupation and violence in East Timor, the chapter will discuss how far the evolution in East Timor fits into the general picture of Indonesian policies concerning three issues: hunger, agriculture, and resettlement. Briefly touching upon other aspects of Indonesian development strategies in East Timor, the chapter attempts to provide an overall picture of socio-​economic conditions in the province. This is part of my larger effort to promote a social history of mass violence; to explore its social side, if you want.3 What is beyond the scope of this article—​ which concentrates on reconstructing Indonesian policies and their impact, and less on local agency—​is to place the period of 1975–​1999 within the longer-​term history of East Timor. Such a perspective would include other experiences of mass violence, in particular the Portuguese suppression of the 1911–​1912 uprising, plus the Japanese repression of resistance against their occupation between 1942 and 1945, both of which caused very substantial losses among the population, and, finally, endemic violence in Timor-​Leste after 1999.4 This text pulls together literature from development studies and genocide studies. In addition, published Indonesian sources, survivor reports, and archival documents from Australia and the USA have been used, which were based on a variety of contacts by diplomats with insurgents, refugees, missionaries, aid workers, Indonesian officers, and travellers, mirroring multiple perspectives.

Indonesian Occupation and Violence in East Timor Indonesian troops invaded East Timor in December 1975 after the Portuguese colonialists had given up the province, where a leftist independence movement called FRETILIN had prevailed in several months of violent struggle within the population. Indonesia annexed East Timor as its twenty-​seventh province in July 1976 but faced great difficulties in defeating the FRETILIN insurgents and bringing all of the area, especially the mountainous countryside, under its control. Basically there were eight years of substantial military action until 1983, and the East Timorese political struggle for independence never fully ceased until 1999, when about 80% of the population voted for independence in a consultative plebiscite and Indonesian troops and authorities retreated. For a long time, the Indonesian regime enjoyed the support of powerful states such as the USA, Australia, and various Western European governments.

3 

See Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies. of Japanese rule can be found in accounts collected in Michele Turner, Telling: East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942–​1992 (Kensington: New South West University Press, 1992). Douglas Kammen’s Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015) attempts a long-​term local study of violence. 4  Impressions

582   Christian Gerlach The Indonesian invasion took place in December 1975, while US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were still on their return flight from a visit to Jakarta. As secret documents show, they had advised Suharto during that visit that, if he wanted to invade, he should enact it swiftly (notably, in order to prevent Congress from cutting off US ‘aid’ for Indonesia), but that operations should start only after their return. As Kissinger phrased it: ‘It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly, we would be able to influence the reaction in America if whatever happens happens after our return’.5 There had actually been Indonesian–​US contact about the issue of an Indonesian takeover for about a year. US policy concerning an Indonesian takeover was mainly influenced by consideration of Indonesian, Portuguese, and Australian, but not necessarily East Timorese, interests.6 Only during 1979, after a sweep through the territory had begun in earnest and much advanced in 1978, did the Indonesians bring more than half of the population under their control, trying to separate it from the insurgents.7 East Timorese were first herded into at least 139 camps, so-​called reception centres, often located around the principal towns,8 and then, between 1979 and the mid-​1980s, moved to 442 strategic villages. Before the invasion, people had lived in over 1,700 settlements.9 This was meant to change the whole social structure. Some reports also held that not all people stayed in such villages and centres, or either were choosing to avoid them by moving on to towns. An Indonesian source noted that there were 36,000 refugees in Dili in 1977.10

5  U.S. Embassy Jakarta to Kissinger, 6 December 1975 (secret), Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, NSA, Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific, Box Indonesia: State Department Telegrams from SECSTATE-​NODIS (3). See also secret State Department telegram, 4 December 1975, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, NSA, Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific, Box 6, Indonesia (4); Robinson to State Department, 4 December 1975, ibid.; Barnes to Snowcroft, 23 October 1975, ibid., Indonesia (3); telegram Ingersoll to Kissinger, 7 December 1975, ibid., (5). In retrospect, good advice from the Ford administration was that the Indonesians should have invaded secretly, without announcing it, so nobody would have noticed: see secret memo Barnes for Snowcroft, 19 December 1975, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, NSA, Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific, Box 6, Indonesia (6). See also Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 91–​107, using different documentation. 6  This was especially Ambassador Newsom’s position. See Memos by W. Smyser for Kissinger, 30 December 1974 and 4 March 1975, both Top Secret/​Sensitive/​Eyes Only, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, NSA, Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific, Box 1, Indonesia (1); Kissinger to U.S. Embassy Jakarta, 9 June 1975, ‘Ford/​Suharto Discussions, July 5’, secret, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, NSA, Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific, Box Indonesia: State Department Telegrams from SECSTATE-​NODIS; see also National Security Council, memo Quinn for Snowcroft, 4 December 1975 (Secret/​Sensitive), Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, NSA, Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific, Box 6, Indonesia (4). 7  See John Taylor, East Timor: The Price of Freedom (London et al.: Zed, 1999), 88–​90. 8  See the 2006 report by the Commission for Reception for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR), chap. 7.3, https://​www.etan.org/​news/​2006/​cavr.htm, accessed 22 May 2023, 61. 9  See Constâncio Pinto and Matthew Jardine, East Timor’s Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1997), 260, n. 3. 10 See undated note by Lloyd, ‘East Timor’ (c.1980), with reference to a Catholic Relief Service member’s report, Australian National Archive, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 18. For Dili, see ‘The Development of East Timore Province’, (1977), ANA, M4091/​46, 218.

Indonesian Strategic Resettlement    583 More than half of the population of East Timor was displaced at some point in the 1970s (and again many more in 1998–​1999).11 An independent team of researchers found in 2003 that earlier figures in circulation that estimated 200,000 victims had been exaggerated, and that slightly more than 100,000 had lost their lives as a result of the occupation, 18,600 through direct killings and an overwhelming majority of the victims, 84,200, through excess deaths from hunger and disease, most of them prior to 1980.12 However, these losses were still enormous if one keeps in mind the original population of 600,000–​700,000; over 10% died, even if one takes births between 1976 and 1999 into account. Indonesian politicians and military showed little concern. The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Jakarta’s Foreign Minister Adam Malik, a former chairman of the UN General Assembly, on 5 April 1977: ‘Fifty thousand people or maybe 80,000 might have been killed during the war in Timor . . . Then what is the big fuss?’13 The direct killings came about in massacres at Dili and in a number of villages, through aerial bombings, in battle and when insurgents were slaughtered upon capture, through torture, and with many individual arbitrary murders of civilians. Almost anybody could become a target, but fatalities were especially high among men, and the Chinese minority in Dili was also strongly affected.14 As mentioned before, organized hunger and disease killed far more people, many of them infant children, elderly people, and women—​as was the case in many other cases of anti-​ guerrilla warfare-​cum-​resettlement.15 Appropriately, I shall dwell more on how these deaths came about. They had two major sources, which is quite clear from survivor memories: there were the victims among the large number of civilian refugees in the mountains and bush, suffering from food denial strategies such as destroying food stores and crops, and among those in the resettlement camps and villages deprived of their livelihood—​enough farming land in particular—​who received insufficient outside supplies, often arbitrarily and seemingly by accident.16 The peak of the famine was in 1978–​1979, but during 1982 there was a second one after new mass resettlements were enacted. Conditions were worst in the months after people were first brought under Indonesian rule, that is, during their first months in a camp and then again in their first months in a strategic village.17 Two nutritionists of the 11 See The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-​ Leste, 1974–​1999. A Report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group to the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation of Timor-​ Leste (Romesh Silva and Patrick Ball), 2006, https://​hrdag.org/​publi​cati​ons-​year/​2006/​, accessed 22 May 2023, 2, 14; Daniel Fitzpatrick and Susana Barnes, ‘The Relative Resilience of Property: First Possession and Order without Law in East Timor’, Law & Society Review, 44/​2 (2010), 206, 210. 12  The Profile, 1-​3, 11-​12. 13  Quoted in Taylor, East Timor, 83. 14 See The Profile; Turner, Telling; J.S. Dunn, ‘The East Timor Situation—​ Report on Talks with Timorese Refugees in Portugal’, (c.February 1977), ANA, A1209, 1975/​2258, 17–​34, here 23–​27. 15  See Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 177–​234. 16  See Pinto and Jardine, East Timor’s Unfinished Struggle, 60–​66, 69–​70, 260–​261, n. 6; accounts in Turner, Telling, 109–​110, 116–​117, 123, 153–​154; Carmel Budiardjo and Liem Soei Liong, The War against East Timor (London et al.: Zed et al., 1984), 33, 37, 42. 17  See Taylor, East Timor, 92–​94, 97–​98, 157–​158; Paulino Gama (Mauk Muruk), ‘The War in the Hills, 1975–​1985: A Fretilin Commander Remembers’, in Peter Carey and G. Carter Bentley (eds.), East Timor at the Crossroads (London: Cassell, 1995), 100. For 1979 and 1983, see also Budiardjo and Liong, The War against East Timor, 37, 77, 141–​142. For 1982, see Rod Nordland, ‘Hunger: Under Indonesia, Timor Remains a Land of Misery’, Philadelphia Inquirer, 28 May 1982; Gabriel Defert, Timor Est: Le génocide

584   Christian Gerlach University of Indonesia examining refugees recently brought under Indonesian control called the situation in 1979 ‘the worst, they said, they had ever seen. They found 100 percent malnutrition [ . . . ] with 50 percent of the children in third degree malnutrition’.18 But there were already FRETILIN radio reports coming out of East Timor about mass death by starvation and security force brutalities in those parts of the territory under Indonesian control in 1976, as well as in rebel areas under attack.19 Indonesian authorities were hesitant to do anything substantial about the situation. Attorney General Ali Said, together with an entourage including Governor Guilherme Gonçalves and the military commander, visited Uatolari, a hotspot of hunger, in January 1978 and noted the need for relief, but the situation remained dramatic there until much later.20 After trips made by his collaborators to Balibo, Mariana, and Bobonaro, which revealed mass suffering and resulted in photographs of ‘sick, starving and malnourished women and children, typical of famine scenes around the world’, missionary Pater Lieshout, finding that commanders in Dili were doing nothing to alleviate the suffering, asked General Benny Murdani, head of military intelligence and the individual pulling the strings of the East Timor operation, for immediate help. This led instead only to Lieshaut being reprimanded by officers from Dili who flew in by helicopter to see him.21 But was President Suharto himself left in the dark? After all, he had visited Mariana in July 1978, at the height of the misery, announcing great plans for East Timor’s largest irrigated rice development project there in an informal speech.22 This is a telling indication of what happened. There were international food aid campaigns in East Timor from about 1979 to 1983; in 1980, the International Committee of the Red Cross aimed at raising the supply of daily food intake for locals to 1,800 calories, still an insufficient level.23 What ICRC delegates described to a US diplomat were ‘emaciated people unable to move from beds and huts [. . . ]Children could not be prompted to smile under any pretext’.24 Aid organizers were told about local oublié (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), 129–​130; for resettlements then also see the CAVR report (2006), chap. 7.3, 4. 18  US Embassy to State Department, 10 July 1979, ‘Update on CRS East Timor Program’, https://​wikile​ aks.org/​plusd/​cab​les/​1979JA​KART​0089​4_​e.html, accessed 26 July 2019. 19 See communiques by Jorge Fernandes, FRETILIN’s Minister for Information and National Security, in radio messages received at Darwin, Australia, 21 and 25 October 1976, ANA, A1209, 1976/​ 2183, 125, 138; see also Pinto and Jardine, East Timor’s Unfinished Struggle, 46, 48; for hunger and death in refugee camps for East Timorese in Indonesian West Timor in 1975–​1976, see J.S. Dunn, ‘The East Timor Situation—​Report on Talks with Timorese Refugees in Portugal’, (c. February 1977), ANA, A1209, 1975/​ 2258, 17–​34, especially 21. 20  For the visit, see Antara (Indonesian news agency), ‘Timorese people need more medicines and food’, 2 January 1978, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 31, 431; see also US representation Geneva to US Embassy Jakarta ‘(C) ICRC Program in East Timor’, 24 May 1979, https://​wikile​aks.org/​plusd/​cab​les/​1979GE​ NEVA​6873​9e_​h​tml, accessed 26 July 2019. 21  Memo Alexander, ‘East Timor’, 15 August 1978, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 764–​765. 22  US Embassy Jakarta telegram, 18 July 1978, https://​wikile​aks.org/​plusd/​cab​les/​1978JA​KART​0964​8_​ d.html, accessed 26 July 2019. For irrigation programmes at the time, see Department of Information, Republic of Indonesia, ’To Build a Better Tomorrow in East Timor’, (c.second half of 1979), 6, ANA. 801/​ 13/​11/​1, part 31, 173. 23  See Donald Weatherbee, ‘The Indonesianization of East Timor’, Contemporary Southeast Asia, 3/​1 (1981), 8. Sometimes ICRC provisions were lower: ‘Report on Visit to East Timor by Defence and Army Attache 21–​22 January 1980’, 31 January 1980, report by Lloyd, ‘East Timor/​New American Assessments’, 8 April 1980, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 112 (Dilor, 200 grams of food daily). 24  Lloyd, ‘East Timor/​New American Assessments’8 April 1980, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 31, 18.

Indonesian Strategic Resettlement    585 daily and monthly mortality figures that translated, projected onto a year, to staggering death rates of fifty-​five to eighty per 1,000.25 According to one source, immediate medical help brought down death figures much faster than an emphasis on high-​protein foods.26 In the same year, 1980, the aid campaign was reduced because the situation appeared to have notably improved.27 The Indonesian authorities had outsourced responsibility to foreigners. Conditions improved after the early 1980s, with some exceptions.28 Many features of this are known from other cases of twentieth-​century counter-​insurgency. Infants figured large among the victims of hunger early on (especially orphans and half-​orphans, of which there were very many).29 On the other hand, within some twenty years, infant mortality dropped by more than half and that of children aged under five years by two-​thirds.30 As lethal as Indonesian anti-​guerrilla policies were by international comparison, as marked was this improvement afterwards. Horrific as the wholesale massacres, individual killings, bombings, torture, and sexual violence were, this section indicates that the bulk of deaths inflicted by Indonesian violence resulted from comprehensive hunger and under-​supply, caused by first besieging and then interning large parts of the population in combination with food denial. Given that a variety of regimes of all kinds had historically used or organized such violence, including systemic violence, and it bore no signifier of one special type of regime, there is no point in discussing whether this violence was colonial or that of a nation-​state. Indonesian action was that of an expansionist power in an annexed territory and, it should be added, it was not ‘post-​colonial’ in the sense that it imitated or simply mirrored violence inflicted by European powers or Japan on what became Indonesian-​ruled soil. It should also be added that third states and international organizations bore only relatively little and indirect responsibility for the mass deaths—​as well as for the recovery after 1982–​1983. This will become clear from the next two sections.

Policies of Hunger Put into the context of Indonesian hunger-​related policies, the developments in East Timor are somewhat surprising. True, this was a regional famine, as had been all acute hunger 25  Transcript

of Australian Broadcasting Corporation programme, Father Mark Raper with John Waddington, 20 February 1980, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 90 (camps under Indonesian control); report by Lloyd, ‘East Timor/​New American Assessments’, 8 April 1980, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 25 (Iliomar; pages 1–​2 of this 20-​page report are misplaced in ditto, part 31, 18–​19, see 19 for Ualuluhur village). 26  Lloyd, ‘East Timor/​New American Assessments’, part 30, 25. 27 Cabinet submission by Andrew Peacock (Australia’s foreign minister), May 1980, Australian National Archive, A12909, 3998, 5–​6. 28  For starvation and deaths on Ataúro island in the mid-​1980s, see account by João Dias, 10 April 1999, in Peter Carey, ‘Third-​World Colonialism, The Geracão Forum, and the Birth of a New Nation’, Indonesia, 76 (October 2003), 53; Budiardjo and Liong, The War against East Timor, 137–​138. 29  Report by Lloyd, ‘East Timor/​New American Assessments’, 8 April 1980, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 38 (widows without family were also badly affected, according to ICRC studies); G. Allen ‘Visit to East Timor’, February 1979, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 31, 336. 30  Jon Pedersen and Marie Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions in East Timor (Oslo: Fafo Institute of Applied Social Science, 1999), 61, 63.

586   Christian Gerlach crises since the 1950s. Indonesia’s emerging national elites had—​like the country’s foreign rulers too—​shown relatively little concern during the great Java famine in 1945,31 and subsequent national governments until the late 1960s had responded with neglect and denial to the many local and regional famines—​journalist Peter Arnett was, for instance, expelled for revealing one in 1962.32 It was thus the military regime under Suharto that had first taken substantial action nationwide against mass starvation and pursued policies of poverty alleviation that started to pay off precisely by the mid-​1980s. For example, during rice shortages in 1972 the government frantically tried to organize imports and sold stocks in a targeted fashion to keep staple food prices down.33 In my still ongoing large study of hunger-​ related development studies, Indonesia represents the relatively most successful among four country case studies (the others are Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Mali).34 To be sure, the Suharto regime pursued a strategy of capital accumulation enabling local elites, and military men in particular, to enrich themselves—​but part of the wealth from oil exports was systematically channelled into rural development. Policies actually pursued mass participation in agricultural intensification, and fiscal measures in the currency sector were designed to prevent detrimental conditions in the countryside. What remained in the background of such efforts was the attempt by this radically anti-​communist regime to enact a capitalist development capable of defusing leftist upheaval by largely solving the question of mass poverty, in part through generating rural small businesses and employment. The regime’s underlying objective was to prevent leftist politicization of the kind that had happened in the 1940s and 1960s.35 That said, the Indonesian state had its own traditions of starvation policies, under Suharto and before. During the war of independence of 1945–​1949, both sides (Dutch and Indonesians) used hunger blockades and boycotts against areas outside their control, disregarding the fate of local individuals and wider communities. Dutch naval blockades and Republican obstruction of the delivery of food to cities are especially noteworthy in this regard. Each contributed to starvation of local populations on both the Indonesian and Dutch sides.36 And the Suharto regime provided totally inadequate food rations to many of the two million or more political prisoners detained during the persecution of leftists after 1965, an unknown number of which died.37 In the former case, this affected local areas; in the latter, a special target group.

31 

See ‘The Problem of Rice: Stenographic Notes on the Fourth Session of the Sanyo Kaigi, January 8, 2605 [1945], 10:00 A.M.’, Indonesia, 2 (October 1966), 77–​123. For the famine, see Pierre van der Eng, Food Supply in Java During War and Decolonization, 1940–​1950 (2008), n.p., http://​mpra.ub.uni-​muenc​hen.de/​ 8852/​, accessed 20 November 2014. 32  See Pierre van der Eng, ‘All Lies? Famine in Sukarno’s Indonesia, 1950s–​1960s’, https://​crawf​ord. anu.edu.au/​news-​eve​nts/​eve​nts/​1218/​all-​lies-​fami​nes-​sukar​nos-​indone​sia-​1950s-​1960s, accessed 22 May 2023,, on Arnett, see 3. 33  See Christian Gerlach, How the World Hunger Problem Was Not Solved (forthcoming). 34 Ibid. 35  For the 1960s, Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 47–​56. 36  For measures by the Indonesian side, see Van der Eng, ‘All Lies?’, 48, 53, 56; William Frederick, Visions and Heat: The Making of the Indonesian Revolution (Athens, 1989), 280; ‘Statement of N.E.I. Government on Food Position in Java [ . . . ]’, 25 April 1946 and W.A.M. Doll, Currency Adviser, Financial Situation of Java’ (travel report, January 1946), ANA 404/​1/​1/​1, part 1, 139 and 146. 37 Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 22, 28–​29.

Indonesian Strategic Resettlement    587 Arguably, East Timor was a different matter because food denial and under-​supply, respectively, affected more than a specific group and covered an entire territory. And this long after the blockades of 1946–​1948, at a time when the government cared about its citizens’ well-​being. Hunger-​related policies in East Timor stood in contrast to what happened simultaneously in the rest of the country. That said, malnutrition was still widespread in independent Timor-​Leste in the 2000s.38

Policies of ‘Development’ In terms of Indonesian rural development policies in East Timor, an influential interpretation forwarded among others by John Taylor had it that the Indonesian authorities recklessly pursued cash crop cultivation, and growing coffee in particular, in areas under army control while neglecting food production. In this view, many East Timorese farmers became proletarianized through large-​scale agricultural production.39 But much of this does not stand up to scrutiny. Apparently, it is correct that coffee bean marketing was under the monopoly of an army-​owned firm until 1992. Yet, coffee was largely not grown on plantations, but continued to be produced by smallholders, up to 45,000 small-​scale farms in total. Also, with the exception of the years 1989–​1993, coffee exports (and harvests partially, too) remained below the figures reached in 1973, before the Indonesian invasion.40 During the 1980s and 1990s, Indonesian rehabilitation measures for the often overaged and densely planted trees seem to have had some success as indicated by increasing production and exports.41 On the other hand, the coffee-​growing acreage did not substantially expand.42 All other cash crops in East Timor were of minor importance. The same goes for sandalwood, a resource soon depleted by the mid-​1980s.43 What did flourish at a certain point was cattle-​raising for export.44 In Indonesian development planning of the 1970s and 1980s, for East Timor as elsewhere, staple food production was given preference over cash crops.45 According to 1980 figures, 38  See Shamali Guttal, ‘New and Old Faces of Hunger: Cambodia, Timor Leste, and Food Crises’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center), 32/​1 (2009), especially 71–​73. 39 Taylor, East Timor, 122–​127; Budiardjo and Liong, The War against East Timor, 103–​104, 107. 40  Helder da Costa, ‘The Evolution of Agricultural Policies in East Timor’, in Helder da Costa et al. (eds.), Agriculture: New Directions for a New Nation—​East Timor (Timor-​Leste) (Canberra: Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, 2003), 51–​52; M. Hadi Soesastro, ‘East Timor: Questions of Economic Viability’, in Hal Hill (ed.), Unity and Diversity: Regional Economic Development in Indonesia since 1970 (Singapore et al.: Oxford University Press, 1989), 224; Narve Rio, The Status of the East Timor Agricultural Sector 1999, working paper (Oslo: Chr. Michelsen Institute, 2001), 20; Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 23, 36; Colin Barlow, ‘The Rural Economy and Institions in East Timor’, in Hall Hill and João Saldanha (eds.), East Timor: Development Challenges for the World’s Newest Nation (Singapore et al: ISEAS and Palgrave 2001), 112–​113. 41  Soesatro, ‘East Timor’, 225; Barlow, ‘The Rural Economy’, 113, 120; Jacqueline Pomeroy, ‘Coffee and the Economy in East Timor’, in Hill and Saldanha (eds.), East Timor, 129. 42  Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 224. 43  Da Costa, ‘The Evolution’, 52. 44  R.A.F. Paul Webb, ‘Progress and Crisis in Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia’, Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, 17 (1989), 162–​163. 45  See Gerlach, How the World Hunger Problem Was Not Solved.

588   Christian Gerlach over 90% of ruralites in East Timor farmed their own land and concentrated on growing their own food. For two-​thirds of these, corn was their primary staple food, for almost one third it was rice.46 Rice production received much attention by the Indonesian planners, but apparently, in the long run, corn acreages expanded a lot, whereas rice areas were slightly on the decrease, and cassava markedly so.47 According to 1995 figures, rural dwellers received just 4% of their income from agricultural wage labour.48 In fact, it was the self-​proclaimed ‘World Bank’ that had pressed for cash crop production since the 1980s, partly through Nuclear Estate and Smallholder Schemes, and especially through the promotion of a cash crops-​first policy after East Timorese independence.49 That said, the counter-​insurgency war depressed food production for many years. What was described as ‘the first corn harvest for two or more years in many villages’ was gathered in 1980.50 The output level achieved in 1973 was not reached again for rice until 1981, for corn until 1983, and for cassava until 1982.51 Production was hampered for two main conflict-​ related reasons: first, the resettled peasants had far too little access to land. Their freedom of movement was restricted until the early or even late 1980s, and people found more than one kilometre beyond village or camp limits could be shot or arrested under suspicion of supporting the guerrillas.52 Secondly, because of immense livestock losses, East Timorese farming—​especially in rice and cassava—​lost productivity, which had anyway been low from the start. From 1975 to 1980, the number of draught animals like buffalos, horses, and cows decreased by over 80%, and only with regard to cattle, pigs, and sheep had livestock levels fully recovered by 1990, but not for buffalos, horses, and other small livestock.53 Fertilizer use increased under the occupation but a low credit level, at least by 1986, points to limited intensification. Peasants invested in seeds rather than in fertilizer or pesticides.54 Agricultural productivity remained very low.55 46 

Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 222. Barlow, ‘The Rural Economy’, 112; Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 211; Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 28. 48  See Anne Booth, ‘Poverty, Equity and Living Standards in East Timor’, in Hill and Saldanha (eds.), East Timor, 249. 49  See M. Adriana Sri Adhiati and Armin Bobsien, ‘Indonesia’s Transmigration Programme—​ An Update. A Report Prepared for Down to Earth’, July 2001, http://​www.down​toea​rth-​indone​sia.org./​old-​ site/​ctr​ans.htm, accessed 7 March 2019; ‘Aidwatch Briefing Note: The World Bank in East Timor’, June 2001, http://​memb​ers.pcug.org.au/​~wildw​ood/​01ju​lwb.htm#3adb, accessed 7 March 2019. 50 Report by Lloyd, ‘East Timor/​ New American Assessments’, 8 April 1980, ANA, 801/​ 13/​ 11/​ 1, part 30, 38. 51  See Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 211. 52 For example, see account by Justino in Turner, Telling, 118; Shirley Shackleton, ‘Planting a Tree in Balibo: A Journey to East Timor’, in Carey and Bentley (eds.), East Timor, 116; John Taylor, ‘ “Encirclement and Annihilation”: The Indonesian Occupation of East Timor’, in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan (eds.), The Specter of Genocide (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 172; Rio, ‘The Status’, 9, 15. See also the regional Indonesian army Instruction Manual No: JUKNIS/​04-​B/​IV/​ 1982, 10 September 1982, in Budiardjo and Liong, The War against East Timor, 219–​220. 53 See da Costa, ‘The Evolution’, 53; Barlow, ‘The Rural Economy’, 113; Rio, ‘The Status’, 19. For ­figures 1973–​1978, see report by Lloyd, ‘East Timor/​New American Assessments’, 8 April 1980, ANA, 801/​ 13/​11/​1, part 30, 35, and for 1976–​1985, Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 212. 54  Rio, ‘The Status’, 26–​27; Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 215. 55  See Anne Booth, ‘Africa in Asia? The Development Challenges Facing East Indonesia and East Timor’, Oxford Development Studies, 32/​1 (2004), 27; Rio, ‘The Status’, 10. 47 

Indonesian Strategic Resettlement    589 Add to this the fact that in 1993 60% of all farms were only 0.5–​2 hectares in size, and almost one quarter below half a hectare, that is, very small units of production in light of the challenging natural conditions of East Timor.56 Little wonder then that 30–​40% of the East Timorese were living below the Indonesian poverty line in 1996, more than in any other province.57 Substantial amounts of rice were imported to East Timor already under the Portuguese, and this figure rose under the Indonesians, becoming even higher in the 1990s and increasing still further after independence.58 That said, staple food production figures in the 1990s should have been sufficient to adequately feed all East Timorese had foodstuffs been evenly distributed, but, in practice, inequality was substantial.59 The Indonesian authorities framed development in terms similar to other regions. Very soon they declared their intention to proceed according to three phases, first, ‘rehabilitation’ between September 1976 to March 1977, followed by one year of ‘consolidation’ and another year of ‘stabilization’, and then, finally (or by 1982 at the latest), ‘development’ proper by Indonesian standards, although it is unclear whether East Timor was formally included in the nationwide five-​year development plans (Repelita) as early as 1979 or only in 1984.60 The first agricultural cooperatives were founded in 1983. During Repelita VI in 1994, East Timor was one of a dozen regions where a so-​called Integrated Economic Development Zone was established.61 From the 1970s, the local administration mirrored the structures put in place in the rest of Indonesia. This is to say, common Indonesian practices of planning and administration applied to East Timor as well. Despite the official emphasis on fostering food production, however, data on official development spending in Indonesia for 1976–​1981 show that most of it went into infrastructure, some into the education sector, and lesser amounts into villages and health.62 Schooling rates were driven up to over 90% for young cohorts, although considerable functional illiteracy persisted even among young adults till the 1990s.63 Even a small university was established at Dili and, from the mid-​1980s, East Timorese high-​school graduates were guaranteed a place at a university elsewhere in Indonesia.64 East Timor was also opened for tourism in 1988, but that did not take off.

56 

See Booth, ‘Poverty’, 247, 249. Booth, ‘Africa in Asia?’, 22; Booth, ‘Poverty’, 242–​243; Mats Lundahl and Frederik Sjöholm, ‘Poverty and Development in Timor-​Leste’, SIDA Country Economic Report 2005, 3, 8–​9. 58  See da Costa, ‘The Evolution’, 50–​51; Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 28. 59  Rio, ‘The Status’, 4, for production ­figures 117–​118. For local and regional inequality, see Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 106; Booth, ‘Poverty’, 243. 60  Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 26; Rio, ‘The Status’, 6–​7; see also the 1977 Indonesian brochure ‘The Development of East Timor Province’; ANA M4091/​46, 218. 61  M. Adhiati and Bobsien, ‘Indonesia’s Transmigration Programme’; Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 27. 62  See Weatherbee, ‘The Indonesianization’, 14; UN General Assembly, Working paper prepared by the Secretariat, 25 August 1978, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 604. But see Department of Information, Republic of Indonesia, ‘To Build a Better Tomorrow in East Timor’, (c. second half of 1979), 4, ANA 801/​13/​11/​1, part 31, 171, according to which there were large funds transferred whose usage was unclear. 63 The World Bank Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, Gender and Development Unit, Patricia Justino et al., Education and Conflict Recovery: The Case of Timor Leste, July 2011, 10; Gavin Jones, ‘Social Policy Issues in East Timor: Education and Health’, in Hill and Saldanha (eds.), East Timor, 257. 64  Rio, ‘The Status’, 8; Jones, ‘Social Policy’, 257; Carey, ‘Third-​World Colonialism’, 57–​58. 57  See

590   Christian Gerlach

Policies of Resettlement For most East Timorese, the years 1975 to 1999 were a time of displacement. Some Indonesians were also brought into the area. How did resettlement sit within Indonesian policies? Large-​scale removal into strategic villages was without precedent in Indonesia. In the late 1960s, the Suharto regime had driven about 60,000 locals, primarily of Chinese extraction, out of their rural homes on Kalimantan because of a localized communist insurgency, but those were largely refugees that fled to the region’s towns plus, it is true, several camps.65 The Indonesian military had itself emerged in the mid-​1940s as a guerrilla force against colonial powers (combatting Dutch, British, and Australian troops), and this had profoundly influenced the general outlook of Mohamed Suharto, the head of state in the 1970s, and Abdul Haris Nasution, the chief strategist of the Indonesian Army, sensitizing them to issues of counter-​guerrilla warfare. However, Indonesia between 1975–​1983 did not mimic Dutch or British ways of operating of the 1940s, which had neither included systematic resettlement nor large-​scale ‘development’ provision.66 On the other hand, lots of resettlement was going on in Indonesia in the so-​called transmigrasi programme, which had colonial origins, but was much intensified by the Republic, relocating people from the densely populated islands of Java, Bali, and Lombok to the so-​called outer islands. From 1979 to 1999 there were over five million transmigrants, most of them brought to Sumatra.67 It is unclear how many of them were settled in East Timor; probably 6,000 by late 1984, up to 60,000 by 1990, and in total perhaps up to 80,000 people, although some authors suggest higher figures.68 Some of this was so-​called military transmigration, the transplantation of veterans.69 In order to please international players, many others sent in were not Muslims, but Balinese and West Timorese.70 Many of them were supposed to cultivate wetland rice on land factually expropriated from East Timorese.71

65 See Jamie Davidson and Douglas Kammen, ‘Indonesia’s Unknown War and the Lineages of Violence in West Kalimantan’, in Indonesia, 73 (April 2002), 55–​87; Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 61–​62. 66  For the Dutch strategies, see various contributions in the Journal of Genocide Research, 14/​3–​4 (2012). 67  Adhiati and Bobsien, ‘Indonesia’s Transmigration Programme’; see also Mariël Otten, Transmigrasi: Myths and Realities: Indonesian Resettlement Policy, 1965–​ 1985 (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 1986). 68  See Otten, Transmigrasi, 208 (on 204, she speaks of presently [c.1985] a total of 50,000 Indonesians in East Timor); Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 54; Rio, ‘The Status’, 28. In 1990 there was officially a non-​Timorese population of 8.5% (1970: 1.6%). Kimberly Hamilton, ‘East Timor: Old Migration Challenges in the World’s Newest Country’, 1 May 2004, https://​www.migr​atio​ npol​icy.org/​arti​cle/​east-​timor-​old-​migrat​ion-​cha​llen​ges-​wor​lds-​new​est-​coun​try, accessed 7 March 2019. See also Aidwatch Briefing Note: ‘The World Bank in East Timor’, June 2001, http://​memb​ers.pcug. org.au/​~wildw​ood/​01ju​lwb.htm, accessed 26 July 2019. 69 Philip Fearnside, ‘Transmigration in Indonesia: Lessons from Its Environmental and Social Impacts’, Environmental Management, 21/​4 (1997), 556. 70 Otten, Transmigrasi, 207–​214, esp. 209. 71  Rio, ‘The Status’, 28.

Indonesian Strategic Resettlement    591 This created two sorts of settlements in the area: those of incoming settlers, primarily in lowland rural as well as urban areas, and the disadvantaged settlements of locals, which were poorer, with restrictions imposed on mobility and political activity, and kept under strict surveillance by military detachments or local pro-​Indonesian militias.72 Both types of settlement were mainly situated on arterial roads. State-​generated conflicts between locals and resettlers were a common occurrence throughout the transmigration settlement areas, as was settlement as a means to foster national integration and ethnic homogenization through placing transmigrants strategically.73 The difference was that in East Timor, the locals were resettled, too, and confronted far greater distress. West Papua might be a parallel, but a somewhat less severe case. In addition, it is worth noting that after 1969, thousands of leftist internees were also used as forced transmigrants.74 Before 1975, a large part of the local populations in East Timor had lived in the highlands; through resettlement, large numbers were forced down to the lowlands.75 Together with very poor housing conditions, with many living in improvised huts until the mid-​1980s, this contributed to numerous fatalities from pneumonia and cold.76 And the strategic villages were large; with an average population of over 1,500, they were semi-​urban settlements. This size made access by all inhabitants to sufficient agricultural land all the more difficult. And still, as in other countries with similar forms of forced resettlements, it seems that many stayed in these places of residence even after the independence of Timor Leste.77

Conclusion With few plantation jobs available, and fewer than 5,000 jobs each in civil administration and manufacturing in 1986,78 and given insufficiently small holdings, what did East Timorese people live off? And how did they actually earn nominally more than the 72 

For the latter point, see Taylor, ‘ “Encirclement and Annihilation” ’, 171. See, for example, Fearnside, ‘Transmigration’, 563. 74  Ibid., 564–​565; ‘Ten thousand G.30.S./​PKI Detainees Released’, in Indonesia Today, 4/​5 (December 1977–​January 1978), 15. 75  See Klemens Ludwig, ‘Ein planmässiger Völkermord’, in Klemens Ludwig (ed.), Osttimor: Der zwanzigjährige Krieg (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990), 48; see also Lloyd report ‘East Timor/​New American Assessments’, 8 April 1980, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 25. 76 See account by Martinho da Costa Lopes in Turner, Telling, 167; Shackleton, ‘Planting’, 116; Nordland, ‘Hunger’; Taylor, ‘ “Encirclement and Annihilation” ’, 171. For the most lethal diseases later, see Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 70. 77  See CAVR report (2006), chap. 7.3, 80; for other countries, see Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 222–​224. 78 Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 216–​ 217 (manufacturing), 219 (fifty new jobs in administration annually); Weatherbee, ‘The Indonesianization’, 10 (4,558 provincial employees in January 1980); Telegram Australian Embassy Jakarta to Canberra, 14 September 1978, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 30, 610 (4,453 employed in civil administration). See Booth, ‘Poverty’, 248. After 1986, additional posts were created, including over 6,000 teachers. For agricultural wage-​labour, see Booth, ‘Poverty’, 247–​248. Under Portuguese colonialism, there had been 2,108 schoolteachers according to Department of Information, Republic of Indonesia, To Build a Better Tomorrow in East Timor, n.p., n.d. (1979), 9, ANA, 801/​13/​11/​1, part 31, 176, but only 500 according to Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 188; see there also on the numbers after 1975. 73 

592   Christian Gerlach average income in Indonesia, even though East Timor’s productivity was very low even by Indonesian standards?79 Data from 1995 suggest that about one third of East Timorese income came either from non-​agricultural wages or from other income, such as pensions and similar payments.80 The only plausible answer is that many people worked part-​time in the only remaining notable sectors of the economy, in construction and doing services for the Indonesian military.81 They had been semi-​proletarianized, but by working for Indonesian state projects. This transition forms part of a fuller picture of East Timorese economic conditions and life in the 1980s and 1990s. The flipside of this was that Indonesia heavily subsidized East Timor throughout the occupation period, with transfers in the 1990s estimated around US$110 to 150 million annually, or at least ten times the proceeds from coffee, the main export crop, and fifteen to thirty times the aggregate level of international ‘aid’.82 These were unusually high investments, as far as strategic resettlement goes. Those who were reaping benefits from the occupation of East Timor were not the Indonesian state, but other groups of individuals, mainly military officer racketeers.83 The state had attempted to buy the loyalty of far more local people than those local militias and troops that worked for their side and many of whom fled East Timor in 1999. This is also a reminder that there was conflict and violence between local populations throughout the years 1976–​1999. However, villagization policies and the creation of such large settlements were not only designed to serve military purposes or to facilitate administrative penetration, but were also intended to stimulate local capital accumulation, which essentially did not materialize. Did the Indonesian state, and Indonesians, behave in East Timor more like in a colony or as if within the Indonesian nation? One of the inner-​Indonesian buzzwords for East Timor was ‘integrasi’, integration—​regionally, economically, and between groups and social strata. From 1974, East Timor’s possible absorption by Indonesia was being discussed as ‘integration’, and that remained so to the end: in the 1999 plebiscite people voted on ‘integration’. A number of things such as heavy investments in infrastructure, education, and the transmigration settlement would suggest that East Timor was regarded as part of the nation. Annual resource flows of US$150 per capita were of a level that foreign ‘aid’ never achieves, and they compare to foreign ‘aid’ of five to eleven US$ per capita.84 On the other hand, it is notable that much was destroyed during the Indonesian retreat in 1999, including 95% of all schools.85 This high-​level Indonesian investment was conditional. By contrast, the reckless starvation policy used against masses of civilians, including women and minors, providing insufficient rations like a third of a can of corn per day,86 79  Booth, ‘Africa in Asia?’, 24. However, mind the exceptionally high level of prices: Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 212. 80  Booth, ‘Poverty’, 247–​249. By contrast, Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 218, 222 unpersuasively suggested a subsistence economy overwhelmingly based on agriculture. 81  Hints in Soesastro, ‘East Timor’, 213, 215. 82  Hall Hill and João Saldanha, ‘The Key Issues’, in Hill and Saldanha (eds.), East Timor, 7; Lundahl and Sjöholm, ‘Poverty and Development’, 6. For Official Development Aid and Indonesian transfers to East Timor, see Pedersen and Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions, 136. For proceeds from coffee, see da Costa, ‘The Evolution’, 51. 83  See Taylor, East Timor, 121–​127. 84  See note 82. 85  Lundahl and Sjöholm, ‘Poverty and Development’, 6. 86  See the account by Justino in Turner, Telling, 179.

Indonesian Strategic Resettlement    593 plus a policy that, in some aspects, bordered on apartheid87 had little precedent inside Indonesia. One of the problems of interpretation is that Javanese and central government representatives have often used racist practices and harbour racist views towards certain ethnicities in the outer islands more generally, which some of those on the receiving end have found reflecting a colonial attitude while the government, by contrast, regards their action as unifying the nation. In any case, after the early 1980s attempts were made to have East Timor become part of the military-​technocratically ruled development state and have it reach certain levels of ‘development’ in different sectors, although this included highly contradictory practices such as planned transmigration. All of which confirms that the relationships between development and violence in East Timor were complex and cannot be reduced to ‘development’ serving military purposes. But there is another twist. The fact that Indonesian policies in East Timor caused large numbers of victims, when compared to similar cases of twentieth-​century anti-​guerrilla warfare conducted by states around the world, can primarily be attributed to hunger and disease and thus to the fact that forced migration, internment, and resettlement affected over half of the people of East Timor, that is, an exceptionally large part of the population. (South Vietnam in the 1960s and French Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s came closest to such a large proportion.88) In other words, the extremely high incidence of mass death and repression in East Timor was closely related to the Indonesian attempt to restructure Timorese society. Thus violence and development did not contradict each other: they were inextricably linked.

Select Bibliography Booth, Anne, ‘Poverty, Equity and Living Standards in East Timor’, in Hall Hill and João Saldanha, eds., East Timor: Development Challenges for the World’s Newest Nation (Singapore et al: ISEAS and Palgrave, 2001), 241–​255. Booth, Anne, ‘Africa in Asia? The Development Challenges Facing East Indonesia and East Timor’, Oxford Development Studies, 32/​1 (2004), 19–​35. Budiardjo, Carmel, and Liem Soei Liong, The War against East Timor (London et al.: Zed et al., 1984). Defert, Gabriel, Timor Est: Le génocide oublié (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992). Gerlach, Christian, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century World (Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Gerlach, Christian, How the World Hunger Problem Was Not Solved (London: Routledge, forthcoming). Kammen, Douglas, Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015). Lundahl, Mats, and Frederik Sjöholm, ‘Poverty and Development in Timor-​Leste,’ SIDA Country Economic Report 2005, Stockholm: SIDA, 3. Otten, Mariël, Transmigrasi: Myths and Realities: Indonesian Resettlement Policy, 1965–​1985 (Copenhagen: IWGIA, 1986). 87 

See, for example, Shackleton, ‘Planting’, 110.

88 Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 178.

594   Christian Gerlach Pedersen, Jon, and Marie Arneberg, Social and Economic Conditions in East Timor (Oslo: Fafo Institute of Applied Social Science, 1999). Pinto, Constâncio, and Matthew Jardine, East Timor’s Unfinished Struggle: Inside the Timorese Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1997). Rio, Narve, ‘The Status of the East Timor Agricultural Sector 1999’, working paper (Oslo: Chr. Michelsen Institute, 2001). Taylor, John, East Timor: The Price of Freedom (London et al.: Zed, 1999). The Profile of Human Rights Violations in Timor-​Leste, 1974–​1999. A Report by the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group to the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation of Timor-​Leste (Romesh Silva and Patrick Ball, 2006), https://​hrdag.org/​publi​cati​ons-​year/​ 2006/​, accessed 22 May 2023. The World Bank Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network, Gender and Development Unit, Patricia Justino et al., Education and Conflict Recovery: The Case of Timor Leste (Washington: IBRD, July 2011). Timor-​ Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, Chega Report, chap. 7.3: Forced Displacement and Famine, https://​www.etan.org/​news/​2006/​cavr.htm (accessed 22 May 2023). Turner, Michele, Telling: East Timor: Personal Testimonies 1942–​1992 (Kensington: New South West University Press, 1992). van der Eng, Pierre, ‘All Lies? Famine in Sukarno’s Indonesia, 1950s–​1960s’, 2012, https://​crawf​ ord.anu.edu.au/​news-​eve​nts/​eve​nts/​1218/​all-​lies-​fami​nes-​sukar​nos-​indone​sia-​1950s-​1960s, accessed 22 May 2023. van der Eng, Pierre, Food Supply in Java During War and Decolonization, 1940–​1950 (n.p., 2008), http://​mpra.ub.uni-​muenc​hen.de/​8852/​, accessed 20 November 2014.

B E YON D B OR DE R S Transnational Dimensions

Chapter 31

Lim its of Sov e re i g nt y Developing Blank Spaces in Asian ‘Bordered-​Lands’ after the Second World War Aditya Kiran Kakati Global War and Decolonization: New States, New Armies This chapter examines the contradictions of ‘development’ in Asian borderlands as a state-​ making response to late-​colonial insurgencies in the mid-​twentieth century, and, more specifically, after a ‘global’ event such as the Second World War (henceforth WWII or the War).1 The post-​war period and ensuing decolonization are increasingly described as a distinct moment of globalization that ‘overrode’ conventional political and historical boundaries.2 Thus, it is important to situate the roles of state-​making, development, and violence in response to armed insurgencies in territorial peripheries of empires and nation-​states within the framework of decolonization and globalization. This is because decolonization, ‘late’ colonial state-​making, and the emergence of insurgencies were intimately connected with the preceding global conflict. Simultaneously, modernization theories and new practices of development also emerged that integrated coercion. Each of these processes was, in turn, connected to the predominance of the nation-​state as the principal form of territorial organization after 1945. Additionally, global flows of capital and political networks have each 1 

Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonization’, Past & Present 200/​ 1 (1 August 2008), 247, and Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson, ‘Empire and Globalisation: From “High Imperialism” to Decolonisation’, The International History Review, 36/​1 (1 January 2014), 155–​158. The notion of ‘global’ I use here does not assume a ‘planetary’ scope, and instead views empire networks as a way of imagining scale which traversed the globe and organized territory and society. In my usage, the post-​1945 predominance of nation-​state, and development in the form of ‘modernization theory’ resembled new networks of imperialism that replaced colonial empires. I use the capitalized term ‘War’ as a shorthand to refer to the Second World War, and to differentiate it from other wars and conflicts that are discussed. 2 A.G.

598   Aditya Kiran Kakati followed specific trajectories in shaping violence, development, and global social organization following ‘modernization’ theories. The nature of imperialism of European colonial rule transformed into an ‘imperialism of nation-​states’ during the inter-​war period and continued through the Cold War. In more recent decades, the nature of nation-​state driven imperialism did not always resemble traditional hegemonic ways of state expansion, capital accumulation, coercion, and connectivity.3 Globalization here should be understood as being part of a long spectrum of historical change. The mid-​and late-​twentieth-​century manifestation of such globalization is peculiar, but by no means completely new. WWII had a more profound ‘globalizing’ effect in Asian colonial frontiers than recognized, by complicating the transition to nation-​states for borderzone minorities.4 The temporal proximity and overlaps between ‘decolonization’ and WWII in the China-​India-​Myanmar borderlands offer under-​examined and unique insights through which to understand new violent nationalist movements and armed conflicts that emerged after 1945 and which later came to be called ‘insurgencies’. My aim is to demonstrate that in consolidating the post-​war international order of nation-​states, distinctive responses to ‘rebellions’ in borderzones were triggered. Here local responses to the breakdown of empires were increasingly internationalized.5 WWII and decolonization either momentarily overthrew states or changed their composition respectively, creating ‘vacuum zones’ where existing structures of political authority were displaced. If insurgency is understood as a process of competitive state-​making, then such ‘virgin territories’ became conducive for counter-​state activities.6 The residual effects of such processes of decolonization can be identified in the efforts made by the emerging nation-​states of India and Burma to create what I call ‘bordered-​ lands’.7 I propose the term ‘bordered-​lands’ as it is more accurate in describing the unsettled nature of bordering and territorial processes. These efforts by newly decolonized states to impose central sovereign authority were, in turn, bitterly resisted, particularly along the international borders demarcated in the late 1940s. Many of these conflicts have evolved and transformed over time and persist to the present day. The end of the War fuelled not just the ‘Big nationalisms’ of India and Burma, but also the various minority groups and ‘nations without states’, like Karens, Kachins, Shans, Chins, Nagas, and Lushais. The warring Allied and Japanese forces militarized and heavily armed these minorities, which were composed of loosely bounded ethnic identities that were anthropologically l as ‘hill tribes’ located across the Indo-​Burma frontiers.8 British imperial policy from the late nineteenth century towards the management of these frontier regions was predicated on disarmament in an effort to contain the cross-​border networks of arms 3  Prasenjit Duara, ‘The Chinese World Order in Historical Perspective’, China and the World, 2/​4 (28 November 2019),–​1–​33. 4  Aditya Kiran Kakati, ‘Global Wars in Colonial Frontiers’, in Jelle J.P. Wouters and Tanka Bahadur Subba (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Northeast India (New York: Routledge, 2022), 197–​201. 5  Thomas and Thompson, ‘Empire and Globalisation’, 155–​158 6  Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 218–​219. 7  I use Burma and Myanmar interchangeably (the country’s name was changed in 1989, and it is more accurate to use the term to refer to the period after this). 8 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2007) 30, 324–​325.

Limits of Sovereignty    599 trading. This policy was reversed during the War9 years, when hill populations were heavily armed, often as a reward for raising recruits, or as indicators of prestige in recompense for the show of loyalty to the British.10 Post-​1945, the colonial state never managed to recover or account for these weapons, which remained available, especially in hidden dumps. Recognizing the impossibility of any return to earlier strategies of disarmament, guns were gifted to various local collaborators for their wartime service.11 In addition to the tangible presence of weapons in the region, the ritualized gifting of rewards, compensation, and titles soon after the Allied victory in north-​east India in 1944 became part of integrating local elites within new wartime governance structures that were based on pre-​existing mutually shared authority with the state, through institutions like chieftainship. Allied reoccupation of Burma was celebrated by the chiefs and levies through durbars (councils) and tribal festivals, which included pledges of allegiance to the King-​Emperor. However, accompanying claims for political autonomy by various distinct ethnic communities inhabiting local frontier zones were not entertained. Instead the minority groups and territories were parcelled between India and Burma after independence in 1947 and 1948 respectively.12 In consequence, the ethnicized identities of various groups who now found themselves constructed as minorities within larger national polities further hardened and were mobilized politically for what later emerged as armed resistance movements and insurgencies, like the Naga, Karen, Kachin, Shan, and Mizo insurrections that have plagued these nation-​states over decades since independence, and which even caused the breakdown of the Burmese state-​regime in particular.13 The reoccupation of Burma by Allied forces in 1945 and the dismantling of the Japanese wartime state led to a political vacuum which manifested as a patchwork of competing claims for authority. Allied militaries, British civil administrative corps, and the nationalist political armies led by figures like General Aung San, comprised of ‘ethnically Burman’ majority recruits that competed with each other.14 Aung San and other anti-​British nationalists are credited with reviving the pre-​colonial Burmese ‘military lineage’ and creating an army comprised of ethnic Bamar recruits.15 Before the Second World War the British military in Burma recruited from minority tribes like the Karen, using these levies in pacification campaigns such as that launched against the peasant-​based Saya San Rebellions in the early 1930s. The ‘Karen revolution’ erupted in 1949 after the massacre of several hundred Karen by a Burmese auxiliary defence group. It was compounded by the failure of negotiations with the British for self-​determination and subsequent conflicts with the Burmese Army (which 9  I use the capitalized term ‘War’ as a shorthand to refer to the Second World War, and to differentiate it from other wars and conflicts that are discussed. 10  Aditya Kiran Kakati, ‘Guns, Gifts, and Guerrillas Knowledge and Objects during World War II in the Indo–​Myanmar (Burma) Frontier’, in Lipokmar Dzüvichü and Manjeet Baruah (eds.), Objects and Frontiers in Modern Asia: Between the Mekong and the Indus (New York: Routledge, 2019). 11 Ibid. 12 Christopher Bayly and Timothy Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941–​ 1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) 269. 13  Andrew Selth, ‘Race and Resistance in Burma, 1942–​1945’, Modern Asian Studies, 20/​3 (July 1986), 483–​484. 14  Mary P. Callahan, Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 88. 15  Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 33.

600   Aditya Kiran Kakati before then had included a large number of Karen members, including senior military commanders).16 After 1945, competing visions of Burma and competing armies emerged. Each was demarcated along ethnic lines as well as purported histories of collaboration or resistance during the War. Aung San negotiated the reorganization of the Burmese army on the colonial principle of ethnically homogenous units. After interning Karen recruits or provoking their defection due to the revolution, Aung San ultimately consolidated the ‘core’ of the state military with an ethnically Burman composition, self-​referred to as the Tatmadaw.17 However, clashes between the Burmese army and the various armed groups decimated the Military in the early 1950s, which meant that the national state’s control beyond the immediate vicinity of the capital Rangoon was only made possible through collaboration with local political armies like that of the Socialist Party, whose guerrillas later became counter-​insurgency experts. This was largely indicative of a newly negotiated pattern of patronage and resource allocation, in what had otherwise become ‘lawless’ territories.18 Within many of the resistance movements in the region, including those of the Nagas and Karens, claims to self-​determination tend to link the idea of wartime political ‘loyalty’ to the Allies as measures of ‘civilizational’ evolution (and in turn ‘national consciousness’). This adds to the rhetoric of cultural and ethnic identity preservation due to post-​war persecution at the hands of the majority Burmans. In the case of the Karen, initially, nationalist claims drew legitimacy from a hierarchical closeness to the British as allies in war, along with socio-​economic grievances. The Karen made territorial claims to the British in the mid-​1940s that were motivated by desire to control vital resources, access to the sea, and the economic viability of a potential new state.19 The Karen National Defence Organisation (KNDO) since 1947 (it became the Karen National Liberation Army or KNLA in 1949) and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) since 1961 have each challenged the Military and functioned as parallel civil–​military governance structures in their respective territories around Burmese international borders. However, the long-​standing existence and pervasiveness of such armed alternative-​governments have been stereotypically portrayed as ‘ethnically-​motivated’ armies.20 This is a reductive characterization that obscures the nature of political networks and negotiations, which can better explain the durability of armed conflicts over time.

16 Mikael

Gravers, ‘Disorder as Order: The Ethno-​Nationalist Struggle of the Karen in Burma/​ Myanmar—​A Discussion of the Dynamics of an Ethicized Civil War and Its Historical Roots’, Journal of Burma Studies, 19/​1 (2015), 53–​54. 17  This term is highly contested, especially since the military coup in Myanmar since February 2021. The term seeks to draw legitimacy and a genealogy from the pre-​colonial Burmese Royal army. As this institution currently wages war against its own people, many critics reject this term and prefer to use Sit Tat (military). Given the baggage of nomenclature, I use ‘Military’ as a proper noun to refer to the predominant, state institution. See Aung Kaung Myat, ‘Sit-​Tat or Military? Debates on What to Call the Most Powerful Institution in Burma’, Tea Circle (blog), October 3, 2022, https://​teac​ircl​eoxf​ord.com/​polit​ ics/​sit-​tat-​or-​Milit​ary-​deba​tes-​on-​what-​to-​call-​the-​most-​power​ful-​inst​itut​ion-​in-​burma/​. 18 Callahan, Making Enemies, 134–​145. 19  Gravers, ‘Disorder as Order’, 51. 20 Mandy Sadan, ‘Ethnic Armies and Ethnic Conflict in Burma: Reconsidering the History of Colonial Militarization in the Kachin Region of Burma during the Second World War’, South East Asia Research, 21/​4 (1 December 2013), 603–​605.

Limits of Sovereignty    601 Paying more attention to the shifting coercive and collaborative forms through which state-​making and resistance to it occurred since 1945 in such zones will deepen our grasp of how beneficent activities in the shape of development restructure conflict-​ridden societies, thereby making conflict more durable in bordered-​lands. Such dynamics appear more starkly in borderzones, where the presence of the state is often thinly stretched if not absent. Such a situation has been more acute in Burma’s borderzones, where the initial 1950s conflicts of the national regime against opponents like the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and the Karen National Union (parent of KNLA and KNDO) were centred on the ‘core’ of Burma’s major towns and cities. Eventually this regional pattern was to change as the war front was pushed towards the hills that surround most of the country and its international borders.21

Blank Spaces, Bordered-​L ands: Filling Empty Spaces with Sovereignty As we saw above, the effect of post-​war adjustments and competing claims to nationhood as part of larger global processes of decolonization had repercussions in fragmenting and multiplying territorial boundaries and hardening ethnic identities, which are starkly visible in borderzones. The relevance of ‘borders’ as markers of political lines became more prominent in the emergent global system of nation-​states that replaced fluid boundaries of colonial ‘frontiers’. The latter were imagined as ‘empty’ spaces that could be filled with political or economic expansion through processes of coercion and negotiation.22 While a border may provide a semblance of territorial fixity and of the sovereign authority of states, the political dynamics of ‘bordered-​lands’ confirms the continuing incompleteness of the bordering process, one marked by continuous negotiation. Further, I will illustrate that actually states have not really sought to completely consolidate border territories in transitioning from colonial frontiers. States tried alternative arrangements to renegotiate with societies and armed groups in the guise of ‘development-​like’23 activities combined with violent coercion. I suggest that the concept of ‘blank spaces’ better describes the ways in which the absence of a hegemonic state, especially in borderzones, can help rethink our understanding of territoriality, state-​formation, development, and the dynamics of insurgency and counter-​ insurgency. Some have used the term ‘blank spaces’ to refer to zones that were excluded from traditional forms of territorial colonialism, and instead examine colonial-​type relationships identifiable in debates on ‘colonialism without colonies’.24 Here, I use ‘blank spaces’ beneficial 21 

Martin Smith, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity, 2nd ed. (Dhaka: The University Press 1999), 96. 22  Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, ‘Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands’, Journal of World History, 8/​2 (1997), 215. 23  This term problematizes the idea of ‘development’ and is more accurate to describe the phenomena in question since colonial/​post-​colonial states in their own bureaucratic language actually used a variety of terms and practices that do not fit within a standardized template. 24  Barbara Lüthi, Francesca Falk, and Patricia Purtschert, ‘Colonialism without Colonies: Examining Blank Spaces in Colonial Studies’, National Identities, 18/​1 (2 January 2016), 1–​9.

602   Aditya Kiran Kakati instead as a concept to examine spaces that have remained contested in the peripheries of states, and to indicate that the presence of borders may not always be accompanied by any substantial administrative presence of states. India and Burma’s borders remained officially undefined till 1967.25 Further, this chapter will illustrate through the scholarship on South/​South East Asian borderlands that the visible ‘absence’ of states does not mean that they do not oscillate between various modes of coercive control to renegotiate their authority and consequent capacity for power-​sharing or the accumulation of capital. This is particularly relevant to the recent decade of scholarship inspired by James C. Scott, who used Willem van Schendel’s concept on pan-​Asian mountain borderzones, described as ‘Zomia’, as spaces of anarchy where societies could ‘evade’ coercive state control.26 I argue against Scott and others’ idea of ‘evasion’ along with the assumption that nation-​states always strive towards greater legibility of their claimed subjects through processes such as the sedentarization of agriculture and the routinization of administration.27 Evidence from the Sino-​Indian-​Burmese bordered-​lands suggest that states do not always use these strategies to assert or territorialize sovereignty. In these regions, state-​making has been historically uneven, itinerant, and episodic in nature. For instance, it was the case in the loosely administered eastern Himalayan frontier that came to be known as North-​ East Frontier Agency (NEFA) overlapping British India, Burma, and Tibet. Less than a decade after Indian independence in 1947 and China’s occupation of Tibet in 1950, Indian state-​making policies moved away from a military-​coercive approach to that of ‘beneficent activities’ in the form of developmental responses and negotiation with local populations in a bid to win their favour and prevent allegiances towards communist China across the border. State-​making in these borderzones nonetheless fluctuated between a range of coercive and developmental responses, while simultaneously remaining vulnerable and fragmented well into the 1960s.28 The key observation here is that rather than being instances of societies that ‘evaded’ the state, it is the state itself that has often remained elusive. States were hard to recognize in the ways in which it may or may not be embedded spatially in the everyday life-​worlds of the bordered-​lands. The ‘late’ colonial states had acquired new features and distinctive modes of operation. This was particularly evident in the emergence of post-​Second World War reconstruction and development as ideals for indigenous and post-​colonial nation-​building, which, in turn, legitimized new forms of imperialism and exploitation.29 While borders and territory are sometimes considered integral to this process, they were often selectively

25  Bérénice Guyot-​Réchard, ‘Tangled Lands: Burma and India’s Unfinished Separation, 1937–​1948’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 80/​2 (May 2021), 293–​315. 26  James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Yale Agrarian Studies Series (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). I elaborate on ‘Zomia’ in the chapter’s next section. 27  James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 28  Bérénice Guyot-​Réchard, ‘Tour Diaries and Itinerant Governance in The Eastern Himalayas, 1909–​ 1962’, The Historical Journal, 60/​4 (December 2017), 1,023–​1,046. 29  Benjamin Zachariah, ‘British and Indian Ideas of “Development”: Decoding Political Conventions in the Late Colonial State’, Itinerario, 23/​3–​4 (November 1999), 180.

Limits of Sovereignty    603 recognized, enforced, or securitized by states, which in turn has produced geo-​political ‘blank spaces’ of sovereignty. The nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century histories of managing the frontiers of British India and Burma, as well as the diplomatic ties with ‘non-​colonized’ neighbours like Tibet, China, and Siam (Thailand), have featured the production of various types of ‘blank spaces’—​a phenomenon especially salient in zones where the political authority between them overlapped and was contested. Thongchai Winichakul’s seminal work underlined alternate practices that signify the relationship of sovereignty and space. He pointed out that, at the Siam-​Burma frontier, boundaries between political entities had discontinuous borders, which did not necessarily have any interface with each other.30 This allows us to imagine corridor zones or ‘no-​man’s lands’ (albeit marked by passageways) within which various types and degrees of relationships with political authority subsisted. Such degrees of political authority could be envisaged in the peculiar geography of ‘Excluded’ and ‘Partially Excluded’ Areas, which were created in 1935 out of areas formerly known as ‘Backward Tracts’ in India, while a similar distinction was made for Burma’s hill tracts called Frontier Areas that comprised most of its international land borders.31 Such categorizations have had a long and complex history in frontier management and practices of sovereignty that sought to impose territorial control over mobility. These enclosed populations according to the dictates of capital extraction, a process usually accompanied by punitive force when necessary. State-​making and the delineation of territory in the Indo-​Burma frontier developed haphazardly, facilitated by laws such as the Inner Line regulation that separated ‘tribes’ from other populations in Assam.32 Thus, the delineation of space and sovereignty was not neat, and where interstices of ‘empty spaces’ existed, colonial laws incrementally crept in to fill the void further shaping spatial divisions.33 Recent studies have analysed the selective nature of state-​making in borderzones like the NEFA region, with specific regard to ‘development’ as a technique of state-​extension. In NEFA’s China borders, the British Indian state embarked upon a minimal and strategic form of development that consisted of ‘essential administrative arrangements’ as part of a ‘forward policy’ intended to vindicate the British Indian claim on the disputed McMahon Line border with China.34 For example, in 1943–​1944 such measures included setting up a dispensary in Dirang, a nodal point on the mountain routes to Tibet, which was intended to mark the non-​military presence of a ‘benevolent’ state and signal interest in the region’s international boundaries. A non-​military presence was chosen in light of the area’s heightened geopolitical sensitivity due to the proximity of both Chinese and American wartime Allied forces. 30 Thongchai

Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-​Body of a Nation, paperback ed (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 76–​77. 31  Robert Reid, ‘The Excluded Areas of Assam’, The Geographical Journal, 103/​1–​2 (January 1944), 18–​ 29 and Brigadier J.F. Bowerman, ‘The Frontier Areas of Burma’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 95/​ 4732 (1946), 44–​55. 32 Peter Robb, ‘The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example on the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s’, Modern Asian Studies, 31/​2 (1 May 1997), 256–​259. 33  Anandaroop Sen, ‘The Law of Emptiness: Episodes from Lushai and Chin Hills (1890–​ 98)’, in Neeladri Bhattacharya and Joy Pachuau (eds.), Landscape, Culture, and Belonging: Writing the History of Northeast India (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 207–​236. 34  Swargajyoti Gohain, ‘Selective Access: Or, How States Make Remoteness’, Social Anthropology, 27/​ 2 (2019), 214.

604   Aditya Kiran Kakati After the Chinese occupation of Indian territories in 1962, a strategic road from the foothills to Tawang near the Tibet border came into operation, its use largely confined to military needs.35 The western part of the NEFA in question, known as Monyul, had been deliberately maintained as a ‘buffer zone’ since the 1900s by British imperial policy-​makers through a dual process of framing the area as ‘inhospitable’ to governance, and by severing historical ties of mobility and local links to other existing authority structures.36 Thus, blank spaces were created by hollowing out the political and cultural connections within a particular territory. The NEFA example pertains to territory which mattered to states due to external security threats, and whose strategic importance increased in the aftermath of the Sino-​Indian conflict in 1962. In contrast, the long-​standing ambiguities of ‘unsettled’ borders in the Naga Hills District created in 1867 (adjoining Burma) reveal a different pattern. The Naga Hills District was regulated by an inner line demarcating zones of capital extraction in ‘arable’ lands (for example, tea gardens) from the seemingly ‘unproductive’ hills beyond. The inner line was malleable, however, and was realigned in accordance with changing colonial economic demands, simultaneously marking out territories judged to be outside the domain of capitalist development which created segregated and ‘anarchic’ spaces.37 On both sides of the Indo-​Burma border, legal enclosures and degrees of administrative presence isolated the hill terrain, using cultural arguments that advocated that ethnic ‘tribes’ be left alone until they could evolve and progress towards ‘development’ at par with the majority populations of their respective nascent nation-​states. It is recognized that borderzone ‘tribes’ such as Nagas, Kachins, Shans, and Chins have had a long history of interactions with states as ‘potential’ state-​makers, colonial and otherwise, that included raiding, which was state-​resource-​seeking behaviour rather than evasion.38 The colonial state often responded by separating off these domains administratively and juridically, accompanied by occasional shows of force, and sometimes redistributing power through customary structures like the chieftainship system. The Tuensang division of NEFA had been maintained as an ‘un-​administered’ area between the international boundaries of India and Burma since 1866, until an outpost with a political officer was established in 1951.39 It is not surprising that the separatist violence of the Naga and the declaration of a parallel Naga government (the self-​titled Federal Government of Nagaland) in 1955 emerged in blank spaces like Tuensang. Here, the administrative presence of the Indian state, as well as that of internal ‘moderate’ factions of the Naga leadership, was weak.40 On the Burmese side of Naga inhabited territory, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his Burmese counterpart U Nu received a warm reception from 35 

Ibid., 215–​216. Swargajyoti Gohain, ‘Producing Monyul as Buffer: Spatial Politics in a Colonial Frontier’, Modern Asian Studies, 54/​2 (March 2020), published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 August 2019, 439–​440. 37  Kar, ‘When was the Postcolonial: A History of Policing Impossible Lines’, in Sanjib Baruah, Beyond Counter-​Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 51–​52. 38  Jelle Wouters, ‘Keeping the Hill Tribes at Bay: A Critique from India’s Northeast of James C. Scott’s Paradigm of State Evasion’, European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 39 (2011) 55, 59. 39  Pran Nath Luthra, ‘Nagaland from a District to a State’ (Shillong: Director of Information and Public Relations, Arunachal Pradesh, 1974), 7. 40  B.N. Mullik, My Years with Nehru: 1948–​1964 (Bombay: Allied Publishers, 1972), 303–​304. 36 

Limits of Sovereignty    605 Nagas, Kachins, and Chins during their 1953 visit to the administrative node of Singkaling-​ Hkamti. However, as Naga violence and a brutal counter-​insurgency campaign by the Indian military escalated in the mid-​1950s, the urgent need for a political settlement increased. Its outlines envisaged avoiding ‘over administration’ while impressing upon Nagas that they were considered as ‘partners in development’ in a possible future in which they would be granted greater political autonomy within India, but not independence.41 After years of complex political negotiations, the Indian state of Nagaland was carved out of Assam in 1963. The Naga Hills and Tuensang were administratively combined, which reportedly deflated the aspirations of radical Naga nationalists. The severity of Indian army coercion, including the perpetration of atrocities, also increased local desperation for a settlement.42 After 1964 repeated ceasefires with insurgents and efforts to achieve lasting peace contributed to the ability of the Nagaland state government to bargain with India to secure the highest per capita expenditure of federal funds among all Indian states. Many former guerrillas were employed in development projects like road building which, in turn, were meant to facilitate counter-​insurgency efforts.43 In this context, counter-​insurgency and development-​like activities have at times served to maintain blank spaces, at others to fill them. Similar practices have informed the nature of political interventions in the Indo-​Myanmar region, the discussion of which offers insights into comparable processes elsewhere. These examples suggest that ‘counter-​insurgency’ and ‘development’ can be conceptually broadened by viewing sovereignty as a spectrum rather than being absolute.44

State Presence, Absence, and Evasion: Parcelling Sovereignty The contentiously productive paradigm of ‘state evasion’45 in studies of highland peripheries emerge from interstices of South and South East Asian ‘Massif ’, or what has been famously conceptualized as ‘Zomia’.46 The populations of this vast region seemingly resisted state

41 

Sajal Nag, ‘Nehru and the Nagas: Minority Nationalism and the Post-​Colonial State’, Economic and Political Weekly, 44/​49 (5 December 2009), 48–​55, 53. 42  Gordon P. Means and Ingunn N. Means, ‘Nagaland—​The Agony of Ending a Guerrilla War’, Pacific Affairs, 39/​3–​4 (1966), 296. 43  Gordon P. Means, ‘Cease-​Fire Politics in Nagaland’, Asian Survey, 11/​10 (1971), 1,014–​1,015. 44 Aihwa Ong, ‘Graduated Sovereignty in South-​ East Asia’, Theory, Culture & Society, 17/​4 (2000), 55–​75. 45 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed. 46  James Scott in the book above heightened the conceptual popularity of ‘Zomia’, which was originally proposed by Willem van Schendel, ‘Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20/​6 (2002), 647–​668. The term ‘Massif ’ was used initially by Jean Michaud, and taken up by others as an extended reconceptualization of Zomia, beyond a purely geographical category. The idea that these spaces continued to form ‘refuge zones’ for anti-​imperialist as well as anti-​colonialist movements has continued. See Bernard Formoso, ‘Zomian or Zombies? What Future Exists for the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif?’, Journal of Global History, 5/​2 (July 2010), 313–​332 and Jean Michaud, ‘Editorial—​Zomia and Beyond’, Journal of Global History, 5/​2 (July 2010), 187–​214.

606   Aditya Kiran Kakati coercion by taking refuge in highland zones, exploiting the latter’s inability to ‘climb’ vertical geographies such as jungle-​clad hills.47 Recent scholarship has engaged with this model, and has suggested that states and societies negotiated their interactions through tactical alliances and material relations, with arrangements that do not fit the binary image of evasion versus adoption of dominant state structures. Seen critically, state evasion nonetheless remains a useful heuristic to examine the stakes of state-​making and the forms it could take, since many insurgencies have gained legitimacy by highlighting the failures of state-​led development.48 Moving beyond these binaries, this chapter indicates that there were selective, ‘standoffish’,49 and alternative manifestations of state-​making, whether through violent counter-​insurgency or development campaigns. As indicated in the previous section, some states deliberately abstained from asserting sovereignty through conventional means such as administrative structures or the assertion of legal sovereignty within certain border regions, and instead embedded themselves in more subtle and indirect ways. Some of the cases I present also demonstrate that, rather than states choosing selective legal-​administrative consolidation as a deliberate tactic, such responses were also contingent and situational. This has resulted in the creation of enclosures since the 1950s, areas which, paradoxically, were either targets of development or were largely excluded from it. This has allowed distinctive forms of parallel, often armed rebel group-​led governance to emerge along these bordered-​areas zones as alternative authority structures to states. Here, there have been swathes of ‘blank spaces’ around the respective borders signified by the relative absence of tangible Indian and Burmese state control at their adjoining borders. Thus, ‘refuge-​zones’ for dissidents have been historically facilitated in these hill-​jungle spaces, due either to the deliberate absence of state or its inability to achieve authority over these areas. Discussions on the historical production of frontier spaces as zones of ‘savagery’ are useful for understanding why insurgencies often emerge in such locations in the first place as a consequence of state practices.50 In Scott’s discussion, the hill-​geographies are marked as vertical spaces of exclusion, where the itinerancy of local populations fed stereotypes of ‘barbarity’, ‘unruliness’, and state ‘evasion’.51 As discussed earlier, hill-​spaces were conceptualized as a separate legal terrain incapable of becoming ‘fully modern’. These were seen as liminal places, which deserved the ‘kind and amount of law’ that corresponded to the level of development that could be provided.52 Thus, sovereignty could be geographically graded and culturally differentiated. Such legal and administrative flexibility had legitimized the use of violence, exclusion, and extraction for imperial businesses and state-​making enterprises since the late nineteenth century. Selective imprecision, indifference, and ambiguity promoted the flexibility of contractual transactions in the longer history of Naga Hills that were favourable for some while denying access to others, as, for instance, by denying indigenous rights to 47 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 62. 48 

See Bengt G. Karlsson, ‘Evading the State: Ethnicity in Northeast India through the Lens of James Scott’, Asian Ethnology, 72/​2 (2013), 321–​331. 49 Dan Slater and Diana Kim, ‘Standoffish States: Nonliterate Leviathans in Southeast Asia’, TRaNS: Trans -​Regional and -​National Studies of Southeast Asia, 3/​1 (January 2015), 25–​44. 50  Benjamin D. Hopkins, Ruling the Savage Periphery: Frontier Governance and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2020). 51 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 101–​102. 52  Lauren A. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–​1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 225.

Limits of Sovereignty    607 resource access by using tropes of ‘nomadism’ and itinerancy.53 The ambiguity of law and sovereign jurisdiction meant that ‘insurgent’ actions were not necessarily met with punitive measures, a trend which seems to have continued as we shall see below. As nation-​states became predominant in the era of decolonization, new international borders acquired sharper definition. Such borders might give the impression of growing state capacity to define the legality of space, where the limits of licit/​illicit or ‘rule-​of-​law’ versus ‘disorder’ are supposedly determined, and sovereignty can be paraded.54 New borders in the decolonizing era of nation-​states faced the problem of ‘rebel sanctuaries,’ which harboured insurgent networks in a foreign country across the border or further afield beyond the reach of their adversaries.55 This new geographical construct of transnational ‘blank spaces’ of refuge was accounted for by modernization theorists like Walt Whitman Rostow who considered techniques of development and national indoctrination as the optimum solution to contain the spread of guerrilla insurgencies during the Cold War.56 There are, though, other continuities between the negotiation of sovereignty in frontier areas through everyday practices and the longer colonial history of structuring allegiance networks and culturally defined entities like ‘chiefs’ as agents of indirect rule.57 It is worth pausing here to reconsider why territory, space, and borders matter to states. For nation-​states, borders are believed to be central in order to valorize claims to sovereignty, particularly through the use of legitimate force within that state’s bounded territory.58 I would caution against the teleological notion that ‘late’ colonial frontiers were successfully converted into the ordered borderlands of nation-​states.59 Recent scholarship has shown that, in effect, border spaces might operate in ways similar to those of preceding colonial frontiers, where the requirement and capacity for seeking legibility of the bounded space were neither consistent nor desirable.60 The question should then be modified to think about not if states care about territory, but rather when, how, and under what conditions are they likely to, and whether they are even able to do so.

53 Bodhisattva Kar, ‘Nomadic Capital and Speculative Tribes: A Culture of Contracts in the Northeastern Frontier of British India’, The Indian Economic & Social History Review, 53/​1 (January 2016), 41–​67. 54  Willem van Schendel, ‘Spaces of Engagement: How Borderlands, Illicit Flows, and Territorial States Interlock’, in William Van Schendel and Itty Abraham (eds.), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, Tracking Globalization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 45. 55  Mathilde von Bülow, ‘Rebel Sanctuaries and Late Colonial Conflicts: The Case of Federal Germany during Algeria’s War of Independence, 1954–​ 1962’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 56  Walt Whitman Rostow, ‘Guerrilla Warfare in Underdeveloped Area’, The Guerrilla and How to Fight Him, Field Manual FRP12-​25 (Washington: U.S. Marine Corps, 1990 [original 1962]). 57  Janet C. Sturgeon, ‘Border Practices, Boundaries, and the Control of Resource Access: A Case from China, Thailand and Burma’, Development and Change, 35/​3 (2004), 463–​484. 58 Thomas M. Wilson, ‘Borders: Cities, Boundaries, and Frontiers’, in A Companion to Urban Anthropology (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014), 106–​107. 59  Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, ‘From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-​States, and the Peoples in between in North American History’, The American Historical Review, 104/​3 (1999), 814–​841. 60  Susan M. Walcott, ‘Bordering the Eastern Himalaya: Boundaries, Passes, Power Contestations’, Geopolitics, 15/​1 (29 January 2010), 62–​81.

608   Aditya Kiran Kakati In situations of insurgencies where the cost of failing to territorialize the state could be high, it would initially seem puzzling if states refused to do so. For instance, during the harsh military pacification of the Karen insurgency in Burma in 1948, the repression undertaken by the Military included forcible expulsions of non-​Burmans through scorched-​earth policies, which created waves of refugees and displaced persons. These measures were not followed by administrative homogenization, and instead prioritized excluding or expelling minorities wilfully.61 This would arguably seem less paradoxical if interpreted as an ‘emptying out’ of spaces, especially from today’s perspective in which the plight of minority Rohingyas from Myanmar’s Rakhine (former Arakan) state looms large. Contemporary examples from the longstanding Kachin insurgency can help rethink the salience of bordering practices and what type of borders matter to states. Instead of privileging the efforts of Myanmar’s military regime to impose definitive international boundaries, the ‘real’ stakes of bordering are more identifiable in a variety of internal bureaucratic and township based borders in Kachin and Shan areas that have emerged as a state practice to exclude certain populations from census registration or voting.62 This is even more significant due to the territorially enclaved nature of state and non-​state armed groups’ influence, where claims of sovereign control are literally dotted across the map with no visible lines of distinction between them. Such parcelled zones of sovereignty in the Sino-​Indian-​ Myanmar borderlands are perhaps best conceived as a ‘tapestry of spaces’ that include enclaves of rebel controlled territories, special economic zones for development, autonomous and self-​ administered zones, special regions, and military bases.63 State-​making depended on the lack of formal governance structures, the use of coercion, the creation of territorial enclosures, and the ascription of sharper ethno-​cultural divides. These provided alternatives to recognizable variants of contemporary ‘liberal’ state-​making. These processes resemble both traces and deviations from what could be thought of as ‘coercive development’ across counter-​insurgency ‘models’ historically and transnationally. Counter-​insurgency operations in India have sought to mirror the guerrilla warfare tactics of insurgents, while the latter, in turn, replicated the apparatus of governance, taxation, and justice characteristic of centralized states.64 There may be other ways in which states make their presence felt in areas outside of their sovereignty. States and their rivals still continue to use violence productively in pursuit of the same objective, using coercion and working through local proxies to decentralize violence in order to extend political influence at less direct cost. Violence remains an attractive alternative for all sides in order to raise the stakes whenever a shift in power-​balance or a redistribution of resources is anticipated. In the states of northeast India, there is an arguable correlation between a rise in violent insurgent activities against public targets and events on the political calendar such as elections, in

61 

Slater and Kim, ‘Standoffish States’, 40. Dean and Mart Viirand, ‘Multiple Borders and Bordering Orocesses in Kachin State’, in Alexander Horstmann, Martin Saxer, and Alessandro Rippa (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Asian Borderlands, (New York: Routledge, 2018), chap. 16, 219. 63  Nicholas Farrelly, ‘Anomalous Spaces’, in Adam Simpson, Nicholas Farrelly, and Ian Holliday (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Myanmar (London & New York: Routledge/​Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), chap. 11. 64  Nandini Sundar, ‘Mimetic Sovereignties, Precarious Citizenship: State Effects in a Looking-​Glass World’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41/​4 (2014), 469–​490. 62  Karin

Limits of Sovereignty    609 which such groups act as racketeers, cutting deals with government agents.65 In Burma, the government established Ka Kwe Ye (KKY) home guard units in order to privatize conflict in the early 1960s, along with providing sanctions and protection to local warlords and opium cartels—​a move which eventually eroded the financial power of insurgent armies while the warlords fought the rebels on behalf of the state, which lacked the resources to take on the task directly.66 The foregoing examples illustrate that degrees of state presence or absence, rather than ‘evasion’, allow a more revealing investigation of the contradictions in the processes of state-​making in borderzones, where the stakes of performing sovereignty are thought to be high. The paradigm of ‘evasion’ points to an understanding of the state as a coercive and extractive agent, elucidating the notion of ‘coercive development’. This approach offers alternate understandings of the political dynamics involved, which go beyond the paradigm of ‘greed-​grievance’ or of ‘winning hearts and minds’ in order to situate the spectrum of coercive forms of state-​making and resistance.67

Filling Empty Spaces: Laws, Loyalties, and Licence for Coercion The ‘displacement’ or relative weakness of the Burmese state from the collapse of the British colonial state in 1942 until the military coup of 1962 left it particularly conducive to political fragmentation.68 The several unsuccessful attempts at economic restructuring and other political means to gain legitimacy pursued by the post-​colonial Burmese state against its competitors caused heightened tension in the border regions. After the Second World War, a form of continuing ‘ceasefire capitalism’ emerged across the various border regions of Burma which was concomitant with the efforts made by its central government to extend political reach into many of these areas while also accruing additional resource-​based rents. Military state-​building here has only been possible thanks to realignments of power-​sharing with non-​state authority figures, including ‘ceasefire organisations’, insurgent groups, and pro-​government paramilitaries.69 Such conditions of ‘armed peace’ have historically allowed insurgent groups to subsist, through activities that included trafficking, forms of taxation, and securing state-​endorsed contracts for new development projects.70 65 Bethany Lacina, ‘Rethinking Delhi’s Northeast India Policy’, in Baruah (ed.), Beyond Counterinsurgency, 333, 66  Catherine Brown, ‘Burma: The Political Economy of Violence’, Disasters, 23/​3 (1999), 246, 67  Alpa Shah, ‘The Intimacy of Insurgency: Beyond Coercion, Greed or Grievance in Maoist India’, Economy and Society, 42/​3 (2013), 480–​506; Philippe Le Billon, ‘The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts’, Political Geography, 20/​5 (2001), 561–​584. 68  Robert H. Taylor, The State in Myanmar (London: Hurst, 2009). 69  Kevin Woods, ‘Ceasefire Capitalism: Military–​ Private Partnerships, Resource Concessions and Military-​State Building in the Burma-​China Borderlands’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38/​4 (1 October 2011), 749. 70  Mandy Sadan (ed.), War and Peace in the Borderlands of Myanmar: The Kachin Ceasefire, 1994–​2011 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016). See chapters by Lee Jones, Mikael Gravers, Mandy Sadan, and Robert Taylor.

610   Aditya Kiran Kakati It is suggested that insurgencies in Burma were reinvigorated after General Ne Win’s 1962 military coup, largely due to the emergence of a massive illicit economy, which substantially arose because of the creation of nationalized state monopolies. The military government under the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC)71 that replaced Ne Win’s government in 1988 after crushing the popular pro-​democracy movement tried to erode the financial base and external linkages of insurgent groups, while supporting large-​scale road-​ building and border development programmes through United Nations aid. Interestingly, the Military had often been outmatched by insurgent groups in their access to arms and weaponry, and was previously unable or reluctant to use air power sufficiently due to the unsustainable costs involved (this has changed today, since the Military after their coup in February 2021 repeatedly uses airstrikes against civilian settlements and insurgent targets to quell resistance). Second World War-​era infrastructure, like the Ledo-​Burma road, had fallen into disrepair, which resulted in a return to archaic modes of porterage labour to support counter-​insurgency missions, which came at a huge collateral and human cost.72 In the 1950s large numbers of Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) troops who had taken refuge in Burma’s Shan areas after the War were financed and operationalized by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to fight Chinese communists, by acquiring control of the shadow economy of opium. The KMT were driven out by 1961 with the aid of China, after which the Communist Party of Burma dominated the opium economy until the late 1970s, operating through ‘toll-​gates’ on the Sino-​Burmese borders until those arrangements also came to an end following the withdrawal of Chinese support.73 The poppy fields for opium were mostly in rebel-​controlled pockets, and involved the various small Shan ethnic-​armies like the Shan United Army, which essentially operated as drug-​mafias by using their well-​ trained and well-​armed troops against other minority armies in return for government indifference to their business ventures. In response, the Burmese state turned to American aircraft, pilot training, and spraying programmes to destroy poppy fields, the aim being to cause widespread destruction of other crops and livestock in minority areas and presumably against political enemies. Ironically, opium production rose meanwhile.74 Within these ‘shadow’ governments and economies,75 local leaders could emerge, playing multiple roles during their careers—​whether as an opium magnate, a government militia leader, a Shan-​ nationalist, and so on.76 Thus, political loyalties have been far from static in international borderzones. After 1988, political changes in the Shan areas saw the emergence of the United Wa State Army (UWSA) and the Military has sought to ‘manage’ rather than monopolize the state’s presence capitalizing on the region’s long history of drug trafficking to establish coercion-​intensive forms of state-​making through coalitions with insurgents and ceasefire groups to act as militias who also receive taxation rights or control over enclaves for drug production and trade. Such strategies have enabled the Military to finance and establish 71 

The SLORC was reconstituted into the State Peace and Development Council in 1997 as the official name of the military government until it was dissolved in 2011. 72 Smith, Burma: Insurgency, 99–​101. 73  Brown, ‘Burma: Political Economy’, 244. 74  Josef Silverstein, ‘Civil War and Rebellion in Burma’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 21/​1 (1990), 121–​122. 75 Eric Michael Wilson (ed.), Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty (New York: Pluto Press 2009). 76  William Delaney, ‘On Capturing an Opium King’, Society 11/​6 (1 September 1974), 68.

Limits of Sovereignty    611 decentralized military and administrative structures in a region otherwise deemed to be ‘ungovernable’, where costs of maintaining such state presence have been otherwise high.77 As other contributions to this handbook indicate, developmental practices that were once equated with policies of ‘winning hearts and minds’ of populations sheltering insurgencies are now considered intrinsically ‘coercive’ because they actually involved a gradual process of securitization of spaces (including village resettlement camps and other strategies of forced population removal).78 The once common presumption that counter-​insurgency doctrines were predicated on the linear and sequential enforcement of violent military action, followed by development projects and ‘national indoctrination’ measures, is questionable. National indoctrination might include ethno-​racial-​linguistic assimilation into ‘national’ culture as ‘loyal’ citizens. But, as we have seen, the rhetoric of the development of ‘backward’ populations in the margins of nation-​states to garner their loyalties is not new. Nor should examination of this aspect of counter-​insurgency blind us to the multiple, overlapping loyalties that operate in borderzones, including across national borders. While the inhabitants of borderzones dwellers may respond tactically, balancing multiple loyalties, evading coercion, or seeking amnesty and other political-​economic ‘bargains’ offered by state agents, there were also legal mechanisms in play which defined both membership and terms of national citizenship, or exclusion from it as indicated above (voting in elections being the clearest example).79 As this scope for manoeuvre suggests, state-​making and nation-​building need not necessarily be simultaneous processes. Such was evident, for instance, in ‘tribal development’ projects that were undertaken as ‘tools’ for state-​making in the NEFA, but which paradoxically resulted in non-​integration within the Indian-​nation for some NEFA inhabitants in the early post-​colonial era.80 This further indicates how state-​making practices in these bordered lands have resulted in deeper fragmentation of communities along ethnic lines. The idea of the ‘exceptionality’ of highland borderzones within the wider region as ‘dangerous’ places of resistance and refuge evident in Indian governmental action in the NEFA shows continuities with colonial policies that sought to segregate dissident spaces via discrete legal mechanisms, and variants of martial law in particular. Before and after Indian independence, these restrictions permitted a normalization of security force violence alongside the pursuit of ‘national’ indoctrination projects. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the post-​colonial Indian government invoked and expanded upon colonial laws like the Defence of India Regulations, which were initially intended for the internment of enemy aliens during the Second World War, applying their restrictions to the population resettlements in Naga and Lushai (Mizo) Hills. The Malayan model of British counter-​insurgency was also

77  Patrick Meehan, ‘Fortifying or Fragmenting the State? The Political Economy of the Opium/​Heroin Trade in Shan State, Myanmar, 1988–​2013’, Critical Asian Studies, 47/​2 (3 April 2015), 274–​276. 78  Karl Hack, ‘Everyone Lived in Fear: Malaya and the British Way of Counter-​Insurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (October 2012), 671–​699. 79  See David M. Anderson and Daniel Branch, Allies at the End of Empire: Loyalists, Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–​76 (London: Routledge, 2017), particularly the chapters by David Anderson and Sibylle Scheipers. 80 Bérénice Guyot-​ Réchard, ‘Nation-​Building or State-​Making? India’s North-​East Frontier and the Ambiguities of Nehruvian Developmentalism, 1950–​1959’, Contemporary South Asia, 21/​1 (March 2013), 23–​25.

612   Aditya Kiran Kakati drawn upon by the Indian state in these hills to demarcate ‘insurgent spaces’ as those of non-​ citizenship, again using legal instruments to create a social landscape of impunity.81 Even as late as the mid-​1970s the Assam state-​government dealing with the Naga insurgency along the Indo-​Burma borders remained cautious about actualizing a deeper state ‘presence’ locally. The creation of Nagaland in 1963 also complicated the international boundary demarcation with Burma. Territorial transfers as part of this boundary delineation would have cut across Naga, severing Burmese ethno-​territorial ties and loyalties to tribal communities and land. Violence continued as a result. Indeed, the protracted failure of brutal military suppression to end conflict in Nagaland, as well as external support for local armed groups from China and East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), resulted in a heightened Indian security force presence beyond the 1970s. The Indian military increasingly assumed the primary role in maintaining legal order, and became the main instrument of infrastructure construction and national development. Indian policies were thus double-​edged, combining high levels of violence with promises of social improvement. Confronted with the failure of military and developmental approaches that had been couched in a rhetoric of preserving ‘tribal’ culture, the Nehru government’s policies in the Naga Hills and NEFA from the late 1950s sought various localized power-​sharing arrangements.82 The 1960s and 1970s saw renewed attempts to make peace in the Naga region, with signing of ceasefires (1964) and the ‘Shillong Accord’ (1975). Unsuccessful, these efforts at limited negotiation only fuelled factional divides, leading to the further proliferation of armed groups. Territorial concessions as part of ceasefire deals have sparked further conflicts amongst rival armed groups, while provoking the anger of neighbouring state-​ governments from whom the territory envisaged would have to be carved. The stockpiling of arms continued unabated meanwhile.83 Jelle Wouters discusses how ceasefires remain productive today in displacing coercion into an alternate arena, where factions that have been dominant since the 1980s like the Naga National Socialist Council, Isak Muivah (NSCN-​ IM), have been able to strengthen their local control through establishing parallel governance structures. While casualties resulting from Indian army repression have reduced, overall numbers of deaths have remained high because increasing numbers of victims faced violence perpetrated by Naga rebel groups often resulting from their factional feuds.84 Massive state development funds have been funnelled into Nagaland only to be siphoned off by rebel government ‘national workers’ or by former armed ‘underground’ members who have now come into the mainstream and continue to extort ‘taxes’ or resources for construction contracts, which, in turn, are left incomplete while the funding for them is siphoned off. The allure of collaboration with the Indian state and its use of the state of Nagaland apparatus as well as other decentralized administrative mechanisms, including the rehabilitation of former rebel cadres into the army or into the disproportionately large government

81  Nandini Sundar, ‘Interning Insurgent Populations: The Buried Histories of Indian Democracy’, Economic and Political Weekly, 46/​6 (2011), 50. 82  Elisabeth Leake, ‘At the Nation-​State’s Edge: Centre–​Periphery Relations in Post-​1947 South Asia’, The Historical Journal, 59/​2 (June 2016), 509–​539, at 523–​526. 83  Dinesh Kotwal, ‘The Naga Insurgency: The Past and the Future’, Strategic Analysis, 24/​ 4 (1 July 2000), 762–​763. 84  Jelle J.P. Wouters, In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018), 88.

Limits of Sovereignty    613 employment structure, along with the concession of limited political power to various leaders, have all split loyalties, while, at the same time, these allegiances overlap and fluctuate.85 In a climate of state-​endorsed violence and impunity, intrusion of international development programmes, like those of the United Nations Development Programme, has tended to absolve the local government of accountability and responsibility, which has, in turn, exacerbated conflict over land and other key resources.86 ‘Ceasefire cities’ like Dimapur in present-​day Nagaland epitomize the haphazard and seemingly anomalous logic that drives long-​term militarism, capitalism, and urbanism.87 Meanwhile, since the 1990s Chinese infrastructure projects that include roads, plantations, and special economic zones regulate and reorder its borderzones more significantly than official state boundaries.88 The discussions so far indicate how the logic of state-​making and development and the tensions between them have continually adapted in ways that neither necessitated ‘filling’ up blank spaces in borderzones nor ‘emptying’ them out entirely. The recent decades of counter-​ insurgency in the NEFA in particular have been discussed as linear stages of economic development and modernization, their declared aim being to promote greater cultural ‘nationalization’ as opposed to the preservation of ‘tribal culture’.89 Legal security instruments like surrender deals, continued access to arms, as well as development concessions together comprise a distinct political economy of security, predicated upon the management of local loyalties and levels of violence. These policy initiatives, together with the widespread use of martial law, have allowed the states examined here to operate with greater flexibility, territorializing their reach through law, parcelling out economic resources, and mobilizing ambiguous political relations on the Indo-​Myanmar borders.90 These processes have shaped political realignments and spatio-​ cultural boundaries, which are neither temporally linear nor regionally uniform, but have instead contained various permutations of coercion and socio-​economic capital that manifested through selective developmental initiatives, securitization, and enclave production.

Conclusion In conclusion, it can be argued that ‘no man’s lands’ emerged out of new styles of mid-​ twentieth century counter-​insurgency and development that might not appear especially

85 

Ibid., 85–​86, 152–​153. Dolly Kikon, ‘Making Pickles during a Ceasefire’, Economic and Political Weekly, 50/​9 (February 28, 2015), 76–​78. 87  Dolly Kikon and Duncan McDuie-​ Ra, Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur, 1st ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021). 88  Karin Dean, Jasnea Sarma, and Alessandro Rippa, ‘Infrastructures and b/​Ordering: How Chinese Projects Are Ordering China–​Myanmar Border Spaces’, Territory, Politics, Governance (October 5, 2022), 1–​22. 89  Sanjib Baruah, ‘Nationalizing Space: Cosmetic Federalism and the Politics of Development in Northeast India’, Development and Change, 34/​5 (November 2003), 915–​939, 934. For more extensive discussion of the Sino-​Indian war and developmentalism here, see Bérénice Guyot-​Réchard, Shadow States India, China and the Himalayas 1910–​1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 90  Nicholas Farrelly, ‘ “AK47/​M16 Rifle—​Rs. 15,000 Each”: What Price Peace on the Indo-​Burmese Frontier?’, Contemporary South Asia, 17/​3 (September 1, 2009), 283–​297. 86 

614   Aditya Kiran Kakati coercive at first sight. Examining the idea of ‘no man’s lands’ that often appear at the margins of legal states can critique studies of transnationalism which overemphasize mobility and cross-​border connections at the cost of overlooking practices of confinement.91 I proposed the concept of ‘blank spaces’ to show how territorial enclosures in international border regions, which are seen as spaces of flows by globalization theorists, could actually result from contingent and partly deliberate long-​standing policies of warfare, development, and securitization. I discussed cases ranging between 1945 and the 2000s from the confluence of India-​China-​Myanmar, which is often seen as a fluid space of illicitness, where state formation has been perceived to be weak and lacking. To situate the utility of the concept, in the first section we discussed the aftermath of the Second World War and decolonization as constituting new forms of globalization which also wrought fragmentation of former empires into new nation-​states and spaces dominated by ethnic armed minority-​led ‘insurgencies’ in competition for sovereignty. Second, we discussed how borderzones and borders influenced practices of sovereignty, or lack thereof, by state and non-​state actors. The concept of blank spaces was introduced as a lens to examine assumptions about workings of state sovereignty. We saw that pockets of territorial exclusion or ‘no man’s lands’ were produced by deliberate continuity of colonial policies, where violent non-​state actors and illicit economies could thrive. Such areas became caricatured as ‘anarchic zones’, which became self-​fulfilling facts due to the perception that people in these regions ‘evaded’ state formation and existed in political vacuums without institutionalized state presence. Third, we departed from debates on ‘evasion’ of coercive states, which revealed that strategies of state-​making have followed degrees of presence and absence through indirect forms including ‘national indoctrination’, coercive development, and privatization of violence through militias and trafficking mafias. It thus revealed that the line between state and non-​state was not clear and shifted along with new alliances. States do not necessarily seek to establish institutionalized presence and sovereignty, and access to capital could be exercised in other ways. Finally, we continued to examine local shifting allegiances that were determined by access and control over resources and violence, international interventions for infrastructural or development-​like activities, and drug control as well as coercive legal mechanisms that gave extra-​judicial powers. This parcelled sovereignty amongst different actors by sub-​contracting the legitimacy to use armed force, conduct trafficking, and promote inter-​factional feuds that eliminated rivals and all of which came with enormous human costs. Altogether, the discussion revealed insights to explain conditions why violent ‘shadow’ peoples and economies have prevailed in this region. Thus, blank spaces of sovereignty do not just exist as a vacuum to be filled, presumably by nation-​states or their rivals. In this chapter, we have seen that the aftermath of WWII in Asian borderlands, and the longstanding conditions that created and maintained blank spaces in borderzones, have exposed both the limits and entrenchment of sovereignty and institutionalized state-​making, and as a result embroiled societies here in an unending cycle of violence and upheaval. 91  Yael Navaro-​Yashin, ‘ “Life Is Dead Here”: Sensing the Political in No Man’s Land” ’, Anthropological Theory, 3/​1 (March 1, 2003), 107–​125. Curiously, the English term ‘No Man’s Land’ continues to be in use in the India-​Myanmar borderzones, including in the genre of ‘rebel literature’ in the Assamese language. See Jibon Krishna Goswami, Remains of Spring: A Naga Village in the No Man’s Land, trans. Manjeet Baruah (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2016).

Limits of Sovereignty    615

Select Bibliography Baruah, Sanjib, In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2020). Brown, Catherine, ‘Burma: The Political Economy of Violence’, Disasters, 23/​3 (1999), 234–​256, https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​1467-​7717.00115. Callahan, Mary P., Making Enemies: War and State Building in Burma (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003). Farrelly, Nicholas, ‘ “AK47/​M16 Rifle—​Rs. 15,000 Each”: What Price Peace on the Indo-​ Burmese Frontier?’, Contemporary South Asia, 17/​3 (2009), 283–​297, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​ 095849​3090​3108​960. Gohain, Swargajyoti, ‘Selective Access: Or, How States Make Remoteness’, Social Anthropology, 27/​2 (2019), 204–​220, https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​1469-​8676.12650. Gravers, Mikael, ‘Disorder as Order: The Ethno-​Nationalist Struggle of the Karen in Burma/​ Myanmar—​A Discussion of the Dynamics of an Ethicized Civil War and Its Historical Roots’, Journal of Burma Studies, 19/​1 (2015), 27–​78, https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​jbs.2015.0005. Guyot-​Réchard, Bérénice, Shadow States India, China and the Himalayas 1910–​ 1962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Means, Gordon P., ‘Cease-​Fire Politics in Nagaland’, Asian Survey, 11/​10 (1971), 1,005–​1,028, https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​2642​757. Meehan, Patrick, ‘Fortifying or Fragmenting the State? The Political Economy of the Opium/​ Heroin Trade in Shan State, Myanmar, 1988–​2013’, Critical Asian Studies, 47/​2 (2015), 253–​ 282, https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​14672​7 15.2015.1041​280. Sadan, Mandy, War and Peace in the Borderlands of Myanmar: The Kachin Ceasefire, 1994–​2011. NIAS Studies in Asian Topics, 56 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2016). Selth, Andrew, ‘Race and Resistance in Burma, 1942–​1945’, Modern Asian Studies, 20/​3 (1986), 483, https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S00267​49X0​0007​836. Silverstein, Josef, ‘Civil War and Rebellion in Burma’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 21/​1 (1990), 114–​134. Slater, Dan, and Diana Kim, ‘Standoffish States: Nonliterate Leviathans in Southeast Asia’, TRaNS: Trans -​Regional and -​National Studies of Southeast Asia, 3/​1 (2015), 25–​44, https://​ doi.org/​10.1017/​trn.2014.14. Smith, Martin, Burma: Insurgency and the Politics of Ethnicity, Vol. 2. updated ed. (Dhaka: The University Press, Dhaka, 1999). Wouters, Jelle J.P., In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency: Tribes, State, and Violence in Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Chapter 32

T he Hunger G e ne ra l Economic Warfare during the Indochina War Christopher Goscha If we fail to consider the burden we are forcing our people to bear and if we fail to take into account our government’s financial capabilities, we will be going down a risky and dangerous road: we will be recruiting and amassing a large number of troops who will not have food to eat, uniforms to wear, or weapons with which to fight. If we take too many men out of our productive labor force, our economy will not be able to keep up with our army’s needs and requirements. It is then that General Rice will become more powerful than our real generals. —​Truong Chinh, 15 April 19511

The leader of the Vietnamese communist party issued this warning as the People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN) led by General Vo Nguyen Giap attacked French forces defending the rice-​rich Red River delta of northern Vietnam. The offensive was not going well. The People’s Army may have taken a large chunk of the border with China following their border victory at Cao Bang in late 1950, but each time PAVN soldiers attacked in the lowlands in 1951, the French repelled them in a barrage of artillery fire and napalm blasts. Unable to break the French hold on the plains, Giap withdrew his main divisions and sent them deep into the highlands of Indochina, culminating in the epic battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. Behind the well-​known story of the road to Dien Bien Phu lurked another clash, the subject of this essay. It centred on food, its production and distribution. Rice above all. The leaders of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh needed rice to feed their newly created standing army, an expanding civil service, and tens of thousands of porters to supply both. The French of course did everything in their power to stop Ho from feeding his army and the state in charge of it. They renewed pacification programmes in the delta. They assigned troops to guard paddy fields during harvest time, and mobilized their Vietnamese partners in the Associated State of Vietnam to help them. The French even took the economic war into enemy territory by bombing dykes, destroying canals, and killing livestock 1  Truong

Chinh, ‘Phuong Cham Chien Luoc Hien Nay’, Nhan Dan, 4 (15 April 1951), cited in Cuoc Khang Chien Than Thanh cua Nhan Dan Viet Nam, Vol. 3 (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Su That, 1959), 26.

The Hunger General    617 to deny the enemy the food he needed to carry on. It was all part of what the French called la guerre économique—​economic warfare. War, whether conventional or guerrilla, regular or irregular, always carries within it an economic component. Nowhere was this more evident than during the second half of the Indochina War, when a food war spread across upper Vietnam, bringing to life the ‘Rice General’ (Tuong gao). This ‘third force’ had no nationality. He needed no army or conscription laws to fight. He walked alone as the French and the Vietnamese faced off in the battlefields. While no one could actually see him, everyone knew he was there. And all feared the weapon he carried at his side—​hunger, his real name. This ‘general’ had taken the lives of millions across Eurasia during the Second World War. Vietnamese farmers had certainly not forgotten the famine that had killed over a million of their compatriots in 1944–​1945 in upper Vietnam. During the first half of the Indochina War, the ‘Rice General’ had watched from the sidelines as Ho found the scraps he needed to keep the guerrilla ‘tiger’ fed. But now, as the communists scrambled to field seven divisions and an expanding civil service standing behind it, Truong Chinh cautioned that this ‘war elephant’ had a voracious appetite. And soldiers, he reminded all, ‘are only strong when their bellies are full. That is something that we should never forget’. Nor should we.

The French Economic Offensive The French recognized this logic and they saw in the Rice General an ally who could help them to stop the Vietnamese from feeding their expanding army.2 During the second half of the Indochina War, French officers referred to their emerging project interchangeably as the ‘economic war’ (la guerre économique) or ‘the rice war’ (la guerre du riz or la bataille du riz). In the late 1940s, the French had imposed an effective rice blockade on their enemy in southern Vietnam. In 1952, the commanding general of the armed forces in Indochina, General Raoul Salan, systematized this economic offensive and connected it to his pacification efforts in the northern paddy fields. The goal was to prevent rice from getting through to Ho’s Vietnam and its hungry divisions now engaging the French in set-​piece battle. As one of the architects of the economic offensive put it that year: ‘Both sides are agreed on one thing. The battle for rice is equal in importance to the one between armies. Victory will go to those who know how to control the delta’s rice granaries’.3 2 

My discussion of the French economic offensive as referred to in the subtitle to this section relies on the following documents: ‘Fiche: possiblités d’action en matière économique’, January 1951; ‘Guerre économique’, 6 January 1951; ‘Etudes sur la répression des trafics au Tonkin’, 29 August 1952; 2ème Bureau, no. 1015/​EMTCC/​2, 30 May 1951; 2ème Bureau, ‘Comment faire entrer la guerre économique dans les réalités’, 7 May 1952 (approved by Salan in margin); 2ème Bureau, no. 0/​120EMIFT, 2S, undated; ‘Salan au Ministre d’Etat chargé des relations avec les Etats Asociés’, January 1951; and Salan, ‘Blocus du delta’, all in 10H638 and 10H2377, SHD. For the economic assault on central Vietnam, see documents in 10H1312, 10H3166, 10H3359, SHD. Although the colonial assault on Ho’s Vietnam covered all of Vietnam, I focus mainly here on the upper half of Vietnam in the early 1950s. 3 2ème Bureau, ‘La question du riz, question vitale pour le Nord Vietnam’, 1 for the citation, 23 July 1952 and Salan’s explanation of his economic offensive to the Minister of the Associated States, undated but based on the attached note, both in 10H638, SHD.

618   Christopher Goscha Economics had always been part of the struggle between the French and the Vietnamese, and no one knew it better than Salan. He had personally accompanied Ho to France during the summer of 1946 as the Vietnamese president tried desperately to negotiate the prickly questions of trade, finance, and monetary policy. Salan was there, too, in November 1946 when differences over sovereignty led to the violent clash in Haiphong harbour over who had the right to collect customs duties, the Vietnamese or the French. And he was still there after the outbreak of full-​scale war in Hanoi a month later: in 1947, he presided over Opération Léa, the large-​scale offensive designed to destroy Ho’s government and sever its commercial ties to China. Both things failed as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam began operating from rural bases in the Thai Nguyen area in the north, large zones in central Vietnam, and rice-​ rich areas of the Ca Mau peninsula in the southern tip of Vietnam. Lacking the resources and manpower to be everywhere at once, the French focused on holding the Red River and Mekong deltas as each side tried to push its territorial control wherever it could. To help them, the French relied on the cooperation of their Vietnamese partners in the Associated State of Vietnam, led by the ex-​emperor Bao Dai. Of course, colonial authorities did not remain inert on the economic front. During the first half of the conflagration, they tried to stop their enemies from connecting their disconnected territories into a functioning state by trying to interdict Ho’s clandestine trade with the colonial cities like Hanoi and Saigon and nearby Asian port cities like Guangzhou (Canton) and Bangkok. They attacked by land and air the DRV’s communications, transport, cottage industries, and natural resources. They went to great lengths to block their enemy’s trade in medicines, chemicals, and paper. And they attacked Ho’s food supplies, rice and salt in particular. Success, however, depended on finding officers willing to invest the time and energy into understanding all the moving parts in the enemy’s economic activities. Progress also depended on the cooperation of Vietnamese partners with intimate knowledge of the land, its languages, and local administration. As a result, colonial operations on the economic front tended to be episodic affairs. An important exception to this rule occurred in the late 1940s when the French army effectively blocked the DRV’s ability to move rice from large stockpiles on the western side of the Ca Mau peninsula to troops fighting on the eastern side. The systematization of the economic assault on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam only really began in 1950—​in the wake of the communist victory in China and Mao Zedong’s decision to help Ho Chi Minh field a professional army and build a revolutionary state to run it. Inspired by the success of the southern blockade, French military officers, colonial administrators, and their Vietnamese partners began elaborating an economic programme to prevent their adversaries from feeding their soldiers and civil servants in central and northern Vietnam, where Chinese aid had helped the Vietnamese to create this conventional army now called the PAVN. The need to act increased as enemy troops attacked the delta during the first half of 1951. The Expeditionary Corps may have repelled Vo Nguyen Giap’s divisions, but the French realized that their adversary had moved on the delta less to capture Hanoi than to seize the rice fields surrounding it to feed his hungry men. The French were now more determined than ever not to let their enemy do this. The French economic assault evolved in three overlapping phases between 1950 and 1954. The first wave began in early 1950 when military authorities began dividing the Associated State of Vietnam into three sectors. Zone A referred to spaces where goods and services could circulate freely, namely deep within the core territories of French Vietnam. The

The Hunger General    619 military placed moderate restrictions on goods and services moving within an intermediate Zone B located in less secure areas. In the borderlands, those areas of the Associated State touching up against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the French created Zone C, where no products were to circulate. The main idea behind all three categories was to spin a protective, layered cocoon around colonial Vietnam. They did this through the reinforcement and construction of new posts, watchtowers, and blockhouses. French military officials and their Vietnamese counterparts administered these zones at the provincial and districts levels. Colonial authorities approved legislation allowing the army to control the circulation of foodstuffs (rice, salt, fish) and industrial inputs that the enemy used for making weapons and explosives (machine parts, gasoline, chemicals). This first wave applied to all of Indochina, including central areas and the apparent renewal of the blockade in the south. At the core of this second phase was the French military’s desire to deny the Vietnamese the northern delta rice vital to feed their standing army. General Salan understood well that General Giap’s failure to take the Red River plains by force in 1951 had in no way stopped the enemy from finding ways of getting rice out of the delta. Salan issued orders ‘to fight a rice war’ in the delta against the enemy using his own methods if necessary. This meant several things, all of which remained in operation until the end of the conflict: 1) the rapid deployment of troops and officials into delta villages during harvest times to protect fields from enemy penetration; 2) assisting villagers to get their paddy (un-​husked rice) out of the fields and into carefully guarded silos or nearby blockhouses as rapidly as possible; 3) the careful measurement and inventorying of harvest yields for every village to determine how much rice could remain for families to meet subsistence needs; 4) guarantees that the colonial government would purchase surplus rice at a favourable price, in colonial piasters, and then store it in safe locations so that nothing would be left to the enemy; and 5) in theory, care was to be taken to avoid using harsh methods that could drive villagers into the enemy’s hands. Although French troops served in the paddy fields, the French increasingly relied on their emerging Vietnamese army and local authorities to fight the rice war on the ground, so that they could concentrate on destroying the PAVN as it moved into the highlands. Their Vietnamese allies knew the lay of the land, its languages, and the nitty-​gritty details of local governance better. Specially minted Vietnamese units known as the armed Economic Brigades were deployed into villages during harvest time to guard the rice fields, carry paddy to secure silos, and transport surpluses further down the line for the French.4 Village life in the northern delta had never been easy during the Indochina War. The violence of the conventional battles during the first half of 1951 had spilled over into scores of villages. The outbreak of the rice wars immediately thereafter ensured the deltas would remain very dangerous places for the hundreds of thousands of poor souls trying to eke out a living as the ‘colonialists’ and the ‘communists’ moved in on them—​quite literally. To stop enemy assaults on rice-​rich areas, the delta surrounding Hanoi and Haiphong and even further south into central Vietnam, the French unrolled barbed wire and installed bamboo-​ piked barricades in and around hundreds, if not thousands of northern villages. ‘In order to continue the conventional war’, French journalist Lucien Bodard wrote, ‘they had to interrupt it at regular intervals to fight the “rice wars” ’.5 Battles over rice occurred mainly

4  5 

Cited in ‘Fiche: possibilités d’action en matière économique’, January 1951, 10H638. Lucien Bodard, La guerre d’Indochine (Paris: Grasset, 1997), 483.

620   Christopher Goscha during the two harvest seasons (roughly in April–​June and October–​December). Attacks usually occurred at night when Vietnamese commandos tried to storm barricaded villages and overwhelm the handful of Franco-​Vietnamese troops defending them and their food stockpiles. As always, civilians got caught in the crossfire. How many died or were injured in these clashes we will never know. When one side could not get ‘its’ rice out, commanders often burned it rather than leave food for the enemy. Watching from the sidelines, peasants wondered where they were going to get their next meal. With the coming of the rice war, the burden of the suffering fell squarely on their shoulders.6 In order to seal off the Red River basin from enemy penetration, colonial strategists went further in this second phase. Salan ordered the creation of a ‘prohibited zone’, une zone interdite, in which nothing of military interest could transit. The army received the legal power it needed to stop the circulation of goods and services, including the authorization ‘to propose to (the Associated State’s) governors any type of legal decrees on products whose transportation would seem unwanted’. Reams of documents in the archives reveal the outlawed products: pharmaceuticals, chemicals, paper, salt, and more. The army leaned on the colonial judicial branch to mete out harsh sentences to those caught smuggling. Significantly, the French military classified ‘rice’ as being of ‘military interest’—​and targeted it as such.7 A third and final wave took the economic war to a higher level from mid-​1952, as another mid-​year harvest apparently came in short for the French. Several things distinguish this final phase from its two antecedents, though they all truly combined into one crescendo. First, Salan’s entourage concluded that the lack of enforcement in the earlier phases had allowed Ho’s officials to continue importing much of what they needed from the colonial zones. This, in turn, had allowed the Vietnamese to feed their PAVN divisions despite the fact that the Chinese communists were not providing much food aid. This was unacceptable. Second, to remedy this problem, Salan’s team concluded that it was imperative to systematize the organization, the administration, and the enforcement of the economic blockade. The air force, navy, and special forces would help the army do this. Third, having failed to hold Hoa Binh in early 1952 (this strategic area west of Hanoi connected central and northern Vietnam for Ho’s resistance state), Salan pushed hard to drive a wedge between the rice-​ rich delta and this enemy corridor hugging its perimeter and through which entire divisions were now moving to areas south of Hanoi and further. Finally, Salan obtained the authorization to attack the DRV’s economic infrastructure in a stepped-​up attempt to bring the enemy to his knees. In June 1952, he declared a ‘systematic economic war’ (une guerre économique systématique) on the Vietnamese.8 ‘Hit the adversary in his economy (in both his interior activities and his trafficking in currency reserves) in no way strikes me as unattainable’, he wrote.9 6  See Gras, Histoire de la guerre d’Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1979), 420–​421, 450–​451. On the burning of rice, see Robert Guillain, Dien Bien Phu la fin des illusions (Paris: Arléa, 2004), 47–​48. On troops protecting Vietnamese rice villages, Pierre Célerier, ‘Le Viet Minh dans l’impasse: Un grain de riz =​une goutte de sang’, Indochine Sud Est (December 1951), 23. 7  They also treated it as a ‘military objective’ and ‘war material’. See ‘Note de service’, no. 87/​3B, undated, 1 and ‘Note’, no. 335/​PAO.CVN, 27 April 1953, 2, both in 10H3359, SHD; ‘Colonel de St. Martin au chef du province du Quang Nam’, 20 April 1953, no. 326/​SAT/​3/​SC, 1; and ‘Protection des greniers de riz’, General LeBlanc, 16 April 1953, 1, both in file Pacification, box 10H3166, SHD. 8  ‘Comment faire entrer la guerre économique dans les réalités’, 1–​2, box 10H638, SHD. 9 Ibid., 2.

The Hunger General    621 Making the blockade airtight marked the first step in this direction. Starting in June, the French army began reinforcing this protective wrapping around the Red River core delta. This belt would become a ‘no man’s land’, in which nothing was allowed to enter or to circulate. The commanding general sealed off the delta with soldiers and administrators backed up by the navy and air force. A separate military territory emerged as a result: ‘This absolute no man’s land, created in the non-​controlled territory extending from our forward posts out, depends uniquely on the military authority and is not subject to the legislation of the civil authority’. This buffer zone expanded out from the Franco-​Vietnamese border ten kilometres or so before touching up against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s territory. Nothing could transit this band—​no rice, salt, medicines, paper, or chemicals. For Salan, ‘nothing’ also meant no human beings living in this strip. To this end, the commander-​in-​chief forcibly evacuated tens of thousands of people. In all, they removed 20,000 Vietnamese from the northern and north-​western sides of the perimeter and 80,000 souls from the south-​ western side. One hundred thousand people lost their homes and rice fields for an indeterminate period of time.10 As one French intelligence officer recognized, civilians suffered the most, caught ‘between the hammer and the anvil’.11 From mid-​1952, the ‘Salan Line’ was real. The French army reserved the right to fire on any person caught in this no-​man’s land. Those arrested would be treated as ‘prisoners of war’ and anything they carried on them seized as ‘spoils of war’ (toute marchandise saisie est considérée comme butin de guerre). Writing in late 1952, Salan did not mince his words: ‘The blockade of the delta begun in June of this year has delivered a real blow to the Viet Minh war economy. It has turned out to be an effective weapon in drying up in very important proportions his food supplies in paddy. It is thus necessary to continue this experience and to render it even more vigorous by fixing any minor problems which may have been detected’.12 The Vietnamese communists closely followed what their adversaries were doing, translating ‘no-​man’s land’ into Vietnamese as khu vuc trang, the ‘zone of nothing’.13 In many ways, Salan’s ‘zone of nothing’ was the precursor to the famous Morice and Challe ‘lines’ the French army used during the Algerian War to isolate their nationalist foes. There was much continuity between the Indochina and Algerian Wars. Military intelligence officers went to work meanwhile, compiling lists of suspicious characters to track carefully—​merchants, transporters, and smugglers. They called on their subordinates to think outside the box. Updating an order of battle using radio intercepts was not enough on the economic front. Intelligence officers had to know the ‘Viet Minh country’ (le pays Viet Minh). To set targets effectively, operational officers needed detailed 10 

‘Le blocus’: A 2ème bureau study of the northern blockade, in 10H638, late 1952, 4. ‘La question du riz, question vitale, pour le Nord Vietnam’, 4 (for the citation), 23 July 1952, 10H638, SHD and for the shelling of rice fields, see: ‘Note de service’, 2 April 1953, no. 585/​SH3, 10H3359, SHD. 12  ‘Etudes sur la répression des trafics au Tonkin’, 29 August 1952, 2–​4; ‘Projet’, signed by Raoul Salan, sent to the commanding general of French Ground Forces in Northern Vietnam and the Commissioner for Tonkin, dated November 1951 (a question mark in the margin ‘?’ suggests that the date was perhaps 1952, a typing error); ‘Notes sur la protection de la récolte du 5ème mois’, no. 2375 FTNV 2 and no. 2470/​ FTNV, 2, 9 May and 14 May 1952 in box 10H638, SHD; and Général de armée de Linarès au Commissaire de la République, Nord Vietnam, Etat major, 2ème Bureau, no. 3465/​FTNV/​2, ‘Analyse sur l’économie viet minh’, 6 July 1952, box 10H638, SHD. 13  No author, unsigned doc., ‘Chu Truong Lap “Khu Vuc Trang” cua Giac’, in Cuoc Khang Chien Than Thanh cua Nhan Dan Viet Nam, Vol. 3 (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Su That, 1959), 95–​96, dated 16 August 1951. 11 

622   Christopher Goscha information on enemy industries, natural resources, mines, dykes, and irrigation systems. Once the maps had been dressed, the coordinates fixed, and the weather permitting, pilots could attack Ho’s economic infrastructure from the air while the navy and special forces moved up rivers and canals to strike.14 The French intelligence services, often relying on the colonial archives and scholarly studies, targeted for attack three main rice-​producing areas in this ‘Viet Minh country’ zone: Thanh Hoa province located south of Hanoi, Bac Giang province lying south-​east of the Thai Nguyen resistance capital in the north, and a wide strip of rice fields running from Phu Tho through Viet Tri to Tam Dao on the eastern edge of the DRV’s highland corridor. From his inter-​war time in Indochina, Salan must have known that the French had built hydraulic complexes in these areas and others to help feed the growing northern population through double-​cropping. These networks consisted of various combinations of dykes, dams, canals, reservoirs, and silos. From mid-​1952, the French air force began bombing them systematically. Salan’s intelligence services closely tallied the attacks and assessed the effects on food production. Thanh Hoa on the eve of the Second World War, they tell us, had an estimated population of 800,000 people and produced 2.5 million quintals (275,000 tons) of paddy annually. Fifty thousand hectares of rice fields in this province depended on the Bai Thuong hydraulic system to produce two harvests a year. In July 1952, French bombers attacked it. As a result, the French reported, annual rice production for Thanh Hoa plunged to 723,000 quintals (77,000 tonnes), a third of what it had been. In the Bac Giang area of the DRV, annual rice production before 1940 had peaked at about two million quintals (220,000 tonnes), thanks to a canal system irrigating 28,000 hectares of land. Following colonial air strikes, production fell to a third of the earlier level. Encouraged by these results, the French bombed canals, dikes, and granaries elsewhere in central and northern Vietnam. The goal of destroying the enemy’s irrigation system was, one internal note put it, ‘to destroy any hope of obtaining a harvest in rebel zones’.15 The list of targets in this ‘systematic’ economic war is longer than we might think. In 1952, the French air force received authorization to ‘massively’ and ‘systematically’ attack and kill as much of the water buffalo and cattle population as possible in this ‘Viet Minh country’. The goal was to deprive the enemy of a source of food and deny its farmers an important means of production for tilling their fields.16 The air force struck deeper into people’s lives by bombing more aggressively the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s outdoor markets,

14 2ème Bureau, ‘Etude sur l’économie viet minh’, 8 March 1952, probably penned by Boussarie, box 10H638, SHD; ‘Etudes sur la répression des trafics au Tonkin’, 29 August 1952, 2–​4; ‘Projet’; ‘Notes sur la protection de la récolte du 5ème mois’, in box 10H638, SHD; and ‘Analyse sur l’économie viet minh’, 6 July 1952, in box 10H638, SHD. 15  2ème Bureau, ‘L’économie viet minh, Indochine du Nord’, 9–​10, May 1953, 10H638, confirmed in part byL.M. Chassin, Aviation indochine (Paris: Amiot Dumont, 1954), 151–​152 and ‘Note de service’, 6 July 1950, no. 1564/​FTCVP/​3S, 10H3359, SHD for the quote on the rebel zones. 16 ‘Note de service: Destruction des buffles’, 23 February 1952, 2 (for ‘massively’) and ‘Directives relatives à la campagne de destruction systématique des troupeaux de buffles’, 27 February 1952, 1–​3, both in 10H3359, SHD. In the classic history of the Vietnamese war economy, the authors provide photos of the French bombing of dykes, dams, and canals. See Tran Duong et al., Kinh Te Viet Nam, (1945–​54) (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Khoa Hoc, 1966), photo inset between 136–​137. The French intentionally ordered the killing of buffalos in order to lower the peasant’s ability to farm his fields. See ‘Directives relatives à la campagne de destruction systématique des troupeaux de buffles’, 27 February 1952, 1–​3, 10H3359, SHD.

The Hunger General    623 transport system (roads, bridges, ports, and a tattered railway), natural resources (mines and salt fields), industrial capacity (weapons workshops, paper mills, textile factories), and any remaining dams, dykes, and canals not taken out in 1952 or rebuilt thereafter. Meanwhile, working through commandos and spies, French intelligence services introduced false banknotes into enemy zones to spike inflation, weaken the Ho Chi Minh dong, and thereby undermine popular support for the government.17 Detailed histories of the DRV’s war economy during the Indochina War corroborate that the French adopted a ‘large-​scale’ (qui mo lon) economic offensive starting in mid-​ 1952. It turned on the creation of this colonial no-​man’s land erected around the delta and a sustained air and amphibious assault on the DRV’s agriculture and infrastructure, most notably its rice production. According to one Vietnamese study, the enemy air force bombed twelve hydraulic systems (dams, dykes, and canals) between June and August 1952. French planes burst the dams of water reservoirs in upper central Vietnam.18 Between 1952 and 1954, the colonial air force massacred ‘tens of thousands’ of beasts of burden in Ho’s Vietnam. Lists of bombing targets held in the archives of the French air force confirm this and more.19 The use of food as a weapon is by no means new in world history. Since antiquity, imperial armies had practiced this form of warfare. Blockades were common during the First World War, while the Germans and Japanese waged economic warfare with devastating effect during the Second. Chiang Kai-​shek imposed blockades on his communist adversaries during China’s long civil war.20 The French were unique in that they carried the assault on food into the twentieth century’s wars of decolonization with devastating consequences for the Vietnamese. By blockading the enemy’s economy and trade, by bombing Ho’s agricultural infrastructure, and targeting animals, the French expanded the war deeper into Vietnamese society, sending pangs of hunger deeper into the bellies of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

Vietnamese Economic Survival Suffice it to say that things were extraordinarily difficult on the Vietnamese side. While the communist leadership could be proud of its ability to take the war to a Western colonial power in modern battle, the slow drip economy that had kept the Vietnamese ‘tiger’ alive in its dispersed, guerrilla form until 1950 could no longer provide the food needed to sustain the PAVN elephant that succeeded it, the expanded civil service in charge of it, the 17  ‘Etude sur l’économie viet minh’, EMIFT/​2ème Bureau, 8 March 1952, 10H638, SHD and Le Van Hien, Nhat Ky cua Mot Bo Truong, Vol. 2 (Danang: Nha Xuat Ban Da Nang, 1995), 391–​392. 18  Tran Duong et al., Kinh Te, 151–​152. 19  Ibid., and Pham Van Dong, ‘Bao Cai Kinh Te Tai Chinh’, Đảng Cộng Sản Việt Nam [Communist Party of Vietnam], Văn Kiện Dảng Toàn Tập [Collection of Party Documents], 69 vols. Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Chính Trị Quốc Gia-​Sự Thật [Hanoi: National Political Publishing House-​‘Truth’], in continued publication since 1999, Vol. 14 (Hanoi : Nha Xuat Ban Chinh Tri Quoc Gia, 2001 [1953]), 97. For an exact number for killed water buffalo, see Tran Duong et al., Kinh Te Viet Nam, 1945–​60 (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Su That, 1960), 24. 20  Lizzie Colingham, Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (London: Penguin Books, 2013, reprint).

624   Christopher Goscha phalanx of porters supplying both, and the thousands of workers repairing roads, bridges, and dikes bombed out by the French. The Chinese communists may have provided modern weapons, but they could spare little food for their Vietnamese brothers, at least not yet. They were locked in battle with the Americans in Korea between October 1950 and July 1953 and committed to radical land reform at the same time. Mao Zedong’s advisors in Vietnam diligently helped Ho on the economic front, providing advice, support, and models for controlling inflation, stabilizing the currency, streamlining taxes, introducing banking reform, and expanding agriculture. But the burden of major economic, financial, and agricultural restructuring fell squarely on Vietnamese shoulders. A few examples illustrate how dire the situation became from 1950. Inflation—​the rise in the price of goods and services over a given period of time—​had always been a problem for the DRV, but it now threatened to spiral out of control as the communists expanded the size of their army and state in record time. Rice was the chief concern in any bundle of goods Vietnamese economists examined. As paddy supplies dwindled because of French attacks, and the demand for food grew as an estimated quarter of a million soldiers and bureaucrats needed to be fed, the price of rice per kilo rose precipitously. Faced with chronic budget deficits, authorities did what so many before them had done in wartime—​they increased the money supply. Between 1946 and 1950, the printing of money accounted, on average, for 76% of the annual budget. As the communists began revamping their army and state, starting in early 1950 inflation took off as the purchasing power of the population declined proportionally. Paid in dong to this point, civil servants struggled to buy food while peasants found it ever harder to pay their taxes in the national tender. Worse, the official price the government imposed for a kilogram of rice was far below the market one. The possibility that farmers would start providing less as the government needed more suddenly became a frightening possibility.21 The chronic depreciation of the national currency was a related problem. The dong had been weak since its inception in 1946. Its value only weakened as the war intensified in 1950 and the government printed money to cover its expenditures. In a bid to make the Vietnamese communists pay for their ‘colonial dependency’ on French Indochina as their most important trading partner, the French depreciated the dong further by introducing counterfeited bills into circulation in DRV zones. Committed to importing essential products from colonial territories like chemicals and, increasingly, bicycles to power their transport services, the colonial piaster remained stronger than the dong no matter how many times the Vietnamese government revalued its national currency or tried to shift its terms of trade towards communist China. The demand for finished textiles, medicines, spare parts, and petrol coming from colonial Indochina remained high. The importation of bicycles jumped from 594 in 1952 to 7,212 in 1953. Each one had to be paid for in piasters, adding further downward pressure on the dong. The colonial piaster always appreciated in value, rendering Vietnamese imports, clandestine or not, ever more expensive. Peasants were not dupes. They never are. Many hoarded the colonial tender and were often tempted for reasons of survival to sell their surplus rice to those who could pay them in piasters. Who the chronic problem of printing money, see Trần Dư ơ ng, Kinh Tế Việt Nam (1945–​ 1954) [Economy of Vietnam (1945–​1954)]. Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Hóa Học, 1966 [Hanoi: Chemistry Publishing House, 1966], 374–​375; Tran Duong et al., Kinh Te, 325–​326; and Kinh te Viet Nam, 1945–​ 1960, 18–​19. 21 On

The Hunger General    625 could blame them? After all, Ho’s government had built up its own foreign currency reserves in Indochinese piasters since 1946 in order to finance its imports. In the south, a chronic shortage of Ho Chi Minh bills, as they were known, left local authorities with no choice but to look the other way as people used the piaster despite the risks that using the enemy’s currency entailed.22 Nothing was more precious than food, though. The problem was that the communists had little or no rice surpluses to support a large standing army, the growing civil service, the human logistics teams, and work crews. They had not stockpiled rice in sufficient quantities in upper Vietnam during the first half of the conflict—​and colonial pilots would have bombed silos and stockpiles had they spotted them. The Chinese could not yet help. They were at war in Korea and needed rice to feed their own troops. Effective French air and naval surveillance prevented Ho from importing rice from granaries in the far south. As a result, the price of rice in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s northern highlands areas exploded as the PAVN’s divisions came to life. Le Van Hien, Minister of Finance at the time, tells us in his diary that Le Van Hien stated that already by June 1950 they were having trouble finding enough food to feed their soldiers. The price of rice in this area climbed from 3,000 dong for one ta (100 kg) of rice at the start of the year to 10,000, even 14,000, dong in some areas. In his 9 July entry, he lamented that the government lacked 25,000 tonnes of rice needed to feed troops following their delta defeat. Food was, he wrote, ‘beyond all others the most important problem’.23 And the Vietnamese failure to seize the northern delta’s rice fields in one fell swoop during first half of 1951 helps to explain why the communists immediately recalibrated their military strategy to reintroduce PAVN units into the delta in guerilla form. Food. Ho and his entourage had to find ways to increase agricultural production in upper Vietnam. He personally led massive propaganda drives across upper Vietnam to exhort peasants to produce more food. This included opening new ground for planting, increasing rice yields by double cropping and using fertilizers, and working harder and longer in the fields. Ho asked this, too, of the delta’s peasants, authority over which they disputed with the French. Pictures showed ‘Uncle Ho’, the father of the nation, working the land diligently like any other Vietnamese. Patriotic emulation drives, known widely in Vietnam as phong trao thi dua, multiplied as the party proposed ‘agricultural heroes’ for the population to imitate in order to increase production. Winners received rewards and prizes. Medals were never in short supply. When they were on operations, soldiers received instructions to help labour-​ short villages repair dykes and terraces, plant rice, or pitch in during harvest time. Austerity measures were de rigueur. The government outlawed the production of rice alcohol and flour made from it. Cadres drilled the slogan, tiet kiem, into people’s heads—​‘economize’, ‘save’, and ‘be frugal!’.24 Expanded food production went hand in hand with increased state control. Decrees required rice producers to measure and report their yields at harvest time and declare their stocks on a monthly basis thereafter. The same was true of other foodstuffs: meat, salt, vegetables, sugar, cattle, and poultry. Village leaders had to do the same for food produced 22 

Kinh Te Viet Nam, 1945–​60, 20. On bicycle imports, see Dang Phong, Lich Su Kinh Te Viet Nam 1945–​2000, vol. 1, 346–​347. 23  Le Van Hien, Nhat ky, 239, 252. 24  Tran Duong et al., Kinh te, 48.

626   Christopher Goscha on communal lands or any newly opened land. Cadres dispersed into ‘free’ and ‘occupied’ villages to take stock of food reserves. They surveyed land, inspected silos, and reported damage. They had orders to ensure that producers, landowners, and villages respected the official price and, if requisitioned, helped feed troops passing through. Those who refused, resisted, or revolted risked severe repercussions from the police, the army, and the judicial system. When mass mobilization laws took many able-​bodied Vietnamese from the fields and incorporated them into the army, porter details, or work teams, the government reserved the right to conscript special harvest teams to enter any given field to collect rice so that it did not rot on its stems for lack of field hands. Such was the importance of food that PAVN units broke off during their conventional assault on the southern delta in 1951 to ‘help’ villagers bring in the harvest. They helped because they needed this food, too. Vietnamese communists knew they had to rebuild their economy, finances, and agriculture to survive. Thanks to assistance from the Chinese advisory team, Vietnamese communists implemented a series of major economic reforms during the party congress of early 1951 with the goals of increasing the food supply to meet the new wartime needs. The new policies included the creation of the ‘State Bank of Vietnam’ in May 1951; the issuance of a new, revalued dong later that year; the establishment of a ‘State Trading Office’; and streamlining of the government’s tax system in the form of an agricultural tax (thue nong nghiep), also introduced in May 1951. The communists were in control of each of these tools approved by the party congress and the Chinese advisory team sent to help Ho Chi Minh build a professional army and single party state to run it. The party’s new trading office was established to centralize and administer foreign trade with communist China and with colonial Indochina. One of its most important tasks was to erase the government’s chronic trade deficit with French Indochina, thereby preventing the dong from further depreciation. This new trading office explains the instructions issued to officials in 1952 ordering them to closely administer commerce and currency exchanges with the French and to do everything possible to increase exports in order to balance trade. On the Chinese side, in 1952, the Vietnamese signed a formal trade agreement with Beijing to administer commercial exchanges on a state-​to-​state basis and, in a follow-​up accord signed a year later, lifted restrictions on border trade (Chinese salt imports increased). Sometime in 1953, China replaced French Indochina as the DRV’s main foreign trading partner. The State Trading Office was in charge of this historic shift in Vietnam’s foreign trade away from the French empire and towards communist Eurasia. The French economic offensive of 1952 pushed them in that very direction.25 Stabilizing a national currency in wartime is a challenge for any country. Vietnam was no exception to this rule. No matter how they sold it, the Vietnamese struggled to convince their population to trust the bank note carrying Ho’s portrait on it. In 1951, the Vietnamese communists, in concert with their Chinese advisors, introduced a new dong printed on shiny Czech paper imported through China. In a unilateral decision, the Vietnamese government declared it to be almost ten times stronger than the old dong. While Chinese and Vietnamese 25  See Dang Phong, Lich Su Kinh Te Viet Nam, 348–​350; Kinh Te Viet Nam, 1945–​60, 39–​40; Pham Van Dong, ‘Chi Thi Cua Ban bi Thu’, November 1952; ‘Nghi Quyet cua Bo Chinh Tri’, dated 17 April 1952, 54–​57; and Truong Chinh (Than), ‘Chi thi cua Ban Chap hanh Trung uong’, dated 8 June 1952, in Van Kien Dang Toan Tap, vol. 13 (1952), (Hanoi, Nha Xuat Ban ChinhTri Quoc Gia, 2001), 357–​360, 54–​57, and 204–​207 respectively.

The Hunger General    627 sources claim the new currency was a success, French accounts are closer to the mark when they point out that the new bills were met with a frosty reception among peasants and civil servants. Again, who can blame them? No matter how the communists spun it on the radio or in their propaganda leaflets, they were unable to stop the dong from depreciating in value relative to the piaster. In 1948, one Indochinese piaster bought 1.5 to 4 dong depending on the area. In mid-​1953, the ratio was 1 to 700! One of those bicycles the government needed so badly that year for their logistical services cost 2,000 Indochinese piasters instead of a million-​and-​a-​half dong. A pack of cigarettes cost three to five piasters instead of 20,000 dong. Although the government could congratulate itself for building up its reserves in the colonial currency, they could not control the higher prices of foodstuffs within their own lands—​rice, meat, and salt especially. And as the price of rice skyrocketed in dong, peasants started to cut back on production, unwilling to sell their rice to the government at an official price well below the market one. It was a nightmare situation, and it came at precisely the moment when the government needed to increase its food supply—​and fast.26 This largely explains why, on 1 May 1951, two weeks after Truong Chinh warned everyone to beware of the Rice General and as it became clear that the PAVN would not seize the delta any time soon, the Vietnamese Communist Party decreed the streamlining of a myriad of pre-​existing taxes into just a few under party control. The most important of them was the agricultural tax, or the thue nong nghiep. The imposition of the agricultural tax allowed the government to secure the rice it needed to feed the army, the civil service, the work crews, and porters. As a tax, producers had no choice. They had to pay it and they had to pay it in kind, in quantities of rice established by the government. The tax was designed in theory to be progressive: rich landholders paid more (i.e. gave more food), the poor paid less. But all producers had to pay not just inside the DRV proper, but also in the rice-​rich areas of the Tonkin delta where Vo Nguyen Giap was dispatching his smaller PAVN units to collect rice duties in contested territories.27 From mid-​1951 until the end of the war in July 1954, rice effectively replaced the dong as the national currency for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The National Bank and State Trading Office became, in effect, granaries for storing and distributing rice to the army, the civil service, workers, and rice-​deficit areas. Shiny or not, the dong was worthless. The government paid salaries in rice. The national budget was calculated in tonnes of rice. The agricultural tax—​meaning rice—​provided 86.2% of the budget for 1951, 77% for 1952, 71.2% for 1953, and 54.7% for 1954 (a lower number given that the war ended in July). Of the streamlined taxes, the only one that really mattered was this one. In all, for the upper half of Ho’s Vietnam, the agricultural tax generated one-​and-​a-​half million tonnes of rice between 1951 and 1954.28 If the French economic assault discussed above had hurt the peasant population the most, the burden of the communist-​imposed agricultural tax only made things worse for this rural majority of the DRV’s population. Vietnamese war communism squeezed the agricultural 26  ‘L’économie viet minh’, Indochine Sud-​ est asiatique’, no. 19 (June–​July 1953), 31–​32. On peasants making false declarations, see ‘Rapport sur la récolte de riz du 3ème mois’, 31 May 1952, no. 537/​SAT/​3/​2, 2, 10H3166, SHD based on intercepted Vietnamese documents. 27  For a general account, see Tran Duong et al., Kinh Te, 123–​125. 28  Tran Duong et al., Kinh Te, 323–​340, especially 335 for percentages of rice in the annual budget and 332 for total production levels. Dang Phong, Lich Su Kinh Te Viet Nam, 1945–​2000, 378.

628   Christopher Goscha sector and its farmers for everything they had in order to feed the army and the state running it. Like the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war and the Maoists fighting the Japanese and Chiang Kai-​shek’s forces before them, the Vietnamese communists effectively confiscated grain and other agricultural products from the peasants in the form of this tax. The party had no choice but to use force, if necessary, to procure it. The survival of the regime depended on food as much as on weapons. The need for food created a terrible Catch-​22 for the DRV government, however. They were committed to helping the peasants and the workers to improve their lives and to building a communist state together. The communists were sincere in their desire to improve the lot of the Vietnamese peasants, who constituted 90% of Ho’s population. The legitimacy of his state depended on them. But as the war moved towards a crescendo at Dien Bien Phu, the only thing the communists could do to keep their hungry army, its porters, and its civil servants alive was to lean ever harder on the peasantry across all of upper Vietnam. Since 1950, the communists had been asking the peasants to do the most—​to give their sons to the army, to provide able-​bodied men and women to serve as road workers and porters, and to produce more from their fields. The French only made things worse for the peasants by trying to starve the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. As the former head of the French air force in Indochina put it in 1956: ‘Economic warfare is the solution: one must starve people to death’ (C’est la solution de la guerre économique: faire crever les gens de faim).29 In late 1952, Ho Chi Minh admitted that there was something terribly unjust about what was happening: Almost 90% of our people are peasants. Over 90% of those in our national army, regional forces, militias and guerillas are peasants. Most of our taxpayers and those serving in our work teams are peasants. Our peasants have given the most to the resistance and have sacrificed the most for the Motherland. And yet our peasants remain among the poorest, because they lack land. The lowering of rents and of usurious interest rates—​something to which the peasant has the most legitimate right—​have not yet been completely realized. It’s an extremely unjust state of affairs (Do la mot tinh trang rat khong cong bang).30

Viewed from the economic level, it is perhaps easier is to understand why the Vietnamese communists finally chose full-​blown land reform in late 1953 as they prepared to go for broke in that faraway valley called Dien Bien Phu. Ho knew he had to give something to the peasants in exchange for their massive participation in the war effort—​land. He also knew that the ‘Rice General’ was out there, watching from the distance as the Vietnamese and the French squared off in Dien Bien Phu. And this time, the Rice General had more than hunger in his arsenal. He had famine, too.

Select Bibliography Bodard, Lucien, La guerre d’Indochine (Paris: Grasset, 1997). Chassin, L.M., Aviation indochine (Paris: Amiot Dumont, 1954).

29 ‘Chassin au Conseil supérieur des forces armées’, 20 January 1956, AIRE2753, SHD. See also Chassin, Aviation Indochine, 239–​240. 30  Cited in Kinh Te Viet Nam, 1945–​1960, 23.

The Hunger General    629 Cuoc Khang Chien Than Thanh cua Nhan Dan Viet Nam [The Sacred Resistance of the Vietnamese People], Vol. 3 (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Su That, 1959). Dang Phong, Lich Su kinh Te Viet Nam, 1946–​2000 [Economic History of Vietnam, 1946–​ 2000], Vol. 1 (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Khoa Hoc Xa Hoi, 2002). Gras, Yves, Histoire de la guerre d’Indochine (Paris: Plon, 1979). Guillain, Robert, Dien Bien Phu la fin des illusions (Paris: Arléa, 2004). Kinh Tế Việt Nam, 1945–​1960 [Economy of Vietnam, 1945–​1960]. Hà Nội: Nhà Xuất Bản Sự Thật, 1960 [Hanoi: ‘Truth’ Publishing House, 1960]. Tran Duong, Kinh Te Viet Nam (1945–​1954) [Economy of Vietnam (1945–​1954)] (Hanoi: Nha Xuat Ban Khoa Hoc, 1966).

Chapter 33

A C omm u ni t y of Maveri c ks

Circulating Counter-​Insurgency Knowledge in the West (1945–​1975) Elie Tenenbaum Introduction Modern counter-​insurgency has usually been studied either through a single case study lens focused on a given conflict or campaign (the Malayan Emergency or the Algerian War, for example) or from a national experience perspective (among them, the ‘British way’ in counter-​insurgency, the French school of revolutionary warfare).1 This was a necessary first step in understanding these ‘twilight wars’ whose historiography had long been marred by moral and political controversies and further constrained by scant or biased information barring the way to serious scholarship. Over the last three decades, as Cold War-​era archives progressively opened, academic research has moved on—​at least in the West. An impressive amount of work has now been done—​even if much still remains—​by historians wherever archives have been accessible, vastly increasing our understanding of these individual conflicts. These works, in their turn, paved the way for another kind of scholarship in the field of comparative history. Drawing on this scholarship, comparative counter-​insurgency studies have been able to highlight important similarities in the way Western democracies handled various political and military challenges of insurgent opposition.2 To be sure, there remain

1 

For the share taken by such monographic approach in the literature, see Gregory Fremont-​Barnes, ‘Guide to Further Reading’, in Gregory Fremont-​Barnes (ed.), A History of Counterinsurgency. Vol. 2 From Cyprus to Afghanistan, 1955 to the 21st Century (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015), 441–​510. 2 Martin Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and the Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Beatrice Heuser and Eitan Shamir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

A Community of Mavericks    631 many differences in culture and context—​after all, ‘war is a chameleon’, as Clausewitz put it—​ but overall, French, British, American, and, to some extent, Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese counter-​insurgency ‘toolboxes’ have been revealed as being remarkably similar to one another. Whether one considers counter-​guerrilla tactics, emergency regulations, population control measures, hearts and minds strategies, resort to special forces and covert action, the use of technology, or even the representation and cultural understandings of the adversary, striking patterns tend to emerge. Comparative history does not, however, always offer explanations for these similarities. One easy way to do so would be by suggesting that similar conditions beget similar reactions: Western countries, with similar colonial backgrounds, struggling with decolonization’s ‘wind of change’,3 supported by a national liberation ideology, while trying to uphold their stable affluent liberal democracy at home, free from the communist threat in the global Cold War. One might also add that there is a finite number of tactics and strategies that could be used to counteract insurgent movements that, in their turn, shared a lot in common—​due to transnational circulations of people, materials, and influences within the Third World. While it is hard to argue against such insights, they cannot explain every convergence, especially the most striking commonalities in doctrinal terminology, threat perception, and analysis, as well as in specific practices, whether military or administrative. Transnational history offers other avenues to discover these commonalities through a persistent circulation and mutual influence paradigm. Focusing on the three main Western powers involved in late-​colonial counter-​insurgency (Great Britain, France, and the United States), this chapter will attempt to draw the connecting lines between their respective experiences, stressing the pooling of lessons learned, liaison exchanges, patterns of organizational learning, and even doctrinal standardization processes, both at bilateral and multilateral levels. Not surprisingly, this circulation of ideas and practices was most intense during the highpoints of counter-​insurgency in the early 1960s, but its origins can be traced further back to the Second World War, while its legacies continued to the advent of Détente in the mid-​1970s. While one should not overestimate the practical influence of such knowledge circulation, one also has to take it into account if one is to arrive at a more global history of late-​colonial conflict and state-​building.

Global Counter-​Insurgency Narrative Exploring the history of Western circulations of counter-​ insurgency knowledge and practices amounts to trying to connect the dots between various experiences that have been heretofore studied separately in particular theatres, among them Greece, Indochina, Malaya, Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam. The resulting accounts trace a Western counter-​insurgency narrative that can be summarily divided into four major phases.

3 Michael E. Latham, ‘The Cold War in the Third World, 1963–​ 1975’, in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Cold War. Volume II, Crises and Détente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 258–​280.

632   Elie Tenenbaum

The Birth of a Community The idea of a Western counter-​insurgency community is rooted in past experience. As twentieth-​century counter-​insurgency was largely practiced in colonized spaces of what would come to be known as the Third World, it is unsurprising that nineteenth-​century colonial warfare was often identified as its immediate forebear.4 From both an inter-​generational and a strategic perspective, however, the experience of total war between 1914 and 1945 may have proved even more influential on Cold War-​era counter-​insurgency than its colonial predecessors from before 1914.5 The costly failure of classic linear warfare during the First World War and the rising importance of ‘home fronts’ for political and economic mobilization had revealed the potential for subversive action behind the lines. Two non-​linear ‘irregular’ lines of operations emerged: guerrilla warfare, as T.E. Lawrence had shown in the Hejaz, or as the Germans had in their support of the Easter Rising, and psychological warfare, such as the Papierkrieg run by Great Britain, which Ludendorff deemed responsible for the German collapse in 1918.6 Inter-​war experience such as the Russian, Irish, Chinese, and Spanish civil wars only strengthened these views. Even so, irregular warfare remained ‘a sideshow of a sideshow’, as T.E. Lawrence himself qualified his campaign, until the advent of the Second World War.7 It was only out of necessity that Great Britain decided in 1940 to resort to such marginal methods as a substitute for regular warfare, which it could not wage other than defensively after the fall of France and its expulsion from the continent. Called upon by Churchill not to yield to ‘The completely defensive habit of mind which has ruined the French’,8 the chiefs of staff figured out that ‘the only way of success [was] by undermining Germany internally and by action in the occupied territories . . . Seen in this light, the war may be regarded as an inter-​connected series of wars of independence’.9 From this initial impetus would spring the Special Operations (SOE) and Political Warfare Executives (PWE), as well as a number of British special forces units such as the commandos and the Special Air Services (SAS). This would mark the beginning of a worldwide irregular campaign involving not only British forces, but those of all the principal Western allies: the British Dominions, the United States, but also Free France and other European governments or movements in exile, including the Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, Czechs, and Poles. British attempts to coordinate resistance in Axis-​occupied countries brought about a new community of practice for covert action, special forces operations, and guerrilla and psychological warfare. The British 4 Ian F.W. Beckett, The Roots of Counter-​ Insurgency: Armies and Guerrilla Warfare, 1900–​ 1945 (New York, NY: Blandford Press; Distributed in the United States by Sterling Pub. Co., 1988); Daniel Whittingham, ‘“Savage Warfare”: C.E. Callwell, the Roots of Counter-​Insurgency, and the Nineteenth Century Context’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​4–​5 (2012), 591–​607. 5  Hew Strachan, ‘Essay and Reflection: On Total War and Modern War’, The International History Review, 22/​ 2 (2000), 341–​ 370; François Géré and Thierry Widemann (eds.), La Guerre Totale (Paris: Economica, 2001). 6  Erich Ludendorff, The Nation at War (London: Hutchinson, 1936). 7  A.R.B Linderman, Rediscovering Irregular Warfare: Colin Gubbins and the Origins of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). 8  ‘Prime Minister to General Ismay’, 4 June 1940, quoted in Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War. Volume 2: Their Finest Hour (New York: Rosetta Books, 2002), 305–​306. 9  The National Archives (TNA), HS 8/​259, DMO for COS Meeting of 7 June 1940.

A Community of Mavericks    633 provided guidance and training for this type of warfare, which, at the time, remained marginal to European military culture. British organizations such as SOE, PWE, and the SAS would not only serve as models for foreign equivalents, but also as incubators to them as these newer agencies relied on training facilities like the Special Training Schools System, which assisted American, French, and other allied equivalents—​ including America’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Free France’s security service, the Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA), and others—​ in their preparations for irregular warfare.10 Those early initiates remained a ‘community of mavericks’, set apart from their respective state apparatus, either military or civilian. In Britain, France, and the United States, government remained wary of facilitating the creation of ‘private armies’.11 The community would find new acceptance, however, as the new Cold War world took shape. In the typical strategic thinking of the early Cold War years, planning staff conceptualized a possible war against the Soviet Union with referents drawn from World War Two: The Red Army and Soviet air forces are capable of taking continental Europe and key areas of Asia within a few months . . . Soviet forces could hold European territory for at least two years before the United States and her allies could assemble and supply a force sufficiently strong to attempt a continental invasion.12

A new occupation was therefore Europe’s destiny. In order to reverse it, the Allies needed to be better prepared than they had been in 1940, and therefore had to be ready to start guerrilla warfare against the rear guards of the Red Army, preparing to liberate occupied territory west, and possibly east, of the Iron Curtain. That was the initial role of the quickly reactivated 21st SAS reserve regiment, as it was for the French Service Action or 11th Shock Battalion, or the American Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and the US Army Special Forces.13 Propaganda and psychological warfare agencies thus became more instrumental in the Cold War in order to safeguard the free world and support the ‘liberation of captive nations’.14 10 William J.M. Mackenzie, The Secret History of SOE: Special Operations Executive, 1940–​ 1945 (London: St Ermin’s Press, 2000); David Stafford, Britain and European Resistance, 1940–​1945: A Survey of the Special Operations Executive, with Documents (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); David Stafford, Camp X: SOE and the American Connection, 1st ed. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987); Olivier Wieviorka, Une Histoire de La Résistance En Europe Occidentale: 1940–​1945 (Paris: Perrin, 2017). 11 Tim Jones, Postwar Counterinsurgency and the SAS, 1945–​ 1952: A Special Type of Warfare (London: Routledge, 2001). 12  Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Report on ‘Soviet Intentions’ Prepared by the Joint Intelligence Committee, American Embassy, Moscow, 1 April 1948. One can find similar assessments in French and British military planning from that time. 13  Service Historique de la Défense (SHD), SHD, 7U 767, Registre des actes administratifs du 11e bataillon parachutiste de choc, 1946–​1959. Philip H.J. Davies, ‘From Special Operations to Special Political Action: The “Rump SOE” and SIS Post‐War Covert Action Capability 1945–​1977’, Intelligence and National Security, 15/​3 (2000), 55–​76; Alfred H. Paddock, US Army Special Warfare. Its Origins. Psychological and Unconventional Warfare, 1941–​1952 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1982). 14  Regarding the ‘liberation strategy’ pursued by British and Americans East of the Iron Curtain, read Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand. Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence (London: John Murray Pub., 2001); Stephen Dorril, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations (London: Fourth Estate, 2000); Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-​Communist Propaganda: The Information Research Department (London: Routledge, 2007).

634   Elie Tenenbaum Self-​consciously a part of the same Western camp, each of these organizations retained the close links that they had woven in the previous war and sustained exchanges with one another: SAS trained along with their French counterpart, while French and American Special Forces still drew upon British organizational models.15 Reviving the facilities and methods used in the Second World War, London and Washington also engaged in a number of joint covert operations to subvert communist regimes in the east—​the largest of these being Operation Valuable run by the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) in Albania.16 At this subversive game, however, the Western powers soon realized that they were neither the sole players nor the best. In Europe, as well as elsewhere in the world—​especially in East Asia—​the Soviet Union and the wider communist bloc were encouraging communist-​ friendly movements, some of them resorting to armed struggle, as in Greece, the Philippines, and Indochina, while others just threatened to do so in France, Italy, Turkey, and elsewhere. The USSR could draw on a long tradition of clandestine ‘agit-​prop’ as well as on the prestige garnered by local communists’ involvement in resistance movements against Axis occupation. Western agents of irregular warfare were meanwhile soon to turn from a role in fomenting anti-​occupation insurgency to one of counter-​insurgency against oppositionist movements. Greece provided an early test-​case, former British SOE and SAS operatives creating new counter-​guerrilla commandos to fight communist insurgents.17 It was also the case in the Far East, and especially in Vietnam, where British-​supported French commandos sought to emulate Orde Wingate’s Chindits’ anti-​Japanese operations in wartime Burma by building up a counter-​guerrilla force against the Vietminh.18

The East Asian Laboratory Eastern Asia also provides the setting for the second phase of this narrative, one that was shaped by the encounter with the Maoist theory of People’s War. Chinese revolutionary doctrine stood out from other forms of irregular warfare, not only in its trans-​regional proliferation, but in its combination guerrilla tactics and mass mobilization techniques, creating a bond between the insurgency and the people that was much stronger and more systemic than one relying on patriotism or ideology.19 In the late 1940s, numerous Western observers of the Chinese Civil War highlighted the novelty of Maoist insurgency doctrine. Among 15 Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères (AMAE), 28QO/​ 66, 29 mars 1950. See also the memoirs of, Aaron Bank, From OSS to Green Berets: The Birth of Special Forces (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1986); Paul Aussaresses, Pour La France. Services Spéciaux. 1942–​1954 (Monaco: Le Rocher, 2001). 16  Albert Lulushi, Operation Valuable Fiend the CIA’s First Paramilitary Strike Against the Iron Curtain (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2014). 17  Tim Jones, ‘The British Army, and Counter‐Guerrilla Warfare in Greece, 1945–​49’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 8/​1 (1997), 88–​106. 18  SHD, 10H 85, Note sur l’activité du service Action, Saigon, 15 décembre 1945; Martin Thomas, ‘Silent Partners: SOE’s French Indo-​China Section, 1943–​1945’, Modern Asian Studies, 34/​4 (2000), 943–​976. 19  Lucien Bianco, Les origines de la révolution chinoise: 1915–​ 1949 (Paris: Gallimard, 2007); Joseph W. Esherick, ‘Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution’, Modern China, 21/​1 (1995), 45–​76; Christopher E. Goscha, ‘A “Total War” of Decolonization? Social Mobilization and State-​Building in Communist Vietnam (1949–​54)’, War & Society, 31/​2 (2012), 136–​162.

A Community of Mavericks    635 them was US Marine Captain Samuel B. Griffith, serving as a liaison officer in China, who translated Maoist military pamphlets such as Yu Chi Chan (‘On Guerrilla Warfare’) in which the famous fish and water analogy of guerrilla operations was first coined.20 On the French side, military attachés like Jacques Guillermaz and David Galula, each of whom would become leading figures in devising counter-​insurgency doctrine, also tried to raise awareness about the challenge presented by the Chinese communist irregular way of war.21 The British for their part paid more attention to the transnational dynamics of Maoist doctrine and its diffusion across South East Asia—​especially in Indochina, Malaya, and the Philippines.22 By the end of 1949, the French and the British, joined by the Americans, identified China as ‘the common enemy that had arrived [on] the borders of the Western world’.23 This stimulated greater appetite for specialist exchanges, sharing expertise on how to counter this new form of war. This explains the impetus behind US National Security Council directive 90, written in October 1950 and entitled ‘Collaboration with Friendly Governments on Operations against Guerrillas’. The document called for ‘a program for the exchange of information on Soviet and communistic (sic) inspired guerrilla activities with our allies’,24 singling out the French and the British in light of their counter-​guerrilla experience in late-​ colonial conflicts in South East Asia. The three allies began more extensive liaison in the region as a whole. A Franco-​British exchange programme for officers was, for instance, established, in which French junior officers based in Indochina were to spend a couple of weeks in Malaya to undergo jungle training, visit resettled villages, talk to special branch officers, and observe operations.25 The French Army also sent observers to Korea to document US psychological warfare and counter-​guerrilla operations.26 The Americans, for their part, observed with interest British use of chemical defoliants in air operations against communist guerrillas in Malaya. They also advertised the adoption of the Philippines’ model of counter-​insurgency against the Hukbalahap rebellion whose tenets US liaison officers brought to French operational planning in Vietnam.27 The launch of the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in 20 Samuel B. Griffith, ‘Translator’s Note’, in Samuel B. Griffith (ed.), Mao Tse-​ Tung on Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Praeger, 1961), 37–​38. 21  SHD, 10T 862, Note de renseignement sur la situation militaire en Chine du Nord, Pékin, 29 mai 1947. See also Jacques Guillermaz, Une Vie Pour La Chine: Mémoires (1937–​1989) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1994); Alain A. Cohen, Galula: The Life and Writings of the French Officer Who Defined the Art of Counterinsurgency (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2012). 22  TNA, FO 371/​83009, ‘Intelligence reports on Communism in the FE’, 1 Aprill 1949; Geoff Wade, ‘The Beginnings of a “Cold War” in Southeast Asia: British and Australian Perceptions’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 40/​3 (2009), 543–​565; Robert Watson, ‘Britain, the United States and the Civil War in China, 1946–​47’, Civil Wars, 1/​2 (June 1998), 52–​82. 23  SHD, 10H 144, ‘Aide-​mémoire sur la conférence tenue à Singapour, 26 November 1949’, 10–​11. 24  NARA, RG59, A11586E, Box 13, Report to the National Security Council by Executive Secretary on Office of Special Projects, Secret, NSC 90, 8 May 1951. 25 SHD, 10H 704, D2, Stages effectués par des officiers du corps expéditionnaires en Malaisie, 1951–​1955. 26  SHD, 10H 299, ‘Lettre du colonel Clément au Ministre des États associés’, 17 juillet 1952; Pierre Dabezies, ‘Réflexions Sur Une Expérience’, Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains, 168 (1992), 99–​100. 27  Edward Lansdale, In the Midst of Wars. An American’s Mission to Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Rufus Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2008).

636   Elie Tenenbaum September 1954, which made explicit reference to counter subversion in its founding Article II, was also the occasion for a multilateral dialogue on counter-​insurgency. A standing committee of security experts was even set up to exchange ideas and coordinate responses about how to make ‘counter-​subversion’ a reality.28

Globalizing Counter-​Insurgency The British led the way in taking the new counter-​insurgency repertoire out of its South East Asian context. As early as 1948, General Cameron Nicholson, newly appointed commander of British forces in West Africa, envisioned the occurrence of a Malayan-​like emergency in Nigeria, and confided to his sceptical French counterpart the need to get ready for it.29 When the Mau-​Mau insurgency erupted in Kenya in 1952, General George Erskine, then head of East African forces, was quick to ask for any kind of documentation from Malaya which might usefully be applied in Kenya, literally copy-​pasting large sections of directives and procedures from one locale to the other.30 Typical British features used in Malaya such as the emergency regulations legal system, the ‘committee system’ aimed at organizing a civil-​ military chain of command, but also more overtly coercive policies like population control, would become counter-​insurgency staples, to be used again in Cyprus, Aden, Nyasaland, Oman, and, to some extent, Northern Ireland.31 The next to globalize their counter-​insurgency experience were the French who, from 1954, transferred much of their Indochina experience to Algeria. Some went so far as calling Algeria’s FLN militants by the pejorative name ‘Viets’, previously given to Vietminh fighters.32 The results were ominous. Not only did they decontextualize their tactical lessons, they also turned them into a more ambitious strategic concept, then known as the ‘doctrine de la guerre révolutionnaire’.33 Even though this slogan conveyed multiple different approaches, what became distinctive in the French approach was a more intensive militarization of the conduct of war—​a tendency compounded by the discontinuities in civilian leadership under the French Fourth Republic—​and the excessive expectations attached to psychological action as a transformative tool of social engineering. Overall, the French approach was marred both by its association with systematic rights abuses and by its dislocation from the political reality of 1950s France: its advocates failed to grasp the different stakes of late-​colonial conflict in Algeria—​an issue of overwhelming imminence for the local 28  TNA, FO 371/​111897, ‘Subversion and Manila Treaty’, 29 December 1954; AMAE (Nantes), S.B, Box 48, telegram n°749, 28 September 1955; David McKnight, ‘Western Intelligence and SEATO’s War on Subversion, 1956–​63’, Intelligence and National Security 20/​2 (June 2005), 288–​303. 29  AMAE, 28QO/​82, ‘Coopération militaire en Afrique centrale’, 24 September 1949. 30 TNA, WO 276/​ 159, Telegram from GHQ East Africa to GHQ FARELF, 11 August 1953; Andrew Mumford, The Counter-​ Insurgency Myth: The British Experience of Irregular Warfare (New York: Routledge, 2012), 57. 31 David French, The British Way in Counter-​ Insurgency, 1945–​1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 32  Jean-​Jacques Servan-​Schreiber, Lieutenant En Algérie (Paris: René Julliard, 1957). 33  Gabriel Périès, ‘De l’action Militaire à l’action Politique. Impulsion, Codification et Application de La Doctrine de La ‘Guerre Révolutionnaire’ Au Sein de l’armée Française, 1944–​1960’ (thèse de doctorat sous la dir. de J. Largoye, Université Paris I Panthéon-​Sorbonne, 1999).

A Community of Mavericks    637 population but one, ultimately, of less significance to France’s metropolitan governments and population. This widening cognitive gap put the supporters of revolutionary warfare at odds with De Gaulle’s decision to quit Algeria and was integral to the foundation of the Organisation de l’armée secrete (OAS), their infamous 1961 coup attempt, and official disavowal of revolutionary warfare doctrine. In spite of these massive shortcomings, the French model was still considered attractive to many counter-​insurgent peers, for whom its military results seemed irrefutable. It was applied on a smaller scale elsewhere in francophone Africa, most notably in Cameroun and to a lesser extent in Chad.34 But it also stimulated the interest of counter-​insurgents across the world. First among these were the Portuguese. Before they were confronted by 1964 with three long wars of national liberation in their African colonial territories of Guinea-​Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique, the Portuguese military sent a number of military observers to France and Algeria.35 So did the South Africans and many South American militaries—​Argentina first among them in promoting French revolutionary warfare across Latin America.36 Anglo-​American counter-​insurgency specialists also took a close interest in French experience and doctrine. Whatever the reservations their political leaderships had in regards to French policy, their military experts sometimes showed greater enthusiasm about their French ally’s performance. Such was the case at Camberley Staff College, which introduced a training exercise, ‘Cactus Curtain’, modelled after the Algerian war. On the American side, the US Marine Corps was especially interested in French use of helicopters, which they would soon adapt to Vietnam.37 US-​based federally funded think tanks such as the RAND Corporation also started longitudinal research programmes into counter-​ insurgency, sending analysts on research trips and debriefing French officials to document the French approach to counter-​insurgent warfare.38 French theories of counter-​insurgency were not entirely buried in the ashes of the Algerian War, but they soon lost ground to a new American school invigorated by John F. Kennedy’s interventionist modernization agenda. Ever since his election in 1960, the young president was deeply convinced of the strategic importance of the Third World and feared communist 34 Thomas Deltombe, Jacob Tatsitsa, and Manuel Domergue, Kamerun! Une guerre cachée aux origines de la Françafrique (1948–​1971) (Paris: La Découverte, 2011); Stéphane Mantoux, Les guerres du Tchad, 1969–​1987 (Chamalières: Lemme edit, 2014); Marielle Debos and Nathaniel Powell, ‘L’autre pays des « guerres sans fin: Une histoire de la France militaire au Tchad (1960–​2016)’, Les Temps Modernes, 693–​694/​2 (2017), 221. 35  Marie-​Monique Robin, Escadrons de La Mort. L’école Française (Paris: La Découverte, 2004); Mehdi Djallal, ‘À Mi-​Chemin Entre La France et Le Brésil, l’exportation de La DGR Vers Le Portugal’, Journée d’études. La « doctrine de La Guerre Révolutionnaire » (DGR): Théories, Pratiques, Continuités, 2013. 36  AMAE, 80QO, D.74, ‘Note à l’attention de Monsieur l’Ambassadeur’, Buenos Aires, 4 October 1961; Mario Ranalletti, ‘Aux origines du terrorisme d’État en Argentine: Les influences françaises dans la formation des militaires argentins (1955-​1976)’, Vingtième Siècle 105/​1 (2010), 45; Gabriel Périès, ‘Un Modèle d’échange Doctrinal Franco-​Argentin: Le Plan Conintes 1951–​1966’, in Renée Fregosi (ed.), Armées et Pouvoirs En Amérique Latine (Paris: IHEAL, 2004), 18–​40. 37  Victor J Croizat, ‘Helicopter Warfare in Algeria’, Marine Corps Gazette, 71/​8 (août 1987), 23–​25. 38  George K. Tanham, ‘Defeating Insurgency in South Vietnam: My Early Efforts’, in H. C. Neese and J. O’Donnell (eds.), Prelude to Tragedy: Vietnam, 1960-​1965 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 155–​179; Constantin Melnik, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Algeria (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1964); David Galula, ‘Pacification in Algeria, 1956–​1958’ (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1963).

638   Elie Tenenbaum subversives would take advantage of Western failure to address decolonization and underdevelopment.39 Kennedy staffers came up with the term ‘counter-​insurgency’, as opposed to more overtly military terms such as counter-​guerrilla. Counter-​insurgency was meant to connote a comprehensive approach to deal with ‘wars of national liberation’, relying heavily on modernization theorist Walt Rostow’s economic understanding of the societal roots of political subversion.40 To be sure, the Pentagon and the military had a role to play, and Kennedy insisted that the military needed to be better prepared to fight so-​called low-​ intensity wars, but counter-​insurgency was also to involve substantial commitment from the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the US Information Service, and the newly created Agency for International Development and its police assistance branch, the Office of Public Safety.41 In its attempt to cast the widest net possible, the US counter-​insurgency community engaged in a systematic effort to collect a comprehensive archive of knowledge about counter-​insurgency from theoretical writings, doctrinal and operational reports, and practitioner testimonies. Relying on their network of foreign military attachés and liaison officers as well as on federally funded research centres such as the RAND Corporation, they collated a wide spectrum of specialist material from books, symposiums, foreign training courses, and so forth. It is no wonder therefore than US doctrine is the most comprehensive. French and British accounts were the most readily accessible and thus influential doctrines, although by no means the only ones—​materials from Germany and Israel in addition to the United States’ particular counter-​insurgency tradition were also central to the elaboration of this more comprehensive doctrine.42

The Slow Decline of Counter-​Insurgency The vast counter-​insurgency war waged by America in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973 could be considered the decisive test for the US school, and, in spite of all its efforts, an incontrovertible failure. The reasons for this fiasco, and the part attributable to counter-​insurgency—​or lack of proper application of the doctrine—​is not our central concern here.43 Even though 39 

Douglas Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, U.S. Doctrine and Performance, 1950 to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1977); Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era, New Cold War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Frank L. Jones, ‘The Guerrilla Warfare Problem Revolutionary War and the Kennedy Administration Response, 1961–​1963’, in J. Boone Bartholomees (ed.), The US Army War College Guide to National Security Issues, Vol. 2, 4th ed. (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 2010), 397–​411. 40 FRUS, 1961–​1963, vol. 8, document 105, NSAM 182, 24 août 1962, 381. 41 William Rosenau, ‘The Kennedy Administration, US Foreign Internal Security Assistance and the Challenge of “Subterranean War”, 1961–​63’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 14/​3 (2003), 65–​99; Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012). 42  Regarding the various influences on the Kennedy-​era counter-​insurgency, see the author’s book, Partisans et Centurions. Une Histoire de La Guerre Irrégulière Au XXe Siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2018). 43 Gary R. Hess, Vietnam: Explaining America’s Lost War (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009); Gregory A. Daddis, ‘Mired in a Quagmire: Popular Interpretations of the Vietnam War’, Orbis, 57/​4 (September 2013), 532–​548.

A Community of Mavericks    639 there were other theatres of American-​backed counter-​insurgency in Africa and Latin America that had equally devastating local impacts, the profile of US involvement was lower. Vietnam remained the war that tarnished the whole picture.44 Counter-​insurgency’s decline thus continued inexorably, but slowly: from the mid-​1960s to the mid-​1970s, the paradigm came to be seen as increasingly irrelevant and even counter-​productive to Western grand strategy in the Cold War. Military failure was obviously one of the main factors for this disenchantment. Wherever counter-​insurgency failed, it nourished abiding Western military and cultural reservations about the efficacy and ethical defensibility of irregular warfare.45 Such was certainly the case in France after the Algerian war, whose lingering after-​effects registered in subsequent strategic doctrine. The Operational Defence of the Territory, whose core plan envisioned potential counter-​insurgency in metropolitan France in the eventuality of a crisis or war with the Soviet Union, remained wedded to the doctrine, but doubts about its wisdom were confirmed in 1973 when the plan was all but abrogated because it was deemed to undermine the credibility of nuclear deterrence.46 Between 1969 and 1972, French security forces also participated in one last counter-​insurgency campaign, in Chad, but, while military involvement continued, in public at least, the Paris government preferred a more ‘hands-​off ’ approach. So did the US Army after the Vietnam War. By 1976, Creighton Abrams, who had headed US forces in Vietnam and became US Army Chief of Staff, was happy to ‘take the Army out of the rice paddies of Vietnam and place it on the Western European battlefield against the Warsaw Pact’.47. There was less of this syndrome in Britain, even though Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s 1967 confirmation of Britain’s retreat east of Suez was, to some degree, a reflection of gathering imperial fatigue and the financial burden of never-​ ending counter-​insurgencies. Military involvement in Northern Ireland would, however, ensure that counter-​insurgency knowledge was not only maintained but consolidated in the coming decades—​quite an exception among the Western democracies. The broad decline of Western counter-​ insurgency was also closely related to the backlashes it generated in domestic politics. France was the first to experience such a blowback, the terrorism of the anti-​Gaullist OAS, closely linked to the ‘guerre révolutionnaire’ community. In the United States, illiberal practices used by the intelligence and law enforcement agencies in domestic surveillance of radical activists, or even by the National Guard and the Army to quell civil unrest and campus activism, can be seen to some degree as counter-​insurgency practiced ‘back home’.48 The boomerang effect was especially striking in 44  Jeffrey H. Michaels, ‘Managing Global Counterinsurgency: The Special Group (CI) 1962–​ 1966’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 35/​1 (2012), 33–​61. 45  Russell Weigley, The American Way of War, A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (New York: MacMillan, 1973); Victor Davis Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Robert M. Cassidy, Counterinsurgency and the Global War on Terror: Military Culture and Irregular War (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006); Heuser and Shamir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies. 46  Alain Bizard, ‘La Défense Opérationnelle Du Territoire’, Pouvoirs, 38 (1986), 88–​98. 47 David Fitzgerald, Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013), 43. 48  William Rosenau, ‘“Our Ghettos, Too, Need a Lansdale”: American Counter-​Insurgency Abroad and at Home in the Vietnam Era’, in Celeste Ward Gventer, David Martin Jones, and M.L.R Smith (eds.), The New Counter-​Insurgency Era in Critical Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 111–​126; Joan M. Jensen, Army Surveillance in America, 1775–​1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 241.

640   Elie Tenenbaum Britain, the counter-​insurgency practices of the Northern Ireland Troubles being pursued at immense human, political, and economic cost to the communities most affected.49 In each of these cases, and many more we cannot mention here, opposition leaders, human rights activists, and a substantial section of the public reasoned that counter-​insurgency presented a threat to liberal democracy, a conclusion that contributed to its further demise. Finally, one has to consider the context of decolonization’s geopolitical endgames and Cold War Détente context as major factors in the diminishing rationale for Western counter-​ insurgency. The received wisdom from the Second World War, the early Cold War years, and past decolonization conflicts that expertise in counter-​subversion was a decisive national security interest gradually receded as different strategic approaches—​from nuclear deterrence to economic leverage and multilateral diplomacy—​gained ground. The US rapprochement with Communist China of the early 1970s, for instance, bore fruit in Beijing’s diminishing support for insurgencies throughout the world.50 The nature and the scale of Soviet support for guerrilla movements were also changing. While past support for some favoured proxies was curtailed, others, from Vietnam, through Angola to Nicaragua, were so successful that the movements in question took power. Ironically, this revivified US sponsorship of various insurgencies, from Central American ‘Contras’ to Afghanistan’s mujahideen, to back ‘freedom fighters’, as the Reagan doctrine put it.51

The Dynamics of Counter-​Insurgency Circulation in the West As the global narrative of Western counter-​insurgency is now more clearly discernible, it raises structural questions about the dynamics of its circulation. Three aspects suggest themselves: one relates to the motivation behind the circulation of Western counter-​insurgency knowledge, the second concerns both the mechanics of such circulation and the sociology of its actors, and the last considers the limits and potential barriers to the phenomenon.

Why Did Counter-​Insurgency Knowledge Circulate? Numerous motives, or even mere incentives, could lead specialist theorists and security force practitioners to engage in counter-​insurgency knowledge circulation. The most significant driver was the will to devise effective strategic responses to new insurgent threats. The aforementioned NSC 90 calling for a programme of ‘exchange of current information on Soviet and communist-​inspired guerrilla activities with our allies and friends’ was emblematic of 49 John

Newsinger, ‘From Counter‐insurgency to Internal Security: Northern Ireland 1969–​1992’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 6/​1 (March 1995), 88–​111; Rod Thornton, ‘Getting It Wrong: The Crucial Mistakes Made in the Early Stages of the British Army’s Deployment to Northern Ireland (August 1969 to March 1972)’, Journal of Strategic Studies, 30/​1 (February 2007), 73–​107. 50  Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 51  James M. Scott, Deciding to Intervene: The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).

A Community of Mavericks    641 this shift. In the context of the ‘loss of China’ in 1949 and the resulting US calculation that communist insurgencies might well seize power in previously Western-​dominated East Asia, it appeared imperative to better understand the nature of the threat. The same could be said about internal circulation within national security forces. The French Army tried to learn from its mistakes in Indochina in order to avoid defeat in Algeria against insurgent adversaries they considered similar to their erstwhile Vietminh opponents.52 To French counter-​insurgency advocates like Roger Trinquier or Charles Lacheroy, circulating lessons from Indochina to Algeria and adapting accordingly was an existential matter of survival for France and its empire—​the two being inseparable in their minds. This ‘learning to adapt’ driver is supported by vast political science scholarship on knowledge transfers and organizational learning.53 This also helps explain why circulation waned from the mid-​1960s onwards, replicating the wider decline of counter-​insurgency previously mentioned. Among the small community of counter-​insurgency experts, a feeling took hold that they had learned from each other whatever they needed to learn. Another engine of circulation was to proffer expertise to secure diplomatic influence. The British advisory mission to Saigon in the 1960s, headed by Sir Robert Thompson and meant to disseminate British Malayan experience to South Vietnam, reflected London’s eagerness to show the flag without substantial military cost, expressing solidarity with the United States, despite the abiding British doubts about the prosecution of the war in Vietnam.54 In a similar vein, fear of loss of diplomatic influence within NATO was a powerful trigger for France to develop its psychological warfare apparatus. In 1950, French officials had regretted that their ‘position in the realm of psychological warfare is less confident than that of the Anglo-​Saxons’.55 Paris then engaged in a sustained effort to catch up with its British and American allies: to do so, they would first need to ‘train in the United States or in Great Britain’,56 before acquiring an independent capability to shape NATO policy in this respect. Circulation could also be spurred by influence competition. In Argentina, for instance, the French competed with the Americans for influence on the local military through the diffusion of their counter-​insurgency knowledge. This was quite clear in 1961 when French liaison officers in Buenos Aires organized an Inter-​ American Seminar on Counter-​ Revolutionary Warfare at the Argentinian War College. Commenting on the success of the seminar, the French Ambassador added that Paris ‘could be all the more satisfied that American military circles have recently shown real jealousy vis-​à-​vis French influence on [the] Argentinian general staff and military school’.57 52  Alexander Zervoudakis, ‘From Indochina to Algeria: Counter-​ Insurgency Lessons’, in Martin S. Alexander, Martin Evans, and John F.V. Keiger (eds.), The Algerian War and the French Army: Experiences, Images, Testimonies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 43–​60. 53  Deborah D. Avant, Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons from Peripheral Wars, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); John A. Gentry, ‘Intelligence Learning and Adaptation: Lessons from Counterinsurgency Wars’, Intelligence and National Security, 25/​1 (2010), 50–​75. 54 Peter Busch, All the Way with JFK? Britain, the US, and the Vietnam War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 55  SHD, GR 5Q 21, ‘Note pour le S.G.P.D.N.’, 31 December 1950. 56  SHD, GR 5Q 21, Note à l’attention du CV Barrière (SGPDN), n°2776 DN/​SIG, 12 juin 1952. 57  AMAE, 80QO, D74, ‘Cours interaméricain de guerre contrerévolutionnaire’, 6 October 1961.

642   Elie Tenenbaum Trading information proved another motivation for counter-​insurgency knowledge circulation. One of the reasons why French liaison officers shared their operational experience in Algeria was that they anticipated clearance to access the boards of US military schools, allowing them to collect intelligence on very different matters such as the development of America’s tactical nuclear weapons.58 The French military attaché in Washington realized that they could trade these clearances against some of their lessons learned ‘in the fields of army aviation, psychological warfare, the use of parachute units, counter-​guerilla warfare . . . [areas] in which the Americans accept that we can bring a lot’.59 The final incentive for circulating expertise stemmed from purely bureaucratic interest. Sharing knowledge with a partner could advance individual careers or help promote favoured ideas. Such was the case with Charlie Beckwith, a lieutenant in the US Army Special Forces, who used his attachment to the 22nd SAS Regiment to help make his case for founding the US Delta Force Detachment.60 Personnel exchanges could also be used by government officials in contrary fashion to sideline embarrassing characters. French defence minister Pierre Messmer was, for example, eager to send high-​profile Algerian veterans abroad less to share their experience than to distance them from French politics. Such was the case with Roger Trinquier and a number of his fellow paratroopers, all confirmed as dangerous political troublemakers in the context of the coup in Algiers, who were sent to the Congo to support Moïse Tshombe’s Katanga secession.61

How Did Counter-​Insurgency Knowledge Circulate? To answer this question it helps to keep in mind that there are two types of circulation: internal and external. Internal circulation takes place within an organized political body like the British Commonwealth, the French empire, or even the American administration across all its agencies: knowledge can circulate from one theatre to another, or from one agency to another.62 Transfer of knowledge from Malaya to Kenya, and from Indochina to Algeria has been mentioned in this context earlier. One could also cite the transfer of knowledge from the CIA to the Pentagon, for instance, when the intelligence agency transferred its operational activities in South Vietnam’s central highlands to the US Army Special Forces in 1963.63 External circulation, however, remains the more interesting and understudied phenomenon. It can occur through four types of channels: inter-​allied joint operations, defence 58 

SHD, 10T 1062, Lettre du général de Bary, 9 mai 1958. SHD, 10T 1062, ‘Accès aux “Boards” des officiers de liaison’, 15 January 1959. 60 Charlie A. Beckwith, Delta Force: The Army’s Elite Counterterrorist Unit (New York: Avon Books, 2000). 61  Roger Trinquier, Jacques Duchemin, and Jacques Le Bailly, Notre Guerre Au Katanga (Paris: La Pensée moderne, 1963); Walter Bruyère-​Ostells, Dans l’ombre de Bob Denard: les mercenaires français de 1960 à 1989 (Paris: Nouveau monde éd., 2014). 62 French, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 207–​213. 63  US Army Heritage and Education Center, Morton Papers, box 1, Gen. Rosson to Col. Morton (MACV), 29 April 1963; Francis J. Kelly, U.S. Army Special Forces 1961–​1971 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 1973), 35; Christopher K. Ives, US Special Forces and Counterinsurgency in Vietnam: Military Innovation and Institutional Failure, 1961–​63 (London: Routledge, 2007), 41ff. 59 

A Community of Mavericks    643 diplomacy activities, ad hoc exchange programmes and special advisory missions, and, finally, the networking among strategic research and epistemic communities. If the Second World War was the primary crucible in which a Western counter-​insurgency community took shape, joint partnerships in the early Cold War cemented the connections. Close Anglo-​American cooperation in Greece in the years 1947–​1949 was especially significant here: from its inception, General Livesay, head of the American Mission to Aid Greece (AMAG), insisted that the Americans take advantage of British experience in counter-​rebellion warfare.64 Of course, these joint operations could also turn sour, as occurred with the French and the Americans in Vietnam.65 But even there, knowledge and experience continued to circulate despite all the reciprocal bitterness. One striking example is that of Edward Lansdale, special CIA envoy to Vietnam in 1953–​1955 who was assigned to the pacification division within the Franco-​American Training Relations Instructions Mission (TRIM). Lansdale’s comments on his attachment were telling: Our teamwork with the French, as fellow westerners in an Asian area, has progressed well despite many handicaps . . . This teamwork has grown more and more into a secretly tripartite type of working arrangement, in practice we incorporate a substantial amount of French thinking in our plans and advice.

Central to diplomacy’s rationale is to engage in dialogue and exchange information. Such exchanges might occur at the highest political level, like De Gaulle’s warning to Kennedy about the lessons he had learned from his own experience in Algeria.66 Ambassadors and their staff may also participate in circulation of counter-​insurgency knowledge. British ambassador to Vietnam Henry Hohler was asked by President Ngo Dinh Diem to relay documentation about Malaya. And the French delegate to SEATO found himself compelled to discuss counter-​subversion policy with France’s new South East Asian alliance partners in 1955.67 For all that, political leaders and high-​level diplomats rarely immersed themselves in the technical minutiae of counter-​insurgency. As a result, the richest material regarding counter-​insurgency circulation is to be found in the realm of defence diplomacy, and especially among military attachés, liaison officers and instructors (or LOIs) who had the dual mission of representing their country and contributing to specialist courses in foreign military schools.68 Officers like Richard L. Clutterbuck, British LOI at the US Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC), gave ‘about 150 lectures, mainly to Universities and armed forces college all of them pertaining to his Malayan experience’69 between 1961 and 1963. One might also mention the now infamous Lieutenant-​Colonel Paul Aussaresses,

64 

FRUS, 1947, vol. 5, Greece, ‘The Ambassador in Greece to the Secretary of State’, 2 juillet 1947, 208. C. Statler, Replacing France the Origins of American Intervention in Vietnam (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007). 66 Documents Diplomatiques Français, 1961, Vol. 1, Document 265, Entretien avec le Président Kennedy, 31 mai 1961; Pierre Journoud, De Gaulle et Le Vietnam: 1945–​ 1969, La Réconciliation (Paris: Tallandier, 2011), 137. 67  TNA, DO 169/​109, Dispatch n° 1239, 12 May 1961; AMAE (Nantes), S.B, Box 48, ‘Bilan et avenir de l’OTASE’, 12 November 1955. 68  SHD, 10T 1062, ‘Fiche à l’attention du colonel, chef du 2e bureau’, 29 mai 1959. 69  Churchill Archives Centre (CAC), Clutterbuck Collection, Box 1, ‘Comments on lectures given by Richard Clutterbuck in the USA’, undated. 65 Kathryn

644   Elie Tenenbaum highly regarded as a LOI at Fort Bragg, where he gave a number of lectures pertaining to his experience as special operations officer in Indochina and during the Battle of Algiers.70 Exchange programmes and advisory teams also play a crucial role in counter-​insurgency circulation. British special training schools during the Second World War were obviously a pioneering model, intrinsically linked to the development of inter-​allied joint operations. In subsequent decades many other institutions began training or advising foreign partners in counter-​insurgency techniques. The British-​run Jungle Warfare School (JWS) of Kota Tinggi, in the Johore Sultanate in Malaya, typified the process. It was a key site of counter-​ insurgency knowledge circulation from 1951 to 1971, offering training to French, American, Australian, New Zealand, and other military personnel from multiple non-​communist Asian countries.71 Some institutions were specifically dedicated to foreign trainees, such as the International Police Academy in Washington, created in 1962 by the Office of Public Safety, the police branch of the AID. Its purpose was to ‘indoctrinate the leaders and potential leaders of the Free World police . . . with knowledge to strengthen the capacity of their country’s police to counter Communist subversion and insurgency’.72 Peer-​to-​peer exchange programmes were also significant, like that between the 22nd SAS regiment and the US Army. Established in 1960, this programme foresaw the exchange of a captain and a sergeant who, unlike liaison officers, would not just observe and liaise, but actually command a unit and even operate alongside the paired unit—​such as US Army Sergeant Rozniak, who was dispatched along with the SAS to the Malayan–​Thai border in 1963.73 Finally, special advisory teams were also influential, the most obvious among many being Robert Thompson’s mission to Saigon.74 Finally, strategic research and epistemic communities also accelerate the circulation process. Think tanks have proven particularly important, especially in the United States, where they were particularly influential as outsourced analysis organizations. The RAND Corporation stands out as a circulation actor, organizing symposiums, sending researchers on the field to collect data, and speaking directly to government.75 But RAND was not alone; others did much the same, including those established outside the United States, like Brian Crozier’s Institute for the Study of Conflict based in London.76 Academics also played their part. Peter Paret’s landmark study of French revolutionary warfare was instrumental in disseminating knowledge of its subject matter in the United States, as did the work

70 

SHD, 10T 1077, ‘Visite à Fort Bragg’, 13 February 1963; Paul Aussaresses, Je n’ai Pas Tout Dit. Ultimes Révélations Au Service de La France (Paris: Le Rocher, 2008). His influence was especially strong on Colonel Carl Bernard, instructor at the Military Assistance and Training Advisor course as mentioned by Andrew J. Birtle, United States Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942–​1976 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 2006), 226. 71 

SHD, 10H 704, 1951–​1955; TNA, FO 371/​135687, D1641/​10, Sir Robert Scott to Lord Selwyn Lloyd, 18 July 1958; TNA, FCO 24/​846, Jungle Warfare Centre, 22 October 1970. 72  NARA, RG 59, MLR A1 5206, Box 3, ‘The International Police Academy’, June 1963, 2. 73  TNA, DO 169/​34, Letter from Col. J.H. Mallard (War Office), 20 November 1963. 74  Typically, Lansdale’s Saigon Military Mission in 1954–​1955. 75  Austin Long, On ‘Other War’: Lessons from Five Decades of RAND Counterinsurgency Research (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2006). 76  TNA, FCO 95/​1428, Letter from Crozier (ISC) to D. Hyde (IRD), 9 September 1971; Brian Crozier, Free Agent: The Unseen War 1941–​1991 (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 86–​91.

A Community of Mavericks    645 of journalist-​turned-​political scientist Bernard Fall.77 One might also mention the role of committed publishers like Frederick Praeger, who was encouraged by the Pentagon’s Special Operations office to publish English translations of ‘classic’ counter-​insurgency texts by Roger Trinquier and David Galula, as well as defining insurgency statements by Mao and Che Guevara.78

Limits and Resistance to the Transnational Circulation By way of conclusion, we might reflect on some limitations to the dynamics of counter-​ insurgency circulation by stressing the many obstacles it encountered throughout the period. Easiest to identify are the many conjunctural frictions that impede third-​party influence on a national counter-​insurgency campaign. Influence competition and frictions between rivals could act as a brake on external influence. Edward Lansdale—​usually depicted as a vocal advocate of learning lessons from foreign experience—​initially opposed Sir Robert Thompson’s mission to Saigon, judging that it was ‘not good to let a foreigner decide on how to spend money and energy invested by the United States in Vietnam’.79 But there are also more long-​lasting, structural limits to circulation. The most obvious was the language barrier, which hindered much of the English-​speaking world’s access to French counter-​insurgency literature for instance—​hence, the key role of officers with language skills on the one hand, and of publishers willing to publish translated works on the other in sustaining the dialogue. One might also point at other inter-​cultural gaps, not to say stereotypes. One telling example among many is that of US Marines General Graves Erskine, who was sent to South East Asia in 1951 on a fact-​finding mission to assess the financial and military needs for US aid. When visiting Indochina, he soon boasted that he would not listen to his French counterparts, calling them ‘a bunch of second raters that haven’t won a war since Napoleon’.80 The most structural hindrance of all might be the gap between the doctrinal heart—​those who think and plan the action—​from the actual practitioners. While the former had the time and the cultural curiosity to engage in circulation, in order words, to inquire into another country’s experience with a view to learning lessons relevant to their own campaigns, the commanding officers on the ground often shunned such analogies, which seemed remote or inapplicable to the local challenges they confronted. This returns us to one of this chapter’s opening propositions, the reluctance or hesitancy among Western military and political establishments to embrace counter-​insurgency as a legitimate assignment for armed forces. For all the evidence that counter-​insurgency proponents followed multiple pathways of knowledge circulation, often finding common ground as a 77  Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The Analysis of a Political and Military Doctrine (New York: Praeger, 1964); Bernard Fall, Street without Joy (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole, 1961). 78  Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Lansdale Papers, Box 48, ‘Praeger Books’, Memorandum for Assistant Secretary Sylvester, from Brig. Lansdale, 15 May 1961; Box 6, Lansdale to Praeger, 26 March 1962. 79 FRUS, 1958–​ 1960, Vol. 1, Vietnam, Document 136, Memorandum from Lansdale (Pentagon) to Williams (MAAG), 14 April 1960, 386. 80 Quote from Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years, 1941–​ 1960 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 1985), 112.

646   Elie Tenenbaum result, they also remained ‘mavericks’ in the eyes of their home institutions and often had a hard time convincing their hierarchy to adopt their policy prescriptions. These limitations notwithstanding, the history of counter-​insurgency circulation helps us to move beyond the model of individual national histories of late-​colonial counter-​insurgency, helping us to connect narratives that hitherto have largely been studied separately. The intensity of these connections and the many platforms for exchange reveal the underlying unity in Western approaches to this form of irregular warfare, whether in its rise or its eventual demise.

Select Bibliography French, David, The British Way in Counter-​Insurgency, 1945–​1967 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Fitzgerald, David, Learning to Forget: US Army Counterinsurgency Doctrine and Practice from Vietnam to Iraq (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013). Heuser, Beatrice, and Eitan Shamir (eds.), Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Mumford, Andrew, Counterinsurgency Wars and the Anglo-​American Alliance: The Special Relationship on the Rocks (Washington, Georgetown University Press, 2017). Tenenbaum, Elie, Partisans et centurions: une histoire de la guerre irrégulière au XXe siècle (Paris: Perrin, 2018). Thomas, Martin, Fight or Flight: Britain, France, and the Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Chapter 34

Exile, Safe Hav e ns , and Rear Base s

External Sanctuaries and the Transnational Dimension of Late Colonial Insurgencies and Counter-​Insurgencies Mathilde von Bülow In late January 1962, Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, and Robert Resha of the African National Congress (ANC) travelled to Addis Ababa to attend a conference of the Pan-​African Freedom Movement for East, Central, and Southern Africa, a precursor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). The ANC having reached the decision in the wake of the 1959 Sharpeville massacre that non-​violence was no longer an effective strategy for ousting the apartheid regime in South Africa, the three men’s mission aimed to ‘enlist support, money, and training’ for the ANC’s recently established military wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK), and ‘boost [the ANC’s] reputation in the rest of Africa’.1 At the conference, Mandela met with representatives of a movement whose long and brutal war of national liberation he and his colleagues followed with great interest: the Algerian Front de libération nationale (FLN). Having initiated its struggle for independence on 1 November 1954, the FLN was by then locked in negotiations with France that would result in the Évian Accords of 18 March, which in turn paved the way for Algeria’s independence on 5 July 1962. To Mandela—​self-​avowedly inexperienced in the military sciences—​the FLN’s successful liberation struggle was worthy of emulation—​all the more since the ‘situation in Algeria was the closest model to our own in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the indigenous majority’.2 The Algerians he met in Addis Ababa pledged to support the ANC’s struggle against apartheid and invited Mandela to visit their bases in Morocco for rudimentary instruction in the strategy of national liberation. There, he found himself in the company also of ‘freedom fighters from Mozambique, Angola . . . and Cape Verde’, for Rabat was the headquarters of the Co-​ordinating Committee of the Freedom Movements of the Portuguese territories, then 1 

2 

Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (London: Abacus, 1994), 342. Ibid., 355.

648   Mathilde von Bülow preparing their own independence struggles. To Mandela, the Moroccan capital resembled ‘the crossroads of virtually every liberation movement on the continent’. He enjoyed lengthy discussions with Dr Chawki Mostefaï, who headed the local mission of the FLN’s Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA), and received training and instruction at the Algerian Liberation Army’s (ALN) western command base in the vicinity of Oujda, close to the Algerian border. Mandela’s sojourn with the FLN and ALN in Morocco proved formative. One of the key lessons he took away from it was the need for external safe havens where MK could establish bases and command posts and where the ANC could form a government-​in-​exile.3 The way he saw it, once MK forces, ‘operating from a friendly territory, set their foot on our soil, they would grow in numbers and striking power so rapidly that in due course [the South African prime minister] Verwoerd would be plagued by all the problems which once tormented Chiang Kai Shek, Ngo [Dinh] Diem, De Gaulle, Batista and the British’.4 Mandela’s vision proved only partially correct. The MK did go on to establish external camps and bases, but it never posed a serious military threat to the South African Defence Force. Mandela overestimated the MK’s abilities, just as he had those of the ALN forces he witnessed in Morocco, which contrary to his apparent belief saw little by way of sustained combat against the French military. Far more decisive to the eventual outcome of the decades-​long struggle against apartheid, besides a rising tide of domestic political unrest that was largely beyond the ANC’s control, were the political activities and increasingly global connections of the ANC’s External Mission, which in turn mirrored those of the GPRA. Mandela’s sojourn in Morocco, and the lessons he took away from it, nonetheless highlight a growing trend among liberation movements contesting colonial and white-​minority rule during the mid-​twentieth century: their use of territory beyond those authorities’ reach. Some, like the FLN and ANC, chose exile only once colonial repression threatened to unravel their entire organization. Others, like the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), were founded abroad. Some, like the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), initiated their insurgency from abroad. Whether they were founded in exile, forced into exile, or left their country by design, almost all African insurgent groups contesting colonial and settler regimes in the 1960s and beyond maintained offices, camps, bases, and headquarters in neighbouring countries and further afield in Cairo, Dar-​es-​Salaam (seat of the OAU’s Liberation Committee), Lusaka, Algiers (once independent), New York, London, or even Bonn. External sanctuaries, to give these sites a common denomination, became a defining feature of the wars of decolonization, one that highlights the increasingly transnational nature of these wars. Their proliferation fuelled cross-​border flows of goods, money, people, and ideas, and helped generate (seemingly) new sites and means of contestation against colonialism and white-​minority rule. Nowhere would this become more evident than in the ANC’s struggle against apartheid. In fact, the whole of southern Africa transformed into a region where decolonization increasingly ‘took place in the context of a transnational war between various state military forces and (foreign) non-​state actors across and beyond state

3  Allison

Drew, ‘Visions of Liberation: The Algerian War of Independence and its South African Reverberations’, Review of African Political Economy 42/​143 (2015), 32. 4 Nelson Mandela, Unpublished Autobiographical Manuscript (Johannesburg: Nelson Mandela Foundation Centre of Memory and Dialogue, 1976), 438.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    649 borders’.5 The ANC and its southern African allies, however, were not the first anti-​colonial insurgents to rely on external sanctuaries. Nor, for that matter, were the Algerians; yet as Mandela’s memoir highlights, it was the FLN’s example these liberation movements largely sought to emulate. To appraise the reasons why and ways in which late-​colonial insurgencies notably in Africa made use of external sanctuaries, this chapter will therefore focus primarily on the FLN during Algeria’s war of independence (1954–​1962). The chapter considers the key benefits and drawbacks external sanctuaries presented for African liberation movements. It starts, however, by exploring the phenomena to be addressed.

Transnational Insurgencies Transnational insurgencies, like transnational history, are difficult to define. Efforts at conceptualization have primarily focused on the regional dynamics of civil wars in parts of Africa and the Middle East beginning in the late 1970s, or on the global ‘War on Terrorism’ and the insurgencies that followed in its wake. These studies categorize transnational insurgencies into three strands. First, an insurgency becomes transnational when insurgents form networks understood as ‘cross-​border associations of groups and individuals who act and interact in the international arena independently of—​and frequently in opposition to—​ states’.6 Bound together by transnational ideologies and identities, these networks pursue objectives and engage in operations that transcend the nation-​state. Second, nation-​bound insurgencies take on transnational features when they gain support from outside state or non-​state actors and recruit foreign fighters or activists to their cause.7 Third, insurgencies become transnational when insurgents ‘have access to external territory’ and engage in 5 

Lennart Bolliger, ‘Apartheid’s Transnational Soldiers: The Case of Black Namibian Soldiers in South Africa’s Former Security Forces’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43/​1 (2017), 198. See also: Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Miles-​Blessing Tendi (eds.), Transnational Histories of Southern African Liberation Movements (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Lena Dallywater, Chris Saunders, and Helder A. Fonseca (eds.), Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War ‘East’. Transnational Activism 1960–​1990 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019); Rui Lopes and Víctor Barros (eds.), ‘Amílcar Cabral and the Liberation of Guinea-​Bissau and Cape Verde: International, Transnational, and Global Dimensions’, themed section in International History Review, 42/​6 (2020); Eddie Michel and Thula Simpson (eds.), ‘Rhodesia to Zimbabwe: The Diplomacy of Isolation and Liberation under UDI’, special issue of South African Historical Journal, 71/​3 (2019); Hilary Sapire (ed.), ‘Liberation Movements, Exile, and International Solidarity: An Introduction’, special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 35/​2 (2009); Hilary Sapire and Chris Saunders (eds.), Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives (Claremont SA: UCT Press, 2013); Luise White and Miles Larmer (eds.), ‘Mobile Soldiers and the Un-​National Liberation of Southern Africa’, special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 40/​6 (2014). 6 Mette Eilstrup-​ Sangiovanni, ‘Transnational Networks and New Security Threats’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 18/​1 (2005), 7. Curtis A. Ohlers, ‘Interstate Warfare and the Emergence of Transnational Insurgencies’, PhD dissertation, LSE, 2014, 20–​22, 147–​181; David J. Kilcullen, ‘Counter-​ Insurgency Redux’, Survival, 48/​4 (2006), 111–​130. 7 Jeffrey Checkel (ed.), Transnational Dynamics of Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Kristian Gleditsch, ‘Transnational Dimensions of Civil War’, Journal of Peace Research, 44/​3 (2007), 293–​309; David Malet, Foreign Fighters: Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also note 6.

650   Mathilde von Bülow ‘extraterritorial operations in countries beyond their target state’.8 The wars of decolonization fall within the second and third categories of transnational insurgencies. The notion of sanctuary, too, is difficult to define, perhaps because it is found in ‘legislative frameworks, political and religious conventions, cultures of hospitality, and codes of honor and revenge the world over’.9 Concepts of sanctuary reflect both individual and collective experiences and are closely connected to ideas of exile. Throughout a period of exile, a return home is frequently impossible because it would result in persecution, imprisonment, or worse.10 Countless historical examples point to individuals and groups using exile to preserve their religious, political, cultural, or ethnic identities and to continue their respective struggles for acceptance or change, whether peaceful or armed. Sanctuary, on the other hand, invokes both a practice, that of granting shelter and protection, and a physical space of refuge and immunity.11 As places and spaces apart, sanctuaries are fundamental to insurgencies, especially as they came to be conceived and practised during the wars of decolonization. To Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, the creation of base or rear areas constituted one of seven fundamental steps to securing victory when fighting a people’s war. Guerrilla warfare, he wrote in 1938, ‘could not last long or grow without base areas’, which constitute ‘the strategic bases on which the guerrilla forces rely in performing their strategic tasks and achieving the object of preserving and expanding themselves and destroying and driving out the enemy’. Without them, Mao warned, ‘there will be nothing to depend on in carrying out any of our strategic tasks or achieving the aim of the war’.12 Vietnamese military leader Võ Nguyên Giáp, architect of France’s 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu, equally argued that ‘a strong rear is always the decisive factor for victory in a revolutionary war’.13 Mao and Giáp’s theories matter because 8 Idean Salehyan, Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 4–​6. Kersti Larsdotter, ‘Fighting Transnational Insurgents: The South African Defence Force in Namibia, 1966–​1989’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 37/​12 (2014), 1,024–​1,038; Michael Murray, ‘Stayin’ Alive: Transnational Sanctuary and Insurgency’, PhD dissertation, CUNY, 2017; Paul Staniland, ‘Defeating Transnational Insurgencies: The Best Offense is a Good Fence’, Washington Quarterly, 29/​1 (2005), 21–​40. 9 Michael Innes, ‘Deconstruction Political Orthodoxies on Insurgent and Terrorist Sanctuaries’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 31 (2008), 251. 10  Egon F. Kunz, ‘Exile and Resettlement: Refugee Theory’, International Migration Review, 15/​1-​2 (1981), 42–​51; JoAnn McGregor, ‘Locating Exile: Decolonization, Anti-​imperial Spaces and Zimbabwean Students in Britain, 1965–​1980’, Journal of Historical Geography, 57 (2017), 62–​75; Benjamin N. Lawrance and Nathan R. Carpenter (eds.), Africans in Exile: Mobility, Law, and Identity (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018); Yossi Shain, The Frontier of Loyalty: Political Exiles in the Age of the Nation-​ State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Christian A. Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 11 R. Lippert and S. Rehaag (eds.), Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship and Social Movements (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013); Michael Innes (ed.), Denial of Sanctuary: Understanding Terrorist Safe Havens (Westport CT: Praeger Security International, 2007). For a detailed terminological discussion, see Michael Innes, Streets without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War (London: Hurst, 2021), especially chap. 3. 12  ’Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan, May 1938’, in Mao Tse-​Tung, Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-​Tung, 1st edn. (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1963), 167–​168; Mao Tse-​Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. S.B. Griffith (New York: Praeger, 1961), 107. 13 Võ Nguyên Giáp, People’s War People’s Army (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 93.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    651 they informed the strategic practice of subsequent insurgent movements contesting colonial and settler rule. Both leaders understood base and rear areas, or sanctuaries, to be spaces located within the confines of the contested state. As physical sites, their defining feature was that they were concealed (e.g. hideaways in an urban environment) or territorially inaccessible (i.e. in rural, sparsely developed regions). Even during the First Indochina war, however, Giáp’s forces also benefitted from rear bases located beyond the boundaries of the contested state—​in China, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.14 In later colonial conflicts, starting with the Algerian war, the tendency to rely on external sanctuaries became ever more pronounced. This practice, however, did not represent a new phenomenon. Even in the colonial world, there are numerous instances of early anti-​ colonialist insurgents fleeing across borders or continuing their efforts from exile. For example, the emir Abd al-​Qadir, who led the resistance to France’s colonization of Algeria during the 1830s and 1840s, frequently sought sanctuary in neighbouring Morocco. His forces’ presence and strength in fact grew so strong that it came to worry Sultan Mawlay Abd al-​Rahman, who eventually turned on his guest.15 The tendency for anti-​colonial movements to rely on external sanctuaries nonetheless seemed to become more pronounced in the era after the Second World War. Several factors help account for this development, including normative and structural changes that occurred in the international community embodied, for instance, in the creation of the United Nations Organisation, whose charter enshrined—​and sought to uphold—​the rules of inter-​state relations, most importantly the inviolability of territorial sovereignty. The development can also be explained by the quickening pace of decolonization as well as the political and military strategies and tactics adopted by anti-​colonialist revolutionaries, who sought to benefit from these and other changes in the realms of communication and mobility. Of course, not all exterior localities from whence late-​colonial insurgents pursued their struggle should be construed as sanctuaries. Unable to reproduce the military victory achieved by the Vietminh, groups such as the FLN increasingly saw the international arena as a battleground in its own right; diplomacy became a ‘secret weapon’ through which to fight the colonial state.16 Over the course of its war, the FLN developed an extensive (pseudo-​ ) diplomatic apparatus and dispatched permanent missions to key cities around the world as well as visiting delegations to others. The FLN also exploited the international connections of auxiliaries such as the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), General Union of Muslim Algerian Students (UGEMA), and Algerian Red Crescent (CRA). Their concerted efforts helped trigger a ‘diplomatic revolution’ that challenged the Westphalian notion whereby only territorially defined, sovereign states were permitted to engage in international politics.17 Yet the myriad locations where Algerian emissaries attended conferences, 14  Christopher E. Goscha, Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 1885–​1954 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999); Michel Lux, La guerre d’Indochine, au 3e escadron monté du Cambodge, 1949–​1951 (Nantes: Odin, 2009); J.J. Zasloff, ‘The Role of the Sanctuary in Insurgency: Communist China’s Support to the Vietminh, 1946–​1954’, RAND Memorandum (May 1967). 15  James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 58–​72. 16 Front de Libération Nationale, ‘Proclamation du Front de libération nationale (1er novembre 1954)’, in Mohammed Harbi (ed.), Les Archives de la Révolution algérienne (Paris: Jeune Afrique, 1981), 101–​103; Matthew Connelly, L’arme secrète du FLN. Comment de Gaulle a perdu la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Payot, 2011). 17  Matthew Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-​Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

652   Mathilde von Bülow issued statements, met with local dignitaries and activists, or engaged in negotiations cannot all be considered sanctuaries; nor can all the countries—​primarily (but not exclusively) in the Middle East and Sino-​Soviet bloc—​where Algerians received specialist training and instruction in sabotage, guerrilla warfare, ordnance, communications, medicine, or trade unionism. Post-​independence, Algeria itself offered training to insurgents from the Global South (and North)—​so much so that by the mid-​1960s, its capital, Algiers, came to be known as the ‘Mecca of revolution’, to cite Amílcar Cabral, leader of the African Party for the Independence of [Portuguese] Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC).18 In these instances, the FLN’s envoys and trainees—​like those of later insurgent groups that found themselves in Algiers or elsewhere—​were but transient visitors. In other countries, the FLN’s sojourn, and that of other liberation movements in the throes of their revolutionary struggles, proved more durable. This longevity represents a defining feature of external sanctuaries. Geographic proximity to the insurgency generally constitutes another. Frequently located in neighbouring or ‘frontline’ states, such sanctuaries embodied extraterritorial places and spaces where liberation movements were able to establish bases, camps, and headquarters. They frequently also sheltered growing populations of refugees from the war zones.19 The host countries were typically formerly colonized territories that had only recently gained their independence. Throughout the Algerian war, Egypt and Libya served as key logistical and operational bases for both FLN and ALN. Morocco and Tunisia soon superseded both in importance, hosting a plethora of camps, bases, offices, and headquarters as well as swelling numbers of refugees, especially once both protectorates gained their independence from France in 1956. Cairo, then Tunis, hosted the FLN’s government-​in-​exile, established in September 1958. Similarly, sanctuaries in newly independent Congo, Zambia, and Namibia20 sustained the insurgent groups fighting to liberate Angola from Portuguese colonial rule (1961–​1974), while safe havens in Guinea and Senegal sheltered the principal organs and forces of the PAIGC (1963–​1974), and FRELIMO relied on sanctuaries in Tanzania and Zambia (1964–​1974).21 Upon independence, Mozambique then served as sanctuary, alongside Tanzania, for the Maoist Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), while the latter’s Soviet-​backed rival, the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), operated primarily from Zambia. Independent Angola, meanwhile, became a refuge for the South-​West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) in its decades-​long conflict against South Africa (1966–​1990). Finally, the ANC and MK came to orchestrate their lengthy struggle against apartheid (1961–​1993) from exile in Tanzania and Zambia, with 18 Jeffrey J. Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3; Elaine Mokhtefi, Algiers, Third World Capital (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2018); Eugenia Palieraki, ‘Producing Scientific Knowledge by and for the Third World: Postcolonial Algeria, South Americans and Militant Expertise in the Global Cold War’, Middle Eastern Studies, 57/​6 (2021), 972–​991. 19  For an ethnographic study of liberation movement camps in Zambia and Angola, see Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa. 20  A South African mandate since 1919, South West Africa was declared independent by the UN General Assembly in 1966; its name was formally recognized as Namibia in 1968. South African occupation continued illegally until 1990. 21  On Dar es Salaam as a hub for liberation movements, see George Roberts, Revolutionary State-​ Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–​1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    653 additional bases in Angola, Uganda, Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, and the United Kingdom. The latter became a central hub of the ANC’s diplomatic efforts, including coordination with an ever-​ growing, transnational Anti-​ Apartheid Movement.22 Here, too, the ANC mirrored the Algerian struggle, for the FLN had also embedded permanent representatives in western European countries. West Germany, for instance, served as operational base for the FLN’s Fédération de France, responsible for the war’s ‘second front’ in the metropole, and seat of an important legation that engaged in diplomacy, recruitment, arms procurement, and the supervision of an expanding community of Algerian migrants and refugees. French intelligence depicted the legation, located within the premises of the Tunisian and Moroccan embassies in Bonn, as the FLN’s European headquarters.23 As places and spaces beyond their jurisdiction, colonial authorities and white-​minority regimes also became fixated on external sanctuaries. Without them, the argument went, insurgencies would return to being zero-​sum games that could be defeated militarily by the far more powerful counter-​insurgent forces.24 This belief was widely shared among French military commanders fighting the FLN. A situation report from November 1956, for instance, concluded that ‘the rebellion finds its force in the aid it receives abroad’ and advocated that ‘measures must be taken to try to isolate Algeria from the rebellion’s external bases of support’.25 Two years later, the director-​general of the French National Police informed officials in Bonn that ‘the total liquidation of terrorist activities in the metropole would be much more advanced today if the rebels did not possess safe havens situated on foreign territories that bordered France’.26 By 1961, French military intelligence argued that the FLN’s external organization had become ‘the rebels’ principal force’.27 The security services’ responses to the FLN’s growing presence across North Africa and western Europe highlight the extent to which external sanctuaries were seen to encumber counter-​insurgency efforts. Since the FLN’s exterior organization constituted the movement’s ‘most coherent machine of war’, so the thinking ran, French authorities should aim for its destruction, along with the attendant goal of sanctuary denial.28 ‘As long as this considerable war potential is not neutralised’, Colonel Roger Trinquier later wrote in his treatise on Modern Warfare, ‘peace,

22  Tom Buchanan, Amnesty International and Human Rights Activism in Postwar Britain, 1945–​1977 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Anna Konieczna and Rob Skinner (eds.), A Global History of Anti-​apartheid: ‘Forward to Freedom’ in South Africa (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Rob Skinner, The Foundations of Anti-​apartheid: Liberal Humanitarians and Transnational Activists in Britain and the United States, c.1919–​64 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Håkan Thörn, Anti-​apartheid and the Emergence of a Global Civil Society (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 23  Mathilde von Bülow, West Germany, Cold War Europe and the Algerian War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 11. 24  Eqbal Ahmad, ‘Revolutionary War and Counter-​Insurgency’, Journal of International Affairs, 25/​1 (1971), 32. 25 Note d’information no.1053/​ INS/​AFN/​EM sur la situation en Afrique du Nord, 16 Nov. 1956, Service Historique de la Défense, Armée de Terre (SHD-​T), Vincennes, 1H/​1101/​D3 (unless stated otherwise, translations from French or German are the author’s). 26  Compte-​ rendu de la conférence entre représentants français et allemands au sujet de l’activité des rebelles algériens en RFA, 18 Nov. 1958, Archives du Ministère des Affaires Étrangères (MAE), Paris, MLA/​2. 27  Notice de renseignement no.1937/​EMI/​2, 1 June 1961, SHD-​T, 1H/​1743/​D1. 28  Fiche, EMI/​2, 17 May 1960, SHD-​T, 1H/​1743/​D1.

654   Mathilde von Bülow even if completely restored within our own borders, will be precarious and in continual jeopardy’.29 Trinquier’s conclusion highlights the extent to which external sanctuaries were perceived to be force multipliers for insurgent groups.30 While they were not always central to insurgent success in the wars of decolonization, insurgent failure frequently coincided with an inability to secure external safe havens.31 To practitioner-​scholars such as Robert Thompson and André Beaufre, who held key commands during the Malayan emergency and Algerian war respectively, the absence of external sanctuaries helped account for the success of British counter-​insurgency efforts in Malaya and Kenya, while their presence explained French failures to vanquish the FLN. ‘Perhaps the greatest advantage of all’, Thompson argued with regard to the British, ‘was that Malaya was completely isolated from outside communist support, having only a 150-​mile frontier with friendly Thailand in the north (with whom there was a border agreement under which Malayan police forces could operate across the border) and a 1,000-​mile seacoast, which could easily be controlled’.32 Beaufre, too, referenced Kenya and Malaya when he observed that a failure to establish contiguous bases ‘because of the geographic isolation of the theatre of . . . war, would weaken an insurgency to the point of being vanquished’.33 The presence or absence of external sanctuaries was thus perceived to shape the nature, duration, and outcome of the wars of decolonization.

Why Insurgents Base Themselves Abroad What, then, were the key advantages to be derived from such sanctuaries? First, they offered insurgents protection from repression and reprisals by the state’s security apparatus. A move abroad was often the only way for insurgent leaders and militants to avoid capture or death. External sanctuaries thus helped ensure a group’s survival. For the FLN’s executive organ, the Committee of Coordination and Execution, the decision to leave Algeria was reached at the height of the so-​called Battle of Algiers, after the capture and summary execution (officially presented as a suicide) of their colleague Larbi Ben M’Hidi in February/​March 1957. Faced with the relentless onslaught of General Jacques Massu’s 10th Parachute Division, the committee’s four remaining members chose to continue the war effort from safe havens in neighbouring Tunisia and Morocco. Here, it was argued, the FLN could be ‘both inside and outside’ of Algeria: close enough to maintain contact with the internal front; yet safely beyond the French authorities’ reach.34 Similar calculations informed the move to West 29  Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency, trans. Daniel Lee (London: Pall Mall, 1964), 97. 30  Rem Korteweg, ‘Black Holes: On Terrorist Sanctuaries and Governmental Weakness’, Civil Wars, 10/​1 (2008), 66; Innes, ‘Deconstructing’, 255, 262; Kilcullen, ‘Counter-​insurgency Redux’, 118. 31  Ahmad, ‘Revolutionary Warfare’, 32–​33. 32 Robert Thompson, Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), 19. 33  André Beaufre, La guerre révolutionnaire. Les forms nouvelles de la guerre (Paris: Fayard, 1972), loc.805. 34  Étude envoyée au C.C.E. de la prison de la Santé (avril 1957), in La Guerre et l’Après-​Guerre, Hocine Aït Ahmed (Paris: Minuit, 1964), 17–​18, 38–​43.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    655 Germany by leaders of the Fédération de France following the March 1958 appointment as Paris’ police chief of Maurice Papon, a former Vichyite administrator and prefect of the Constantinois department in Algeria. Papon’s appointment portended a grave escalation of metropolitan repression of Algerians resident in France.35 The FLN’s leaders would not return to Algeria until mid-​1962, after ratification of the Évian Accords. In the meantime, they were joined, in West Germany but especially in North Africa, by thousands, even hundreds of thousands of Algerians—​both militants and refugees—​seeking safety from French repression.36 By 1962, the FLN’s politico-​ administrative and military structures in Tunisia and Morocco—​consisting of the GPRA, a burgeoning bureaucracy, a modern army led by a powerful general staff, and auxiliary organizations—​barely resembled the small band of insurgents that had launched the Algerian liberation struggle. This points to a second critical advantage to be gained from external sanctuaries. As spaces beyond the colonial authorities’ control, they offered insurgents not just security but also time. After all, most liberation movements engaged in, and were inspired by, what Mao referred to as protracted war.37 Theirs was an attritional war that sought to gradually grind down their opponents, physically or morally. Taken together, the time and security provided by sanctuaries allowed insurgents to engage in a range of activities and develop several attributes. For one, sanctuaries facilitated tasks of recruitment and training. Since French counter-​insurgency measures made it impossible to organize anything but rudimentary training in guerrilla tactics for new recruits within Algeria, from 1957 most military training occurred in camps and bases run by the ALN in Tunisia and Morocco. The permanence of these camps allowed for long-​term planning and growth, and their location made it easier to exploit the expertise of instructors seconded by the FLN’s foreign backers. Thousands of recruits would cross the Algerian border to enlist in what became known as the armée de la frontière, which by 1962 had grown into a well-​equipped conventional force of 30,000. The FLN/​ALN could also draw on a ready source of new recruits among the refugee camps that emerged on either side of the Algerian border.38 West Germany, meanwhile, served as a nodal point for FLN/​ALN recruitment efforts in Europe. In 1957, the movement established an office in the newly opened Tunisian embassy in Bonn/​Bad Godesberg, which, among other responsibilities, ran an exfiltration network for Algerians seeking to enlist and return to North Africa. The office operated separately from the Fédération de France, which did its own recruiting among the Algerian diaspora and ran ‘schools’, mostly in West Germany, where new recruits to its paramilitary wing, the Organisation Spéciale, were taught the basics of clandestine tradecraft.39 35  Omar

Boudaoud, Du PPA au FLN. Mémoires d’un combattant (Alger: Casbah, 2007), 162–​168; Mohammed Harbi, Une Vie debout: Mémoires politiques 1945–​1962, Vol. 1 (Paris: Découverte, 2001), 222; Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Post-​Colonial Memories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 27–​28. 36  League of Red Cross Societies, Relief Action for Algerian Refugees in Tunisia and Morocco, 1959–​ 62: Final Report (Geneva: League of Red Cross Societies, 1963). 37  Mao Tse-​Tung, ‘On Protracted War, May 1938’, in Selected Military Writings. 38  Safia Arezki, De l’ALN à l’ANP. La construction de l’armée algérienne 1954–​1991 (Algiers: Barzakh, 2018), 93–​101, 107; Gilbert Meynier, Histoire intérieure du FLN, 1954–​1962 (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 557–​580. 39 Bülow, West Germany; ‘Entretiens avec Keramane, et avec Omar Boudaoud, Ali Haroun et Kaddour Ladlani, Alger, 19 sept. 2000’, in Nassima Bougherara, Les Rapports franco-​allemands à l’épreuve de la question algérienne (1955–​1963) (Bern: Lang, 2006), 206–​224; Daho Djerbal, L’Organisation

656   Mathilde von Bülow Subsequent liberation movements, especially those in southern Africa, would emulate the FLN’s example. Even the PAIGC, which was eventually able to train most of its new recruits in the liberated areas it controlled within Guinea-​Bissau, initially operated from bases in neighbouring Guinea-​Conakry.40 In facilitating the recruitment and training of political cadres and guerrilla fighters, external sanctuaries contributed to the professionalization of liberation movements. Time, after all, helped insurgents garner experience and expertise, plan and organize, and develop multipronged strategies involving military, political, psychological, and diplomatic dimensions. Liberation camps, bases, and headquarters proved important also in the struggle to influence international and world opinion. Journalists, dignitaries, aid workers, or foreign sympathizers could visit these sites far more easily than strictly monitored war zones. External sanctuaries thus constituted windows to the world for liberation movements. More importantly, they facilitated the development of an ‘insurgent-​state-​ in-​waiting’.41 The nature, scale, cohesion, and effectiveness of these counter-​states varied considerably during the wars of decolonization. In the case of the FLN, it appeared both extensive and sophisticated, despite the internal rivalries and divisions that plagued the movement throughout and beyond the Algerian war. The GPRA was organized (and subsequently reorganized) into separate ministries each with specific remits, whether finance and economic affairs, social and cultural affairs, foreign relations, information, or armaments and general relations. The governments themselves were designated by the National Council of the Algerian Revolution (CNRA), the FLN’s supreme organ invested with popular sovereignty whose role it was, in theory, to decide all key policies. Real power and authority, however, increasingly lay with the ALN and especially the commanders of its armée de la frontière, where Houari Boumediene rose to become chief first of the ALN’s Operational-​ Military Committee ‘West’ at Oujda and then, in January 1960, of its newly formed general staff.42 To the outside world, however, the FLN/​ALN-​in-​exile projected a united front, which in its words and deeds increasingly encapsulated the attributes of self-​determination, sovereignty, and statehood: although the movement never fully controlled any territory prior to 1962, it nonetheless won the allegiance of the Algerian people, as demonstrated, for instance, by the mass demonstrations that erupted in December 1960;43 it also effectively controlled the Algerian diaspora, whether the migrant communities in France and western Europe, or the refugees gathered in Tunisian and Moroccan camps; and it came to be recognized by a majority of states in the Global South and the socialist bloc (and implicitly even by a growing number of Western states) as the legitimate representative of the Algerian people. The formation of the GRPA proved essential to these achievements. Diplomatic recognition Spéciale de la Fédération de France du FLN: Histoire de la lutte armée du FLN en France (1956–​1962) (Alger: Chihab, 2012). 40 Patrick Chabal, Amílcar Cabral. Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War, 2nd ed. (London: Hurst, 2002), 57–​58, 84–​85. 41 Rex Brynen, Sanctuary and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1990); Michael G. Panzer, ‘Building a Revolutionary Constituency: Mozambican Refugees and the Development of the FRELIMO Proto-​state, 1963–​1968’, Social Dynamics, 39/​1 (2013), 5–​23. 42 McDougall, Algeria, 208–​210; Arezki, De l’ALN à l’ANP; Meynier, Histoire intérieure. 43 Nadia Sariahmed Belhadj, ‘The December 1960 Demonstrations in Algiers: Spontaneity and Organisation of Mass Action’, Journal of North African Studies, 27/​1 (2022), 104–​142.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    657 and legitimacy also advanced the ‘foreign policy of national liberation’, which helped the FLN/​ALN garner the external support so indispensable to keeping the liberation struggle alive, whether moral, political, technical, financial, or material.44 Here, too, operating from external sanctuaries proved vital, enhancing the movement’s ability to manoeuvre, and safeguarding vital resources, including its war materiel. Countries adjacent to the war zones, whether Tunisia and Morocco in North Africa, or West Germany in Europe, developed into depots for arms, munitions, communications equipment, and other vital supplies. External sanctuaries thus helped sustain insurgent movements in multiple ways. To Abdelhafid Keramane, who headed the FLN’s bureau in Bonn, West Germany was the country in western Europe ‘that did the most for the Algerian cause, for refugees, for the FLN, and for [its] external delegation’.45 But it was Morocco and Tunisia, Mohamed Lebjaoui, a one-​time leader of the Fédération de France, noted, that became ‘the principal bases of our political, diplomatic and military action’.46 The French authorities reached a similar conclusion. The ‘external rebellion’, a study prepared by the cabinet of Prime Minister Michel Debré observed in May 1959, ‘essentially embodies a “base” in the sense given to that term by the theoreticians of revolutionary warfare: at once a ground of departure, zone of logistical support, headquarters, crucible of revolutionary training, [and] contact point with exterior allies’.47 And as New York Times journalist Michael Clark noted in 1959 about France’s counter-​insurgency against the FLN, ‘it is singularly difficult to destroy an enemy enjoying the sanctuary of an inviolable frontier’.48

Drawbacks and Dangers International borders, however, are inviolable only in theory. They mean little where power relations between neighbouring states remain fraught, where there are few prying eyes to witness incursions, or where states lack the resources to police their physical boundaries. As mentioned previously, while the support of neighbouring countries and the use of external sanctuaries could be of great advantage to insurgent movements, they were not a sine qua non of a successful liberation struggle. Indeed, operating from external sanctuaries also posed serious challenges. For one, colonial authorities and white-​minority regimes sought to asphyxiate the external sources of support to insurgencies, without which, so they believed, these movements would collapse. To achieve that goal, counter-​insurgent forces regularly pursued insurgents across frontiers. From their perspective, international laws and norms did not apply to national liberation struggles.49 Imperial governments neither accepted the insurgents as legitimate political actors, nor did they recognize the struggles in which these insurgents engaged as lawful or ‘real’ wars. Their methods of repression, while adapted to 44 Connelly, Diplomatic Revolution. 45 

Bougherara, ‘Entretiens’, 214. Mohamed Lebjaoui, Vérités sur la Révolution algérienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 105–​106. 47  Étude sur la situation générale en Algérie, 13 May 1959, AHC, 2DE/​75/​D1*. 48  Michael Clark, Algeria in Turmoil: A History of the Rebellion (New York: Praeger, 1959), 309. 49  On the international law pertaining to civil and colonial wars, see Boyd van Dijk, Preparing for War: The Making of the 1949 Geneva Conventions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), chap. 3. 46 

658   Mathilde von Bülow the theories of revolutionary or people’s warfare, remained rooted in the nineteenth-​century tradition of ‘small wars’, one that ignored matters of sovereignty, restraint, or legality.50 Thus, during the wars of decolonization in southern Africa, Portuguese, Rhodesian, and South African forces cooperated with one another; South Africa, for example, providing air cover to Portuguese operations in Cuando Cubango district against Angolan insurgents and SWAPO.51 All three settler-​colonial states relied heavily on special and auxiliary forces, many of which were African, which were tasked with eradicating insurgent groups in their external sanctuaries.52 These interventions made life difficult for liberation movements but rarely produced the desired goal of sanctuary denial. French efforts to destroy the FLN and ALN’s external organization are a case in point. On 22 October 1956, French intelligence orchestrated ‘the world’s first incident of “aerial piracy” ’, hijacking an aircraft chartered by Morocco’s Sultan V to transport the FLN’s external leaders from Rabat to Tunis.53 One week later, French forces, colluding with Britain and Israel, invaded the Suez Canal zone, aiming to oust Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whom French authorities perceived to be the principal mastermind behind the FLN. Hailed spectacular successes daringly executed, both transgressions proved counterproductive; the governments in Rabat, Tunis, and Cairo redoubled their support for the FLN, thereby entrenching the movement’s external sanctuaries, upending mediation efforts for a negotiated settlement to the Algerian conflict, and sparking international condemnation, which isolated the French diplomatically and helped the FLN garner fresh support at the UN.54 The aerial bombardment of the Tunisian village of Sakiet-​Sidi-​Youssef on 8 February 1958, justified by French generals as retaliation against cross-​border skirmishes with the armée de la frontière, proved even more disastrous. Instead of destroying one of the ALN’s external bases, the operation killed sixty-​eight civilians, many of them children and women. A blatant violation of Tunisian sovereignty 50  Alex

Marshall, ‘Imperial Nostalgia, the Liberal Lie, and the Perils of Postmodern Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 21/​ 1 (2010), 233–​ 258; Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Dierk Walter, Colonial Violence: European Empires and the Use of Force (London: Hurst, 2017). 51  Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, The White Redoubt, the Great Powers and the Struggle for Southern Africa (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, ‘The Last Throw of the Dice: Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa, 1970–​74’, Portuguese Studies, 28/​2 (2012), 201–​215; Luís Barroso, ‘The Origins of Exercise ALCORA: South Africa and the Portuguese Counterinsurgency Strategy in Southern Angola’, South African Historical Journal, 69/​3 (2017), 468–​485. 52 Lennart Bolliger, Apartheid’s Black Soldiers: Un-​ National Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming); Lennart Bolliger and Will Gordon, ‘“Forged in Battle”: The Transnational Origins and Formation of Apartheid South Africa’s 32 “Buffalo” Battalion, 1969–​1976’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 46/​5 (2020), 881–​901; João P.B. Coelho, ‘African Troops in the Portuguese Colonial Army, 1961–​1974: Angola, Guinea-​Bissau and Mozambique’, Portuguese Studies Review, 10/​1 (2002), 129–​150; Miles Larmer and Eric Kennes, The Katangese Gendarmes and War in Central-​Southern Africa, 1960–​1999 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); Timothy Stapleton, African Police and Soldiers in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1923–​80 (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011). 53 McDougall, Algeria, 209. 54 Amira Aleya-​ Sghaier, ‘La Tunisie: base-​ arrière de la révolution algérienne’, Revue d’Histoire Maghrébine, 118 (2005), 155–​160; Mounya Essemlali, ‘Le Maroc entre la France et l’Algérie (1956–​1962)’, Relations internationals, 146/​12 (2011), 77–​93.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    659 and non-​belligerency, the bombing produced ‘little military gain, while costing a great deal in diplomatic complications and unfavourable public opinion’.55 The ensuing political and diplomatic crises precipitated an uprising in Algiers in May 1958 that overthrew the Fourth French Republic and prompted the return to power of General Charles de Gaulle. French efforts at sanctuary denial thus exacerbated domestic tensions, a situation the Portuguese would also discover. Rather than learning from the French experience, Portuguese forces, too, sought to eliminate their most formidable foe—​Amílcar Cabral and his highly successful PAIGC—​by attacking both in their primary sanctuary. In an eleventh-​hour attempt to reverse the tide of the Guinea-​Bissauan liberation struggle, the Portuguese in November 1970 launched an amphibious assault on Conakry to oust the PAIGC’s prime backer, President Ahmed Sékou Touré, and capture Cabral. Militarily successful, this operation, too, backfired politically.56 The colonial authorities also pursued their opponents abroad covertly. The French foreign intelligence service (SDECE), for instance, played an important role in so-​called operational action missions beyond Algeria’s borders, which targeted vehicles, bases, depots, and convoys linked to the FLN and ALN. Perhaps in response to past experience, these missions, about which we still know little, were supposed to be untraceable.57 The proviso of plausible deniability also applied to assassination attempts, through which SDECE sought to eliminate not only FLN militants, but also, and more importantly, arms dealers known for supplying the ALN.58 Like other attempts to disrupt the FLN’s external bases and sources of support, these efforts did more harm than good. Instead of dislocating the FLN’s procurement activities in West Germany, for instance, they forced the Algerians to seek out more powerful suppliers based beyond the Iron Curtain. ‘State organisations have replaced the arms traffickers’, French intelligence reported in December 1960, which made intelligence harder to collect and interventions almost impossible to execute without provoking international incidents.59 The assassination attempts also did serious damage to France’s reputation, for it proved implausible to deny French involvement. In the contest to win over world opinion, they helped reinforce the image of France as villain in the Algerian war, while arms traffickers were transformed into heroes, ‘on the whole sympathetic, who had placed [their] skills and courage in the service of a good cause, in this case the fight by the Algerian insurgents for their liberty’.60 Here, too, other imperialist regimes appeared blind to the lessons learned by the French. In 1969, FRELIMO leader Eduardo Mondlane was killed by a letter bomb in Dar es Salaam, seat of the movement’s headquarters; and in 1973, Cabral 55  Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria: The Analysis of a Political and Military Doctrine (New York: Praeger, 1964), 33–​34. 56 Alexis Arieff, ‘Still Standing: Neighbourhood Wars and Political Stability in Guinea’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 47/​3 (2009), 333–​338; John P. Cann, ‘Operation Mar Verde, the Strike on Conakry, 1970’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 8/​3 (1997), 64–​81; Bilguissa Diallo, Guinée, 22 novembre 1970: Opération Mar Verde (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014). 57  Instruction no.1/​EMDN/​REN/​O.S. relative à l’Action Opérationnelle en Afrique du Nord, 28 July 1958, Archives Nationales de France, Pierrefite-​sur-​Seine, AG/​5(F)/​318. 58 Opérations réalisées depuis le 1er Janvier 1956, undated list [mid-​ 1958?], ANF, AG/​5(F)/​318. Also: Bülow, West Germany, chaps. 5 and 9; Damien van Puyvelde, ‘French Paramilitary Actions and the Algerian War of Independence, 1956–​1958’, Intelligence & National Security 36/​6 (2021), 898-​909 . 59  Note, EMG/​2, 6 Dec. 1960, SHD-​T, 1R/​352/​D3*. 60  Dépêche no.630 de l’ambassadeur Seydoux à Bonn, 26 March 1959, MAE, MLA/​3.

660   Mathilde von Bülow was gunned down in front of the PAIGC headquarter in Conakry. Both assassinations were allegedly facilitated by members of the Portuguese intelligence service (PIDE) working with the murdered men’s disgruntled followers.61 The assassinations neither reversed the tide of the insurgencies in Mozambique and Guinea-​Bissau, nor did they dampen the growing disgruntlement among the Portuguese military and population over the seemingly interminable conflicts in Africa. In 1974, the Estado Novo regime was overthrown by the Armed Forces Movement, which promptly negotiated an end to Portugal’s colonial wars. Interventions across state boundaries thus frequently backfired on counter-​insurgents, shoring up support for insurgents from host governments, local communities, and international as well as domestic opinion. Counter-​insurgent efforts were frustrated in part by the very logic of the colonial narrative they sought to defend. Their claim that colonial insurgencies constituted domestic affairs made it difficult for imperial authorities and white-​minority regimes to justify interventions beyond their territorial jurisdiction without simultaneously internationalizing the very conflicts they sought to delegitimize and domesticate. In this way, national frontiers could also constitute deterrents that bridled the colonial impulse to pursue and destroy.62 As we have seen, that deterrent was frequently ineffective, especially in the Global South—​perhaps because of the ‘rule of colonial difference’ that structured relations between (former) colonizers and (former) colonized.63 It proved more effective in Europe, where relations between states were better respected. Thus at no point during the Algerian war did the French contemplate overt interventions against Algerian militants in their sanctuaries in Belgium, Switzerland, or West Germany. Even the intensified surveillance at France’s borders proved problematic for fear of what that signalled to the international community. After all, France was not supposed to be at war; and since Algeria was constitutionally a part of France, Algerians were supposed to be treated as any other French citizen, which meant they should enjoy free movement across European frontiers. French border guards were therefore instructed in September 1957 to intensify their inspections ‘with judgement, avoiding vexatious measures, notably with regards to known Muslim personalities, and with a maximum of discretion in order to prevent unfavourable commentaries by foreign witnesses’.64 Police prefect Papon fought for the closure of France’s metropolitan borders, but to no avail.65 In western Europe, in other words, the colonial narrative came to undermine French efforts at sanctuary denial. Colonial authorities also applied considerable diplomatic pressure on governments that aided or hosted insurgent movements. Thus in March 1959, Prime Minister Michel Debré instructed French diplomats to make plain that the French people ‘will judge countries

61  Dalila C. Mateus, A PIDE/​DGS na Guerra Colonial 1961–​1974 (Lisbon: Terramar, 2004), 169–​173; Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, ‘Parallel Diplomacy, Parallel War: The PIDE/​DGS’s Dealings with Rhodesia and South Africa, 1961–​74’, Journal of Contemporary History, 49/​2 (2014), 367, 370; George Roberts, ‘The Assassination of Eduardo Mondlane: FRELIMO, Tanzania, and the Politics of Exile in Dar es Salaam’, Cold War History, 17/​1 (2017), 15–​17. 62 Beaufre, Guerre révolutionnaire, loc.803. 63  Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 10, 14–​34. 64  Instruction no.4085/​SN.RG.RAF du directeur des Renseignements Généraux, 12 Sept. 1957, Service des Archives et du Musée de la Préfecture de Police (SAMPP/​P), Paris, Ha/​66*. 65  Quelques suggestions sur la lutte à mener contre le FLN en France, undated, SAMPP/​P, Ha/​68*.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    661 purporting to be our friends and allies by their attitude toward the Algerian problem’.66 Diplomatic pressure still proved ineffective against countries such as Morocco or Tunisia, which, given their strategic locations, were able to countermand French pressure with support gained from other states, including ones allied to France. As we have seen, efforts to dislodge the FLN and ALN from these countries proved counter-​productive, and both would continue to pose a ‘delicate problem’ to the French. To neutralize the danger emanating from Tunisia and Morocco, the French authorities instead relied on extensive fortified barriers constructed along the Algerian borders, the so-​called Morice and Pedron lines. These physical barriers, heavily patrolled and consisting of electrified fencing, radar surveillance systems, anti-​personnel mines, and free-​fire zones came to constitute France’s ‘only defence’ against the ALN’s increasingly powerful armée de la frontière.67 Diplomatic pressure did prove effective in the case of West Germany. As a country that had only just regained its sovereignty, remained divided, and depended on its Western allies, especially the three former occupying powers (which included France), for its national security, the Bonn government could ill afford to alienate its neighbour. Mounting tensions over the fate of Berlin and the two Germanies, especially after 1958, offered a convenient pressure point for the French. In February 1959, Debré warned Bonn’s ambassador in Paris ‘that the solidarity of the accord between France and Germany was linked to a community of views that must, for the moment, manifest itself principally in Algeria’.68 The FLN’s presence in West Germany thus remained precarious, and Bonn’s unwillingness to tolerate subversive activities pushed the FLN underground. To operate, the movement relied on the support of allies, from Arab diplomats to German civil-​society actors prepared to shelter and assist its militants. Reliance on middlemen and women, however, could not prevent the crackdown prompted by French pressures. On 21 April 1961, the West German police arrested Abdelhafid Keramane and two other members of his bureau in Bonn. The three stood accused, following extensive investigations by the federal police, of leading a terrorist organization that ‘has arrogated police powers for itself and imposed monetary fines and corporal punishments on its fellow countrymen’. Given the nature, scale, and scope of the FLN’s activities in West Germany, Keramane later considered that the authorities had ‘tolerated a lot’ and even acknowledged that his arrest was ‘understandable’.69 Diplomatic pressure had achieved its desired result: the arrests severely constricted the FLN’s manoeuvring room in West Germany, limiting the country’s usefulness as a sanctuary. When it came to sanctuary denial, economic pressure, too, proved effective against certain host governments. Zambia and Botswana were particularly prone to such coercion given their continued dependence on the so-​called white redoubt: exports and imports from these landlocked countries relied on railway connections through Rhodesia, South Africa, and Portuguese Angola and Mozambique. Threats of severing these economic arteries 66 

Compte-​rendu résumé de la reunion sur l’Algérie tenue à l’Hôtel Matignon, 14 March 1959, AHC, 2DE/​75/​D1*. 67  Ibid. Also Jacques Vernet, ‘Les barrages pendant la guerre d’Algérie’, in Jean-​Charles Jauffret and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), Militaires et guérilla dans la guerre d’Algérie (Bruxelles: André Versaille, 2012), 181–​191. 68  Note a.s. de l’entretien du Premier Ministre et de M. Blankenhorn, 17 Feb. 1959, MAE, EU/​RFA/​ 1261*. 69 Schnellbrief, Bundesministerium der Justiz an Bundesministerium des Innern, 21 April 1961, Bundesarchiv, Koblenz (BA/​K), B106/​15780; ‘Entretiens,’ in Bougherara, Rapports franco-​allemands, 212.

662   Mathilde von Bülow regularly prompted the governments in Lusaka and Gaborone to attempt tighter control of insurgent groups operating from their territory.70 In 1975, for instance, President Kenneth Kaunda banned SWAPO from using Zambia as a base for armed operations, having previously also banned the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) for refusing to halt the sabotage of the Benguela railway. Likewise, while Kaunda allowed the ANC’s External Mission to base its headquarters in Lusaka, he forbade the establishment of MK camps within Zambian borders, which were consequently based, at least initially, in Tanzania.71 During the late 1970s and 1980s, South African pressure likewise prompted Mozambique and Angola to restrict MK activities, notwithstanding the fact that both countries had fought liberation struggles of their own. Yet these clampdowns also reflected an unease with the unchecked behaviour of certain MK units caught up in desertions, mutinies, and human rights abuses.72 Indeed, host governments would sometimes curb or withdraw their support, whether tacit or open, when political violence implicating insurgent movements came to threaten or was perceived as threatening their own security. Suspecting FRELIMO of supporting his rivals during the 1964 political crisis, for instance, President Hastings Banda banned its insurgents from using Malawi as a staging post to infiltrate Mozambique.73 In 1975, meanwhile, the assassination in Lusaka of ZANU chairman Herbert Chitepo prompted the Zambian authorities to close ZANLA’s two camps and arrest over 1,300 insurgents. Kaunda blamed the assassination on ZANU infighting, though others implicated the Rhodesian intelligence services.74 Internal disputes certainly strained relations between insurgents and host governments preoccupied with asserting their own territorial authority. This was apparent even in Morocco and Tunisia, where the governments supported the Algerian independence struggle. Maintaining a degree of control particularly over the armée de la frontière proved possible while the latter remained weak, divided, and poorly led, which was especially the 70 

Luís Barroso, ‘ “A Trick with Rebounds”: Portugal, Zambia and the Rhodesian Crisis (1967–​1968)’, Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 12/​2 (2013), 195–​209; Kenneth Good, ‘Zambia and the Liberation of South Africa’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 25/​3 (1987), 505–​540; Washa G. Morapedi, ‘The Dilemmas of Liberation in Southern Africa: the Case of Zimbabwean Liberation Movements and Botswana, 1960–​1979’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 38/​1 (2012), 73–​90. 71  Larsdotter, ‘Fighting Transnational Insurgents’, 1,028; Chabal, Cabral, 209; Hugh Macmillan, The Lusaka Years: The ANC in Exile in Zambia 1963–​1994 (Auckland Park SA: Jacana, 2013), loc.497; Thula Simpson, ‘The Making (and Remaking) of a Revolutionary Plan: Strategic Dilemmas of the ANC’s Armed Struggle, 1974–​1978’, Social Dynamics, 35/​2 (2009), 314; Christian Williams, ‘Ordering the Nation: SWAPO in Zambia, 1974–​76’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 37/​4 (2011), 693–​7 13. 72  Luli Callinicos, ‘Oliver Tambo and the Dilemma of the Camp Mutinies in Angola in the Eighties’, South African Historical Journal, 64/​3 (2012), 587–​621; Stephen Davis, The ANC’s War against Apartheid. Umkhonto we Sizwe and the Liberation of South Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), chaps. 1 and 4; Stephen Ellis, ‘Mbokodo: Security in ANC Camps, 1961–​1990’, African Affairs, 93/​371 (1994), 279–​98; Arianna Lissoni, ‘Transformations in the ANC External Mission and Umkhonto we Sizwe, c.1960–​1969’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 35/​2 (2009), 297–​300; Simpson, ‘Making’, 315–​316. 73  Sayaka Funada-​Classen, The Origins of War in Mozambique: A History of Unity and Division, trans. Masako Osada (Somerset West: African Minds, 2013), 248–​249. 74  Luise White, The Assassination of Herbert Chitepo: Texts and Politics in Zimbabwe (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2003); Blessing-​Miles Tendi, ‘Transnationalism, Contingency and Loyalty in African Liberation Armies: The Case of ZANU’s 1974–​1975 Nhari Mutiny’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 43/​1 (2017), 143–​159.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    663 case in Tunisia; indeed, in 1958–​1959 the ALN required Tunisian support to quell a series of rebellions within its own ranks. It proved considerably harder after the January 1960 reorganization of the ALN’s command structures. Thereafter, the armée de la frontière operated increasingly as a state within a state that rivalled not just the GPRA but at times even its host governments.75 The shooting down in June 1961 by the ALN of a French fighter jet over Tunisian territory triggered a particularly serious rift between the ALN, GPRA, and the Tunis government. To avoid French retaliation, President Habib Bourguiba demanded the immediate release of the French pilot, who had been captured by the ALN. Bourguiba was backed by the GPRA, which at the time was seeking to resume negotiations with the French authorities. The ALN, however, relented only after Bourguiba suspended the supply of arms and water to its bases. Accusing the GPRA of weakness vis-​à-​vis Bourguiba as well as the French, the entire ALN general staff resigned in protest (albeit temporarily), which in turn aggravated the simmering crisis in civil–​military relations within the Algerian liberation movement.76 Bourguiba’s response to the ALN’s act of insubordination highlights the extent to which insurgent groups depended on the goodwill, cooperation, or tolerance of host governments and local communities to sustain their externally based camps and troops. That dependence, as we have seen, gave host governments some degree of leverage, one that could constrain insurgent actions, or intensify factionalism.77 Infighting, however, was equally a product of the isolation that so frequently emerged between interior and exterior forces engaged in the liberation struggles. In operating from external sanctuaries, insurgent leaders—​both military and political—​risked losing touch not only with fighters and militants on the internal front, but also with the local populations upon whose loyalty and support those fighters and militants depended. This disconnect stemmed at least in part from factors beyond an insurgent group’s control, including the distance between external sanctuaries and the internal fronts; the difficulty of the terrain that had to be crossed; the limited means of transport and communication available to insurgents; and the prevailing attitudes of resident populations. Logistical challenges were further compounded by difficulties arising from an insurgent group’s approach to political mobilization; its capacity to organize effective politico-​administrative and military structures; its ability to garner the resources required to pursue an armed struggle; and the capabilities of its leaders. Of the liberation movements contesting colonial and white-​minority regimes in Africa, few enjoyed the propitious circumstances of the PAIGC. The movement’s external bases in Guinea and Senegal were so close to the internal front, which was itself exceptionally small, that contact with the movement’s liberated zones could easily be maintained and supplies and reinforcements assured. The supply lines for the MK or for the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), meanwhile, stretched vast distances all the way to Tanzania, since neighbouring countries were either ruled by white-​minority governments or proved unreliable hosts politically. The PAIGC also had an exceptional leader in the charismatic Cabral, who devoted considerable energy to the political mobilization of Guinea-​Bissau’s

75 Meynier, Histoire intérieure, 416–​430, 559–​569, 692. 76 Arezki,

De l’ALN à l’ANP, 149, 159–​171; Renaud de Rochebrune and Benjamin Stora, La guerre d’Algérie vue par les Algériens, II: De la bataille d’Alger à l’indépendance (Paris: Denoël, 2016), 325–​330. 77  Thomas Henriksen, ‘People’s War in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-​Bissau’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 14/​3 (1976), 377–​399.

664   Mathilde von Bülow rural populations.78 In contrast, the ANC, ZAPU, and FRELIMO initially prioritized military strategy over political mobilization, whereas the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA relied on ethnic mobilization, having failed to establish a unified nationalist front. For many, therefore, a reliance on external sanctuaries also created impediments to the pursuit of guerrilla warfare. Exile politics and diplomacy, at least for a time, came to eclipse the internal struggle, sometimes to the detriment of the movements’ political effectiveness.79 Based in its North African sanctuaries, the FLN, too, increasingly prioritized the external front over the internal one. Unbeknownst to many outside observers, including visiting liberation fighters such as Mandela, the ALN’s external forces by 1962 had long ceased to influence the armed struggle within Algeria. In early 1958, the armée de la frontière had engaged in several pitched battles against French forces, especially along the Tunisian frontier.80 The fortification of Algeria’s borders, however, rendered these confrontations, and any attempts by the Algerians to traverse the frontiers, increasingly suicidal. ALN units began to suffer from a ‘psychosis of “the barrier that kills” ’; orders to cross the border were increasingly disobeyed, and finally abandoned.81 The Morice and Pedron lines thus proved highly effective at keeping insurgents and materiel out of Algeria, so much so that the internal front was drained of supplies and left to fend for itself. In February 1959, the French also launched a broad new offensive—​the Challe Plan, which swept across Algeria from west to east, decimating the ALN’s remaining fighters. At its apogee in late 1957, the internal ALN had counted c.20,000 combatants and as many auxiliaries; by the time of the ceasefire in March 1962, only 5,000 fighters remained.82 Commanders such as Colonel Amirouche grew increasingly frustrated with the armée de la frontière’s lack of action and accused the ALN’s leaders of treason. Dissent and protest—​some incited by the French intelligence services—​resulted in purges that killed thousands, further facilitating the external ALN’s rise to power.83

Conclusion Ultimately, the rupture between the FLN’s interior and exterior forces scarcely influenced the outcome of Algeria’s independence struggle. Despite the divisions that plagued it, the 78 

In addition to Chabal’s study on Cabral, see also Peter Mendy, Amílcar Cabral: A Nationalist and Pan-​Africanist (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019); António Tomás, Amílcar Cabral: The Life of a Reluctant Nationalist (London: Hurst, 2021). 79 Chabal, Cabral, chap. 7, esp. 203. 80  Charles-​Robert Ageron, ‘Un versant de la guerre d’Algérie: la bataille des frontiers (1956–​1962)’, Revue d’histoire odern et contemporaine, 46/​2 (1999), 348–​359; Martin Thomas, ‘Policing Algeria’s Borders, 1956–​1960: Arms Supplies, Frontier Defences and the Sakiet Affair’, War & Society, 13/​1 (1995), 81–​99. 81 Meynier, Histoire intérieure, 296. 82 Meynier, Histoire intérieure, 685. On the Challe Plan, François-​ Marie Gougeon, ‘The Challe Plan: Vain Yet Indispensable Victory’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 16/​3 (2005), 293–​316; François-​Xavier Houtreux, La guerre d’Algérie des Harkis (Paris: Perrin, 2013), chap. 5. 83  Charles-​ Robert Ageron, ‘Complots et purges dans l’armée de libération algérienne (1958–​1961)’, Vingtième Siècle, 59 (1998), 15–​27; Meynier, Histoire intérieure, 296–​307, 406–​444; Rochebrune and Stora, La guerre d’Algérie II, 224–​248.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    665 FLN, especially its external organization, projected a powerful image of unity that helped the movement win over supporters both domestically and globally. In that process, the armée de la frontière, though it did little fighting during the war’s final years, came to be seen as the spearhead of the Algerian people’s struggle for their liberation.84 In the case of the South African struggle against apartheid, the externally based MK also frequently engaged in ineffective or performative operations, but these actions nonetheless enhanced the ANC’s international and domestic credibility, turning the movement into ‘the custodian of South African liberation’.85 The same can be said of many of the other liberation movements contesting colonial and white-​minority rule from external sanctuaries during the wars of decolonization in Africa, all with varying degrees of success. It is often thought that to be successful, a people’s war should not be conducted entirely from external bases; that exile politics are no substitute for political mobilization within the contested locale. There is, of course, some truth to this mantra. After all, the liberation movements that most successfully waged people’s wars against superior colonial forces—​the Vietminh in French Indochina, or the PAIGC against the Portuguese—​did so primarily from within their own countries. They succeeded, it is averred, because they established the right balance between the military and political as well as the internal and external dimensions of their struggle.86 This argument, however, overlooks the fact that some liberation movements emerged victorious in the wars of decolonization despite failing to maintain this balance, develop an effective military campaign, or organize politically within liberated areas. They emerged victorious, one might argue, because in spite of these failures, they came to be accepted, both abroad and at home (at least for a time) as the legitimate representatives of the people they claimed to represent. Movements such as the FRELIMO, ZANU, ZAPU, ANC, and, of course, the FLN achieved this level of acceptance even though and perhaps even because they operated largely from cross-​border camps and bases. Access to external sanctuaries proved indispensable to their eventual success, for it was here that they were able to consolidate the political hopes of the colonized into insurgent-​states-​in-​waiting with their own institutions and hierarchies. Insurgent groups operating from external sanctuaries thus arrogated for themselves not only many of the attributes of sovereignty and statehood, but also moral power. They did so because they recognized that armed resistance alone would not dislodge the colonialist regimes they contested, given the asymmetry of power between insurgent and counter-​ insurgent forces. The task of political mobilization, in other words, ultimately outweighed the quest for military victory, and the international community represented as much of a target for that mobilization as populations at home. This was one of the lessons that Chawki Mostefaï sought to convey to Mandela during the latter’s visit to Rabat in 1962. ‘Guerrilla warfare’, Mostefaï explained, ‘was not designed to win a military victory so much as to unleash political and economic forces that would bring down the enemy’. Hence it was imperative ‘not to neglect the political side of war’, for ‘[i]‌nternational public opinion . . . is sometimes worth more than a fleet of jet fighters’.87 The diplomacy of national liberation 84 Meynier, Histoire inteérieure, 320; McDougall, History of Algeria, 222–​224, 233. 85 

Sapire, ‘Liberation Movements’, 276. See also Davis, The ANC’s War; Thula Simpson, Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle (Cape Town: Penguin Random House, 2016). 86 Chabal, Cabral, 203. 87 Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, 355.

666   Mathilde von Bülow was best pursued from sanctuaries beyond the counter-​insurgent’s control. Mandela took these lessons to heart, as did insurgent leaders such as Cabral or Mondlane.88 Even after the Rivonia trial, which led to his incarceration in 1964 on Robben Island, Mandela urged the ANC’s remaining leaders ‘to develop our armed struggle mainly from adjacent territories’, where the MK might be forged into a regular force, which, just like the ALN in Morocco and Tunisia, could ‘[take] away a lot of the pressure on the internal forces’.89 His exiled colleague, Oliver Tambo, focused meanwhile on the task of political organizing. Under his helm, the External Mission pursued an increasingly effective diplomacy of national liberation.90 Here, too, the ANC emulated the FLN, which developed a ‘veritable diplomatic apparatus’ that in addition to statesmen and diplomats included ‘journalists, trade unionists, intellectuals, academics, political parties, youth organisations, humanitarian institutions’.91 Without external sanctuaries, the FLN—​and the ANC—​would have been hard-​pressed to build that apparatus. Sanctuaries, then, helped insurgents achieve ‘the first and most critical’ principle of revolutionary strategy: namely, the political task of ‘drain[ing] the enemy of legitimacy and beginning to construct parallel counterinstitutions’.92 While they were not always of great military value, they were, as Eqbal Ahmad noted, of ‘great psychological and diplomatic value’, for they helped ‘in internationalising guerrilla demands and keep[ing] alive the hope of liberation’.93 It was for this reason that Mohammed Lebjaoui considered Tunisia and Morocco’s solidarity the FLN’s ‘most precious trump’.94

Select Bibliography Alexander, Jocelyn, JoAnn McGregor, and Miles-​Blessing Tendi (eds.), Transnational Histories of Southern African Liberation Movements (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020). Bülow, Mathilde von, West Germany, Cold War Europe and the Algerian War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Byrne, Jeffrey J., Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization & the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Chabal, Patrick, Amílcar Cabral. Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War, 2nd ed. (London: Hurst, 2002).

88 

Federico Ferretti, ‘Geopolitics of Decolonisation: The Subaltern Diplomacies of Lusophone Africa (1961–​1974)’, Political Geography, 85 (2021), 1–​11; Natalia Telepneva, Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–​1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). 89 Mandela, Manuscript, 591–​592. 90  Stephen Ellis, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960–​1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Macmillan, Lusaka Years; Hugh Macmillan, Oliver Tambo (Cape Town: Jacana, 2017); Scott Thomas, The Diplomacy of Liberation: Foreign Relations of the ANC since 1960 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996). 91  Rédha Malek, L’Algérie à Évian. Histoire des négociations secretes 1956–​1962 (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995), 74. 92 Carollee Bergelsdorf and Margaret Cerullo, ‘Introduction’, in Carollee Bergelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani (eds), The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 4. 93 Eqbal Ahmad, ‘Revolutionary Warfare. How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won,’ in Selected Writings, 21. 94 Lebjaoui, Vérités, 109.

Exile, Safe Havens, and Rear Bases    667 Connelly, Matthew, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the post-​Cold War Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Dallywater, Lena, Chris Saunders, and Helder A. Fonseca (eds.), Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War ‘East’. Transnational Activism 1960–​1990 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019). Drew, Allison, ‘Visions of Liberation: The Algerian War of Independence and its South African Reverberations’, Review of African Political Economy, 42/​143 (2015), 22–​43. Ellis, Stephen, External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960–​1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Innes, Michael, Streets without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War (London: Hurst, 2021). Lopes, Rui, and Víctor Barros (eds.), ‘Amílcar Cabral and the Liberation of Guinea-​Bissau and Cape Verde: International, Transnational, and Global Dimensions’, themed section in International History Review 42/​6 (2020), 1230–​1338. Macmillan, Hugh, The Lusaka Years: The ANC in Exile in Zambia 1963–​1994 (Auckland Park SA: Jacana, 2013). Meynier, Gilbert, Histoire intérieure du FLN, 1954–​1962 (Paris: Fayard, 2002). Michel, Eddie, and Thula Simpson (eds.), ‘Rhodesia to Zimbabwe: The Diplomacy of Isolation and Liberation under UDI’, special issue of South African Historical Journal, 71/​3 (2019), 363–​364. Panzer, Michael G., ‘Building a Revolutionary Constituency: Mozambican Refugees and the Development of the FRELIMO Proto-​state, 1963–​1968’, Social Dynamics, 39/​1 (2013), 5–​23. Roberts, George, Revolutionary State-​Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961–​1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Rochebrune, Renaud de, and Benjamin Stora. La guerre d’Algérie vue par les Algériens. II: De la bataille d’Alger à l’indépendance (Paris: Denoël, 2016). Salehyan, Idean, Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). Sapire, Hilary (ed.), ‘Liberation Movements, Exile, and International Solidarity: An Introduction’, special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 35/​2 (2009), 271–​286. Sapire, Hilary, and Chris Saunders (eds.), Southern African Liberation Struggles: New Local, Regional and Global Perspectives (Claremont SA: University of Cape Town Press, 2013). Simpson, Thula, Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle (Cape Town SA: Penguin Random House, 2016). Telepneva, Natalia, Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961–​1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). White, Luise, and Miles Larmer (eds.), ‘Mobile Soldiers and the Un-​National Liberation of Southern Africa’, part special issue of Journal of Southern African Studies, 40/​6 (2014), 1271–​1361. Williams, Christian, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Chapter 35

Dark Net work s a nd C onflict Transformat i on in Northern I re l a nd Aaron Edwards War provides a legitimation for various criminal forms of private aggrandizement while at the same time these are necessary sources of revenue in order to sustain the war. The warring parties need more or less permanent conflict both to reproduce their positions of power and for access to resources. -​Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars1

Introduction Northern Ireland has been celebrated as a success story in the management of ethno-​ national conflicts.2 From the 1960s until the 1990s, the region was engulfed in violence in the form of large-​scale civil disorder, targeted assassinations, and bomb attacks. In an internal armed conflict that lasted for over thirty years, rival paramilitary groupings—​representing the extreme fringes of the Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist communities—​ clashed with one other and with the local security forces, which included the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), the British Army, and British Security Service, MI5. The ‘Troubles’ saw almost 4,000 people killed and approximately 40,000 injured.3 It was the representative nature of the violence, perpetrated in a deeply divided society, which would prolong the conflict beyond the paramilitary ceasefires of 1994 and leave still-​visible scars on Northern

1 

Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999; 2012), 117. Ethno-​nationalism is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘Advocacy of or support for the interests of a particular ethnic group, esp. with regard to its national independence or self-​determination’. 3  David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, and Chris Thornton, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2001). 2 

Dark Networks   669 Ireland a generation after the signing of the Belfast/​Good Friday Agreement in 1998.4 Despite the termination of the major paramilitary campaigns in 2005–​2009 and the stabilization of the security situation, these groups have refused to disband. They retain their organizational structures, membership, training, expertise, and, crucially, their illicit funding streams.5 Indeed, since announcing ceasefires and moving towards ending their respective armed campaigns, paramilitary groups have increasingly turned to criminal activity, including drug and people trafficking, protection rackets, cross-​border smuggling, and intimidation.6 In April 2021, civil unrest broke out again in protest at the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol of the Withdrawal Agreement between the European Union and British Government, amongst other factors, which saw a form of leaderless violence emerge from within the loyalist community.7 In addition, Republican paramilitary groups have frequently been seen engaging in ‘shows of strength’, public spectacles designed to reassert territorial control over working-​class housing estates.8 Northern Ireland, therefore, presents a curious paradox: Why do violent non-​state actors remain active in the absence of major ethno-​national conflict? This chapter explores this puzzle. It builds on recent research by Jupp and Garrod, which demonstrates that ‘Northern Ireland has established itself as not only the most concentrated area of terrorist activity but also the centerpiece of convergence between “terrorism” and “organized crime” in Europe’.9 Specifically, they argue, we cannot understand organized crime in this region without understanding the role that Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries play in these illicit activities. Drawing on this broader conceptual literature, the chapter makes the case that the security situation has changed radically since the 1990s and, therefore, must be understood as more complex, dynamic, and multilayered. It offers a way forwards for practitioners dealing with these ‘new’ security challenges in ‘old’ conflict zones by engaging with the literature on the ‘Crime-​Terror Nexus’,10 which focuses on the convergent activities of terrorism and criminality, or so-​called dark networks.11

4 

Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987), 11. John Jupp and Matthew Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles: The Links between Organized Crime and Terrorism in Northern Ireland’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (published online, 2019), 8–​9. 6  Jon Moran, ‘Paramilitaries, “Ordinary Decent Criminals” and the Development of Organised Crime following the Belfast Agreement’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 32 (2004), 263–​278. 7  Aaron Edwards, ‘A New Approach Is Necessary: The Policy Ramifications of the April 2021 Loyalist Violence in Northern Ireland’, CTC Sentinel, 14/​4 (April/​May, 2021), 39–​44. 8  BBC, ‘Ardfoyle: Shots fired in Derry a “Brazen Show of Strength” ’, BBC News, 23 May 2021. Archived at: ‘Ardfoyle: Shots fired in Derry a “Brazen Show of Strength” —​BBC News, https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​ news/​uk-​north​ern-​irel​and-​57217​452, accessed 24 May 2021. 9  Jupp and Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles’, 2, 25. 10  Tamara Makarenko, ‘The Crime-​Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay between Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism’, Global Crime, 6/​1 (2004), 129–​145; see also Norma Rossi, ‘Breaking the Nexus: Conceptualising “Illicit Sovereigns” ’, Global Crime, 15/​3-​4 (2014), 299–​319. 11  The concept of ‘dark networks’ was coined by Asal et al. in relation to a major quantitative-​based study of 395 terrorist groups worldwide. Importantly, they seek to put terrorist activity in the context of both organizational attributes and environmental factors. See Victor Asal, H. Brinton Milward, and Eric W. Schoon, ‘When Terrorists Go Bad: Analyzing Terrorist Organizations’ Involvement in Drug Smuggling’, International Studies Quarterly, 59/​1 (2015), 112–​123. 5 

670   Aaron Edwards

From Crime-​Terror to Dark Networks One of the most useful conceptual lenses applied to the study of political and criminal violence is the ‘Crime-​Terror Nexus’. Stated simply, the term identifies where terrorism and criminality intersect in circumstances that are mutually beneficial and based on operational imperatives. Some scholars have emphasized how ‘a terrorist group’s organization and need are key predicators of the types of crime they will engage in, although their ideological distinctiveness from organized crime will preclude fully symbiotic cooperation’.12 This speaks to the casual, temporary, or—​on occasion—​formal alliances often struck between terrorists and criminals in which the former pursue primarily political or ideological ends and only become involved with the latter as a means of, for example, tapping into illicit markets to finance their ideologically-​ charged campaigns.13 Conversely, it was believed that criminals were entirely motived by personal gain.14 In recent decades, however, the relationship between organized crime and terrorism has become increasingly complex. The end of the Cold War in 1989–​1991 saw the gradual drawdown in state-​sponsorship of terrorism, thereby precipitating the diversification of Violent Non State Actors’ (VNSAs) funding streams, operational capability, and organizational structures.15 While some of these changes were born out of necessity in the face of state opposition, they also reflect the impact of globalization on illicit markets.16 Mary Kaldor’s work on ‘New Wars’ offers us a glimpse into the paradigm shift in how we understand organized violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries. Kaldor argues that there is an urgent need to reconceptualize contemporary conflict to help us build a more ‘integrative framework of analysis’ for developing more flexible research and policy agendas.17 This is important, for it offers new ways of understanding how actors, goals, methods, and forms of finance relate to contemporary forms of conflict. Kaldor’s analysis helps us make sense of a world where old categories and ways of thinking about security-​ related phenomena are being constantly challenged and re-​evaluated. The New Wars thesis complements work by Mark Duffield who points to the fluidity of conflict where political ideologies were less evident in conflict in the 1990s and were more likely to take on ‘an exclusively ethnic or fundamentalist character’ where borders were thought to be less important and political movements more fragmented.18 Duffield’s network analysis of New Wars and the liberal peace also draws our attention to the effects of ‘market deregulation and the qualification of attenuation of nation-​state competence’, reflecting an ‘emerging liberal way of war’.19 In the three decades since the end of the Cold War, we have seen increasing adaptation 12 

Steven Hutchinson and Pat O’Malley, ‘A Crime-​Terror Nexus? Thinking on Some of the Links between Terrorism and Criminality’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 30/​12 (December 2007), 1,096. 13 Ibid. 14  Makarenko, ‘The Crime-​Terror Continuum’, 130. 15  Hutchinson and O’Malley, ‘A Crime-​Terror Nexus?’, 1,095–​1,107. 16  Ibid. Louise Shelley, ‘The Unholy Trinity: Transnational Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism’, Brown Journal of World Affairs, 11/​2 (Winter/​Spring 2005), 102. 17  Mary Kaldor, ‘In Defence of New Wars’, Stability, 2/​1, (2013), 2. 18  Mark Duffield, ‘NGO Relief in War Zones: Towards an Analysis of the New Aid Paradigm’, Third World Quarterly, 18/​3, (1997), 536. 19  Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001), 13–​14.

Dark Networks   671 of states and international organizations to this changing reality but also in VNSA’s tendency to merge and blend. The Northern Ireland case is important here because it suggests a complex development from politically inspired insurgency to self-​serving criminality.20 Where we could previously identify groups as either drug cartels, terrorists, insurgents, or crime gangs, we should now see them as multidimensional actors that have become more networked and less hierarchical, though not beyond standing up leadership structures when required. Intriguingly, VNSAs can also field critical mass when required, making it possible for them to rival official law enforcement agencies in terms of numerical superiority.21 More recent research on the evolution of the Crime-​Terror Nexus draws our attention to the powerful counter-​cultural message amongst European jihadis of redemption of criminality through engagement in ideological conflict.22 There is something intriguing here, particularly when we explore the ‘after lives’ of ‘old’ ethno-​national terrorist groups, which tend to endure even as their concerted violent campaigns end. Louise Shelley has argued that newer transnational crime groups, often originating in post-​conflict environments, share the same goal of destroying the existing system and both, therefore, ‘thrive on the violence and the disorder of the state’.23 Shelley posits that what makes the ‘destabilizing nexus of transnational crime and terrorism . . . so intractable’ is the tendency of policymakers to ‘continue to think about crime in terms of traditional paradigms’.24 Scholars researching the Crime-​Terror Nexus have risen to the conceptual challenge posed by the dangerous intersection of these overlapping phenomena. Work on ‘dark networks’ has shown that there is much more synchronization between terrorism and criminality than was previously recognized by policymakers.25 Asal et al. maintain that dark networks are covert and illegal organizational activity that take a network form. These dark networks are typically driven by two key imperatives: ‘the need to exist and the need to act’.26 Using this conceptual framework, we can discern three component parts: (1) network connectivity, (2) ideology, and (3) regime characteristics of their support base. Research by Asal et al. suggests that ‘rather than hindering the intersection of terrorism and crime, the presence of an explicit ethnonational ideology actually increased the likelihood of groups engaging in drug trafficking while religious ideology has no significant effect’.27 Moreover, the bigger the network, the more likely these groups are to engage in such activity. Importantly, this should not be seen as an ideological contradiction, but as part of a ‘tactical toolkit’ reliant on three key factors: (1) opportunity, (2) access, and (3) need.28 It is worth bearing these features in mind as we turn to one of the world’s most intractable ethno-​national conflicts, Northern Ireland. Despite a successful move away from armed conflict to peace, this polity demonstrates the resilience of terrorist structures and their increasingly deadly intersection with organized crime.

20 

Jupp and Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles’. Robert J. Bunker, ‘Defeating Violent Nonstate Actors’, Parameters, 43/​4 (WINTER 2013/​14), 59. 22  Rajan Basra and Peter R. Neumann ‘Criminal Pasts, Terrorist Futures: European Jihadists and the New Crime-​Terror Nexus’, Perspectives on Terrorism, 10/​6 (December 2016), 36. 23  Shelley, ‘The Unholy Trinity’, 103. 24  Ibid., 110. 25 Ibid. 26  Asal, Milward, and Schoon, ‘When Terrorists Go Bad’, 114. 27  Ibid., 113. 28 Ibid. 21 

672   Aaron Edwards

Terrorism and Crime in Northern Ireland The mobilization of armed militias from within rival ethno-​national communities has been a prominent feature of Irish history for centuries. Many historians trace the origins of these groups to the revolutionary fervour of the late eighteenth century, pointing to the emergence of the United Irishmen Movement and the reaction from the established Protestant ascendency in the formation of the counter-​revolutionary Orange Order.29 However, mass mobilizations were to take a more enduring form in the early twentieth century as Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists organized along opposing lines in the dispute over Home Rule for Ireland. The clash between rival armies was only interrupted by the First World War, though Irish Republican militants launched a rebellion in Dublin that led to the capture and execution of their leaders by the British. An Anglo-​Irish War of Independence followed, which was succeeded in turn by a civil war between those who accepted a peace treaty with the British and those who did not. Under the Government of Ireland Act (1920) and the establishment of a Parliament in Belfast, the island was partitioned. In the new state of Northern Ireland, Protestant groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) became absorbed into the law enforcement apparatus, while the Irish Republican Army (IRA), formed amidst the War of Independence, was driven underground by the newly established Dublin and Belfast administrations. The British-​sanctioned approach in the new Northern Ireland state reflected the imperial dynamic operating in Britain’s overseas colonies, which saw a Protestant majority in the new six-​county state of Northern Ireland afforded what Ian Lustick calls ‘virtually untrammelled dominion over the Catholic-​nationalist minority’.30 However, the IRA would remain active in its subversion, undertaking a bombing campaign in England in 1939–​1940 and in a military offensive against Northern Ireland in 1956–​1962, which petered out due to the lack of support from nationalists on both sides of the Irish border.31 The UVF was rejuvenated in November 1965 as a means of opposing a perceived IRA threat.32 Its first commander, Gusty Spence, was a former soldier from the Shankill Road area in Belfast. The group carried out several sectarian assassinations in 1966 before Spence and others were arrested and imprisoned. As Sean Brennan has observed, the ‘warrior regimes’ of the IRA and UVF persisted in north-​east Ulster, as evinced by the re-​emergence of sectarian violence in the mid-​1960s.33 As demonstrated by other scholars, loyalist paramilitaries emerged as a late conspiratorial reaction against what they perceived to be a physical threat from a resurgent IRA.34

29  Peter Gibbon, The Origins of Ulster Unionism: The Formation of Popular Protestant Politics and Ideology in Nineteenth-​Century Ireland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 22. 30  Ian S. Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank-​Gaza (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 347. 31  Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA: Updated Edition (London: Penguin, 2007), 50. 32  Roy Garland, Gusty Spence (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2001), 48–​49. 33  Sean Brennan, ‘Ulster’s Uncertain Menders? The Challenge of Reintegration and Reconciliation for Ulster Loyalists in a Post-​Ceasefire Society’, PhD dissertation, Queen’s University Belfast, 2017. 34  James W. McAuley, ‘Just Fighting to Survive’: Loyalist Paramilitary Politics and the Progressive Unionist Party’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16/​3 (2004), 522–​543; Aaron Edwards, ‘Abandoning Armed Resistance? The Ulster Volunteer Force as a Case-​study of Strategic Terrorism in Northern

Dark Networks   673 With the outbreak of large-​scale civil disturbances in the late 1960s, loyalist and republican vigilante groups again announced the mobilization of paramilitary groups. Due to the breakdown in law and order, particularly in increasingly segregated communities, armed groups soon took on a policing function, becoming embedded in the fabric of society.35 Despite republican and loyalist armed groups remaining locked in violent competition, the withering of state-​based forms of criminal justice and policing structures allowed illegal activity to flow unfettered.36 Surprisingly, this even enabled some paramilitary leaders to carve up criminal enterprises across the intercommunal divide.37 As one British Government report noted in the early 1980s: There have been a number of RUC intelligence reports suggesting meetings between a leading UDA member and representatives of both PIRA and INLA, but discussion during such meetings is generally restricted to the topics of racketeering and tax evasion. It seems likely that if any contacts between loyalist paramilitaries and Republican terrorist groups exist they are at a low level and primarily concerned with criminal matters.38

Belfast UDA commander James Pratt Craig—​one of the most infamous paramilitaries to control these huge criminal empires—​was later assassinated by members of his own organization. Craig was said to have possessed a well-​developed criminal mind and realised the potential for exploiting the lawlessness of the province by entering into an alliance with republicans on the basis of the one thing they had in common: a lack of financial resources to fight an ongoing war.39

Some commentators have concluded that Craig was ‘an archetypal gangster, fond of expensive clothes and jewelry and of holidaying in the Costa del Sol and Florida. If it were not for the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Jim Craig would have been a career criminal’.40 Craig and a senior member of the Provisional IRA, Joe Haughey, were thought to have masterminded the carving up of territory in a manner that further blurred the boundaries between ethno-​ national-​based terrorism and criminality.41 The British government’s obsession with the IRA Ireland’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 32/​2 (2009), 146–​166; Aaron Edwards, UVF: Behind the Mask (Newbridge: Merrion Press, 2017). 35  Rachel

Monaghan, ‘The Return of “Captain Moonlight”: Informal Justice in Northern Ireland’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 25/​1 (2002), 41–​56; see also Liam Kennedy, Who Was Responsible for the Troubles? The Northern Ireland Conflict (London: McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2020). 36 Frank Burton, The Politics of Legitimacy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); Rachel Monaghan, ‘ “An Imperfect Peace”: Paramilitary Punishments in Northern Ireland’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16/​3 (2004), 439–​461; Colin Knox, ‘“See No Evil, Hear No Evil”: Insidious Paramilitary Violence in Northern Ireland’, British Journal of Criminology, 42/​1 (2002), 164–​185. 37  For more commentary on the extortion of construction businesses in the 1980s, see James Adams, The Financing of Terror (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 172. 38 The National Archives (TNA), CJ 4/​ 4871, Cooperation between UVF and PIRA/​ INLA, 17 February 1983. 39  Martin Dillon, The Dirty War (London: Arrow Books, 1990), 444–​445. 40  Henry McDonald and Jim Cusack, UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2004), 152. 41  It has been alleged that the spouses of James Craig and Joe Haughey were closely related, thereby making casual meetings more likely through family ties. For more on Haughey, see Hugh Jordan, ‘Chief Suspect Bradford Murder: Kenova Probe had Eyes on “The Hawk”’, Sunday World, 16 December 2018.

674   Aaron Edwards threat posed to UK national security enabled loyalist paramilitaries to escalate their own armed campaign and to consolidate shadow state structures within their own communities. This was done in several ways, including money lending, copyright infringement, money laundering, smuggling, tax evasion, extortion, and drug dealing.42 Fund-​raising from these illicit funding streams was essential for the continuation of loyalist and republican paramilitary campaigns. For the IRA, its short-​term guerrilla-​style objectives to conduct hit and run operations against the Security Forces could only be sustained over the longer term by maintaining a subversive economic base. By 1977, the IRA’s revolutionary new ‘Long War’ strategy required long-​term investment. As journalist James Adams observed, this was achieved by way of a ‘combination of armed might and economic subversion, which would tie down large numbers of the enemy while at the same time funding the revolution and involving the mass of the people in it’.43 Although the Security Forces concentrated on ‘killing or capturing IRA leaders’, argued Adams, ‘the IRA have quietly and effectively built a revolutionary infrastructure based on economic subversion’.44 Curiously, it was in this restructuring of their organization and their militant modus operandi that the IRA set in train a process where the ‘division between terrorism and pure crime has become blurred, and some terrorism is actually criminal activity and vice versa’.45 The highly centralized control and focused strategy practised by the IRA from the late 1970s onwards was not mirrored in the activities of loyalist paramilitaries. They struggled to balance the tensions inherent within their structures, with occasional clashes between leadership directives and autonomous individual members who often followed their own agendas. Although most groups were relatively stable throughout the Troubles, notwithstanding occasional splits, principally in republicanism in 1974 and 1986, loyalist leaders cracked down on dissent in more violent ways. As Detective Chief inspector Jimmy Nesbitt, one of the RUC’s best-​known CID officers, noted in relation to the UVF: The IRA were all in units, you know, and all controlled . . . The UVF, in my experience, [were also controlled in Belfast] . . . Outside that they had absolutely no control. They were all different gangs of gangsters. For example, in the Long Bar, you had ‘Chuck’ Berry and his mob. You had Lenny Murphy and his mob. And you had them in the Rex Bar, and you had them in the Windsor Bar. All different, separate groups of all headbangers. Now, from time to time, the leaders would have given them instructions to carry out certain murders or given approval for certain murders. But, in between time, these boys were free to kill whoever they wanted . . . I mean, plenty of people walked into the bars and, if they discovered [people] were Catholics, they took them outside and shot them or kicked them to death. And the hierarchy knew nothing about that.46

One of the ways that the UVF moved to wrest control from individual members who they accused of operating to their own agendas was to facilitate the leaking of information to their enemies in the IRA.47 Jim Craig, for instance, was later accused of passing on information on 42 

Andrew Silke, ‘In Defense of the Realm: Financing Loyalist Terrorism in Northern Ireland—​Part One: Extortion and Blackmail’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 21/​4 (1998), 337. 43 Adams, The Financing of Terror, 181. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46  Author interview with Jimmy Nesbitt MBE, 26 October 2011. 47  Martin Dillon, The Shankill Butchers (London: Arrow Books, 1989), 263.

Dark Networks   675 Lenny Murphy’s movements to Joe Haughey during a business deal. Murphy was killed in a hail of bullets as he sat in his car outside his girlfriend’s home on 16 November 1982. With the onset of the peace process in the 1990s, the British government sought to draw republicanism and loyalism into the political process, encouraging the electoral activity of paramilitary-​aligned political parties. According to Jon Moran this shift in political priorities inadvertently triggered a rise in crime. As an ‘indispensable part of the peace process’, argues Moran, the removal or lessening of ‘situational security controls’ ‘opened up opportunities for certain criminal activities by both Republican and Loyalist groups’.48 Scholars other than Moran have tended to overlook this regression in favour of highlighting the benefits of paramilitary groups channelling their efforts towards community development work or in the direction of parties like Sinn Féin and the PUP. It bears emphasis, however, that such transformation in activities have been ad hoc and have periodically suffered reversals, with Jupp and Garrod concluding, that ‘[a]‌ll of Northern Ireland’s paramilitary groups consequently evolved as hybrid organizations’.49 This has been complicated by the rise of accompanying political parties as outgrowths of terrorist campaigns. As Moran argues, the IRA’s ‘sophistication’ lies in its ability to reconcile the contradictions of pursuing the peace process without abandoning its criminal tendencies, something attributable both to its ‘efficient organisational capacity, particularly when compared to the Loyalists, but also to the solid basis of its political support, as witnessed by the success of Sinn Féin’.50

The Contradictions of Conflict Transformation The Northern Ireland peace process is a complex, multilayered experiment in conflict management, which has depended on paramilitary groups to operate organic Disarmament, Demobilisation, and Reintegration (DDR) strategies. Paramilitary groups saw themselves in the role of defenders of their respective communities during the Troubles and were, indeed, part of a long history of organized militias in Ireland. Since the onset of the peace process in the 1990s, however, these paramilitary groups have sought to police the peace by enforcing discipline on their own communities. The persistence of paramilitaries has been facilitated by the ambiguity employed by politicians to shore up contentious issues relating to ‘decommissioning, prisoner releases, paramilitaries in executive positions and policing’51 during the peace process. Had the process been unambiguous, argues Paul Dixon, it may not have produced a peace agreement, yet this very ambiguity ‘stored up problems for the future’.52 Apart from the British Government’s insistence that parties to the negotiations sign 48  Moran, ‘Paramilitaries’, 269. According to Jupp and Garrod, the combined annual budget of the PIRA, the UVF, and the UDA in the mid-​1990s was approximately £15–​£18 million. Jupp and Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles’, 10. 49  Jupp and Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles’, 10. 50  Moran, ‘Paramilitaries’, 265. 51  Paul Dixon, Performing the Northern Ireland Peace Process: In Defence of Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 155. 52 Ibid.

676   Aaron Edwards up to the so-​called Mitchell Principles,53 there was little movement on decommissioning until 2001, with the IRA apparently sealing weapons and explosives in bunkers until it eventually halted its armed campaign in September 2005. Loyalist paramilitaries, however, continued to resist calls for reciprocal disarmament until 2009. Since then, attempts to remove paramilitary structures have had mixed success.54 In an early assessment of the merits of home-​grown conflict mediation processes, Adrian Guelke observed how paramilitaries would either develop into constitutional parties or become criminal mafias.55 Writing more recently, Jupp and Garrod have challenged what they see as a false dichotomy between crime and terrorism, highlighting the difficulty in distinguishing between these phenomena in Northern Ireland.56 Sinn Féin enjoyed considerable success in persuading the IRA to abandon its violent campaign and throw its weight behind the peace strategy developed under the leadership of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The Adams-​McGuinness leadership was less successful though in persuading republican splinter groups to abandon their armed campaigns. Republicans belonging to the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), which had split from the Official IRA in December 1974, as well as more recent Provisional IRA splinter groups, which coalesced around the Continuity IRA and Real IRA, continued to carry out violent attacks on what they called the ‘forces of occupation in Ireland’. These dissident republicans advocate the use of force to secure their strategic objectives, which has triggered occasional condemnation from the Adams-​McGuinness leadership. In the aftermath of the Real IRA bombing of Omagh on 15 August 1998, in which twenty-​nine people and two unborn babies were killed, Adams told reporters, ‘I condemn it without any equivocation whatsoever’.57 Despite a barrage of criticism from Sinn Féin politicians and major intelligence-​led successes by the Security Forces, dissident republican groups remained unbowed. Marisa McGlinchey contends that a ‘significant aim of radical republicanism is simply to “keep the flame burning” for the next generation’, despite operating in a ‘context of unprecedented hostility and public opposition’.58 The fetishism of armed struggle privileged by dissident republicans has also amplified dissent vis-​à-​vis the Sinn Féin peace strategy.59 Apart from their involvement in killings, dissident republicans have also been heavily involved in smuggling and other illicit activities.60

53  Named after Chairman of the International Decommissioning Body and Chairperson of the Multi-​ Party Talks, Senator George Mitchell required all parties represented at the peace talks to sign up to exclusively peaceful means and work for the disarmament of armed groups. 54  Jupp and Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles’, 8. 55  Adrian Guelke, ‘Political Violence and the Paramilitaries’, in Paul Mitchell and Rick Wilford (eds.), Politics in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Westview Press, 1999), 50. 56  Jupp and Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles’, 7. 57  ‘Adams’s Condemnation Further Isolates Dissidents’, Irish Times, 17 August 1998. 58 Marisa McGlinchey, Unfinished Business: The Politics of ‘Dissident’ Irish Republicanism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 208; see also Joceyn Evans and Jonathan Tonge, ‘Menace without Mandate? Is There Any Sympathy for “Dissident” Irish Republicanism in Northern Ireland?”, Terrorism and Political Violence, 24/​1 (January–​March 2012), 75. 59  Sophie A Whiting, ‘“The Discourse of Defence”: “Dissident” Irish Republican Newspapers and the “Propaganda War” ’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 24/​3 (July–​August 2012), 484. 60  Henry McDonald, ‘Real IRA makes Millions from Smuggling Deals’, The Observer, 6 January 2002; ‘Dissident Republican Gangs “Heavily involved” in Crime, Report Finds’, Irish Times, 26 June 2013.

Dark Networks   677 The Provisionals’ opposition to criminality has been publicly articulated by Adams on a number of occasions, including in the aftermath of murders attributed to the Provisional IRA. In the wake of the fatal stabbing of Robert McCartney in a Belfast bar in 2005, a killing which made international headlines, Adams told his party’s Ard Fheis (annual conference) that the only decent course of action for those responsible was to explain their actions in a court of law. They had sullied the republican cause, he insisted, and should be held to account: Twenty-​five years ago Margaret Thatcher couldn’t criminalise us. The women prisoners in Armagh and the blanketmen and the hunger strikers in Long Kesh wouldn’t allow her. That was then; this is now. Michael McDowell [then Irish Justice Minister] has stepped into Margaret Thatcher’s shoes. But he will not criminalise us either, because we will not allow him. And we won’t allow anyone within republican ranks to criminalise this party or this struggle. There is no place in republicanism for anyone involved in criminality.61

With the return of the Northern Ireland power-​sharing Executive in 2007, Sinn Féin’s opposition to criminality was most frequently articulated by the newly appointed deputy First Minister, Martin McGuinness. In the wake of the fatal shooting of a prison officer in 2012, he commented that dissident republicans were ‘swimming in a sea of crime’.62 Sinn Féin have thus been at pains to challenge the political legitimacy of dissidents, emphasizing their lack of either an electoral mandate or any widespread support in nationalist communities. However, they have stopped short of condemning them on ideological grounds. For its part, the British government, despite condemning IRA involvement in criminality in the post-​Good Friday Agreement security environment, was reluctant to exclude republicans from Northern Ireland’s political institutions. Loyalists, meanwhile, could neither match Sinn Féin’s electoral success or its strong political leadership, and have struggled to deal with criminality perpetrated by their paramilitary groupings. Loyalist groupings like the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) and Ulster Political Research Group (UPRG) were vital in securing the loyalist ceasefires in 1994 and also in dissuading loyalist paramilitaries from responding to renewed Provisional IRA violence in 1996–​1997. Both, however, found themselves increasingly sidelined as they sought to implement their respective processes of conflict transformation. The objective of this process, as another former UVF leader-​turned-​ PUP strategist Billy Mitchell observed in 2005, was to utilize ‘all our skills and influence to encourage those who would normally use armed force to achieve political objectives, on to a path, which uses democratic principles to change political outcomes’.63 PUP member Dawn Purvis worked alongside Mitchell in this process, recalling the difficulties facing loyalist activists who sought to challenge criminality within their own ranks: It’s my belief and it was others’ beliefs, including David Ervine [the former PUP leader], that this was more about agents of the state getting loyalism to tear itself apart so that it could be cleaned up by the police. It wasn’t about people being anti peace and pro peace . . . The UDA 61 Gerry Adams Presidential Address 2005. Archived at: https://​www.sinnf​ein.ie/​conte​nts/​15204, accessed 15 October 2020. 62  BBC, ‘Dissidents “Swimming in Sea of Crime”—​Martin McGuinness’, BBC News, 2 November 2012. Archived at: https://​www.bbc.co.uk/​news/​uk-​north​ern-​irel​and-​20181​366, accessed 15 October 2020. 63  Billy Mitchell, Progressive Unionist Party Rebuttal of the First Report of the International Monitoring Commission, April 2004 (copy in author’s possession).

678   Aaron Edwards was aboard with the Good Friday Agreement. This was about criminality; this was about power and that egotistic personality that wanted to assume a different role and a different type of role within Loyalism. And wanted to take Loyalism somewhere different. To destroy and wreck Loyalist working class communities, to poison them and control them and extort from them. That’s what that was about.64

Mitchell died in July 2006 and Ervine died six months later. It was left to Purvis and a handful of other PUP members to persuade the UVF to end its armed campaign, which it eventually did in 2009. Within a year of allegedly decommissioning, however, the UVF had murdered a man in the Shankill area, prompting Purvis’s resignation from the PUP. The UVF refused to fulfil the promise of its earlier announcement, continuing to recruit new members and control areas where it was strong.65 The literature on loyalist paramilitarism tends to concentrate disproportionately on leadership decisions to halt their armed campaigns. McAuley et al. argue that such a dramatic transformation was the result of a bottom-​up approach by paramilitaries who they refer to as ‘agents of change’. In a structural analysis, common in much of the scholarly work on Northern Ireland, McAuley et al. show how, paradoxically, former loyalist prisoners have not ‘abandoned the past’ in supporting the process. Their ‘ideological antipathy remains intact’, although ‘a more pragmatic approach to the articulation and advancement of ideological goals has been adopted’.66 It is argued that former paramilitaries work ‘to diminish the political tensions that remain as a result of the long-​term inter-​communal hostility developed across three decades of violence’.67 Much of this is empirically verifiable but it is also incomplete. It could be equally proven that loyalist paramilitary groupings contain people who joined—​and remained engaged in such activity—​for criminal reasons, something acknowledged by the former leader of the Red Hand Commando, a UVF satellite group, William ‘Plum’ Smith, a decade after the loyalist ceasefires.68 Sean Brennan suggests that the greater symbiosis between terrorism and crime came in the wake of the failure of post-​ ceasefire polities to remove the legal, social, or cultural barriers that had inhibited former paramilitaries from reintegrating. In the most extreme cases, the results, he argues, are narco-​terrorism or mercenary activities.69 Throughout the post-​ceasefire period, barriers for reintegration have presented a vexing position for political forms of Ulster loyalism. While former combatants have undoubtedly helped bring about transformative change, Garrod and Jupp see this as limited.70 Ironically, the resurgence of criminal elements within loyalism increased at the same time as their grassroots political leaderships sounded alarm bells about the lack of a ‘peace dividend’ in working class areas.71 The belief that loyalists were excluded from the new 64 

Interview with Dawn Purvis, 28 February 2016. For more on these developments see Edwards, UVF: Behind the Mask. 66  James W., McAuley, Jonathan Tonge, and Peter Shirlow ‘Conflict, Transformation, and Former Loyalist Paramilitary Prisoners in Northern Ireland’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 22/​1 (2009), 24. 67  Ibid., 24. 68  Cited in Edwards, UVF, 293. 69 Brennan, Ulster’s Uncertain Menders, 23–​24. 70  Jupp and Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles’, 8. 71  See Aaron Edwards and Stephen Bloomer, A Watching Brief? The Political Strategy of Progressive Loyalism since 1994 (Belfast: LINC Resource Centre, 2004). Archived at: https://​cain.uls​ter.ac.uk/​iss​ues/​ polit​ics/​docs/​edwar​dsbl​oome​r04.pdf, accessed 28 June 2021. 65 

Dark Networks   679 political dispensation at Stormont manifested itself in violent ways. Major riots broke out in loyalist areas in 2005, 2011 and 2012–​2013. In 2005 and 2011, the UVF and UDA were directly involved in orchestrating the violence. The pattern changed in the following year with the outbreak of the so-​called ‘flags protests’ in December 2012, a series of leaderless demonstrations, organized via spontaneous social networks, and spurred by the lightning rod of disaffection over the removal of the Union Flag from aloft Belfast City Hall.72 Costing the taxpayer around £70 million to police, these protests quickly fell under loyalist paramilitary control as sectarian groups moved to harness the discontent by recruiting young people into their ranks. Ironically, it was the spontaneous outbreak of protest action in Belfast in December 2012 that led the PSNI to rethink their operations against paramilitary groups. Some senior officers came to see the problem as more complex and multilayered, with one former police officer arguing that the authorities sought to challenge the East Belfast UVF, a more autonomous grouping under nominal control of its West Belfast leadership, on the basis of the group’s modus operandi rather than their ideology. ‘Operation Mors’ explicitly targeted the financial assets underpinning the UVF organization in East Belfast. The police action taken against loyalists was matched by intelligence-​led operations targeting dissident republicans who continued to pose a national security challenge. In 2001–​2002, 33% of MI5’s effort was directed against Northern Ireland Related Terrorism (NIRT).73 This figure had been declining since the years 1993–​1994, when ‘just under one half of the Service’s resources’ were directed against NIRT.74 After the Real IRA murdered two soldiers at a military base in County Antrim in March 2009, it was revealed that only 13% of MI5’s operational resources had been allocated to tackling NIRT with the vast majority (75%) devoted to International Counter Terrorism (ICT).75 The threat level in Northern Ireland increased thereafter. Between 1 January 2009 and 30 September 2014, there were a total of 89 bomb and 27 shooting attacks on police officers, six bomb attacks and one shooting attack on soldiers, and two bomb attacks and one shooting attack on prison officers. Some 796 republicans were arrested in the same period under the Terrorism Act (2000), of which only 179 were charged.76 By 2015, MI5’s operational effort on NIRT had again fallen to 18%.77 When cross-​ examined by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), a senior MI5 officer said that the threat from dissident republicans remained ‘resilient’, despite the agency carrying out 250 disruptions of these groups.78 The point was proven by the formation of the New IRA in 2012, which signalled the amalgamation of the Real IRA, Republican Action Against Drugs, and several independent republican groups.79

72 

Paul Nolan et al., The Flag Dispute: Anatomy of a Protest (Belfast: Queen’s University Belfast, 2014). and Security Committee (ISC), Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report 2001–​2002, Cm 5542 (June 2002), 9. 74  ISC, Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report 1995, Cm 3198 (March 1996), 15. 75  ISC, Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report 2009-​2010, Cm 7844 (March 2010), 11. 76  PSNI, FOI, F-​2014-​05378, Attacks by Republicans on Police Prison Officers and Military. Statistics released to the author under a Freedom of Information Request. 77  ISC, Intelligence and Security Committee Annual Report 2015–​2016, HC 444 (July 2016), 11. 78 Ibid. 79  Gerry Moriarty, ‘Who are the New IRA and What Have They Done?’, Irish Times, 23 April 2019. 73  Intelligence

680   Aaron Edwards

Tackling Northern Ireland-​ Related Terrorism The persistence of paramilitary groups has posed considerable operational challenges for the PSNI and their partners in MI5, National Crime Agency (NCA), and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). As the PSNI and MI5 noted in a joint report in 2015: Members of these paramilitary groups, to different degrees, are also involved in other serious criminal activity, which harms communities and damages the financial prosperity and reputation of NI. This includes large-​scale smuggling operations, fuel laundering, drug dealing and extortion of local businesses.80

This intelligence-​based judgement triggered a crisis in confidence in the peace process, particularly among unionists. Roundtable talks were hastily convened in Belfast to address two urgent issues: (1) the legacy and impact of paramilitary activity and (2) the implementation of the earlier Stormont House Agreement (2014), which focused on ongoing disputes around parades, protests, flags, emblems, and the contested interpretations of the past.81 In 2015, the ‘Fresh Start’ Agreement dedicated local politicians in the Northern Ireland Executive to complete the transition away from paramilitarism.82 The Executive appointed a panel of independent experts to advise on the disbandment of paramilitary organizations. Following the publication of the panel report in June 2016, the Executive responded with a twenty-​two-​ page strategy, which set out their intent to tackle paramilitary activity and return confidence to the justice system.83 In 2017, the PSNI, NCA, and HMRC established a joint Paramilitary Crime Task Force (PCTF) to tackle the involvement of paramilitary groups in criminality. Raids and arrests soon followed, prompting some paramilitary groups to reiterate their support for the peace process. Criminality continued unabated, however. By 2018, the PCTF was reporting how paramilitaries were exploiting their own communities through a complex 80  NIO, Paramilitary Groups in Northern Ireland: An assessment commissioned by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland on the structure, role and purpose of paramilitary groups focusing on those which declared ceasefires in order to support and facilitate the political process, dated 19 October 2015. Archived at: https://​ass​ets.pub​lish​ing.serv​ice.gov.uk/​gov​ernm​ent/​uplo​ads/​sys​tem/​uplo​ads/​atta​chme​ nt_​d​ata/​file/​469​548/​Paramilitary_​Grou​ps_​i​n_​No​rthe​rn_​I​rela​nd_​-​_​20_​O​ct_​2​015.pdf, accessed 17 September 2020. 81  HMG, The Stormont House Agreement: An agreement on key issues that opens the way to a more prosperous, stable and secure future for Northern Ireland (Belfast: NIO, 23 December 2014). Archived at: https://​www.gov.uk/​gov​ernm​ent/​publi​cati​ons/​the-​storm​ont-​house-​agreem​ent, accessed 5 October 2020. 82  HMG, A Fresh Start: The Stormont Agreement and Implementation Plan—​An agreement to consolidate the peace, secure stability, enable progress and offer hope (Belfast: NIO, 17 November 2015). Archived at: https://​ass​ets.pub​lish​ing.serv​ice.gov.uk/​gov​ernm​ent/​uplo​ads/​sys​tem/​uplo​ads/​atta​chme​ nt_​d​ata/​f ile/​4 79​116/​A_​F​resh​_​Sta​r t_​-​_​The_​Stormont_​Agreeme​nt_​a​nd_​I​mple​ment​atio​n_​Pl​an_​-​_​ Final_​Vers​ion_​20_​N​ov_​2​015_​for_​PDF.pdf, accessed 5 October 2020. 83 Northern Ireland Executive, Tackling Paramilitary Activity, Criminality and Organised Crime: Executive Action Plan (Belfast: Northern Ireland Executive, 2016), 2. Archived at: https://​www. nort​hern​irel​and.gov.uk/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​publi​cati​ons/​newni​gov/​Execut​ive%20Act​ion%20P​lan%20-​ %20T​ackl​ing%20P​aram​ilit​ary%20A​ctiv​ity.pdf, accessed 5 October 2020.

Dark Networks   681 array of criminal activity, which, ultimately, destroyed their communities.84 The exploitation of communities has continued, albeit in the face of a more concerted legal challenge to paramilitaries’ illicit activities. It is not the operational complexities posed by such activities that remain the problem, however. Rather, it is the conceptualization of the problem that prevents concerted efforts to end it.85 Many policymakers and practitioners involved in the business of tackling dark networks are reluctant to situate paramilitary structures in the same theoretical space as organized crime or, ironically, dissident republican activity, which they pigeonhole exclusively under the rubric of NIRT. Therefore, any attempt to apply the dark networks lens to the security situation in Northern Ireland raises several important analytical points. Foremost amongst these are the increasingly decentralized activities of these groups and their capacity to mobilize in their post-​ceasefire environment. As Jupp and Garrod remind us, it is impossible to understand organized criminality without understanding the involvement of paramilitaries in illicit economies. This has serious consequences for policymakers and practitioners involved in combatting these malign actors. In October 2020, MI5 told the ISC that it did not view the totally suppression of paramilitary activity as ‘realistic’, nor did they believe that attacks could be reduced to zero. Instead, intelligence officers argued that the UK would have to learn to live with terrorism in the same way that they had become accustomed to living with the pandemic.86 MI5 also acknowledged that a more holistic response was necessary, perhaps by handing responsibility for tackling NIRT to government departments without prior experience in counter terrorism.87 That no one department has a monopoly over tackling the NIRT challenge should be obvious to researchers with an understanding of the broader challenge posed by terrorism, yet we must not lose sight of the fact that terrorism in Northern Ireland is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. The security situation has been transformed since the early 1990s. As we have seen in relation to the ongoing constitutional instability provoked by the UK electorate’s decision to leave the European Union, this has had significant consequences for those policymakers and practitioners dealing with the operational dilemma posed by the transnational phenomena of terrorism and organized crime. Brexit complicates the already ‘porous’ border between north and south, which may be further exploited by organized criminals and paramilitary groups. The PSNI Chief Constable, Simon Byrne, referred to this as the ‘soft underbelly’ of the border. Quite apart from the emotional logic of an ‘invisible’ border seen as indispensable to a fragile peace process, there is the unmentioned logic of a world where borders have proliferated in the post-​Cold War world. This is a challenge highlighted by other senior law enforcement officers. In evidence given to the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, the 84  PSNI, Paramilitary Crime Task Force search and arrest operation focuses on INLA, 13 April 2018. Archived at: https://​www.psni.pol​ice.uk/​news/​Lat​est-​News/​130​418-​param​ilit​ary-​crime-​task-​force-​sea​ rch-​and-​arr​est-​operat​ion-​focu​ses-​on-​inla/​, accessed, 5 October 2020. 85  Shelley, ‘The Unholy Trinity’, 101–​111. 86 ISC, Northern Ireland Related Terrorism (London: UK Parliament, 5 October 2020). Archived at: https://​isc.inde​pend​ent.gov.uk/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2021/​01/​202010​05_​C​CS20​7_​CC​S092​0226​370-​ 001_​N​orth​ern_​Irel​and-​rela​ted_​terr​oris​m_​fi​nal.pdf, accessed 5 October 2020. 87  A. Edwards, ‘A New Approach Is Necessary: The Policy Ramifications of the April 2021 Loyalist Violence in Northern Ireland’, CTC Sentinel, Combatting Terrorism Center, Westpoint, 14/​4 (April/​May 2021), 40–​44. Archived at: https://​ctc.usma.edu/​a-​new-​appro​ach-​is-​necess​ary-​the-​pol​icy-​ramifi​cati​ons-​ of-​the-​april-​2021-​loyal​ist-​viole​nce-​in-​north​ern-​irel​and/​, accessed 29 June 2021.

682   Aaron Edwards senior NCA officer responsible for Northern Ireland, Steve Rodhouse, observed how the UK was ‘an attractive market for organised criminals’ who had proven themselves to be ‘agile and flexible’. Interestingly, Rodhouse indicated that the UK saw the Republic as a ‘way in’, altering some of the well-​established channels for illicit goods into the UK mainland.88 Thanks to the efforts of the NCA—​and their other partners in the PCTF—​there is recognition that the security challenge posed by these groups remains fluid. Consideration of how best to tackle the security challenge posed by these groups is beyond the scope of this chapter. Yet, we may briefly ponder one practical suggestion from the analysis presented by Sean Everton who argues, ‘when facing a relatively provincial network, we should probably adopt strategies that force the network to become even more provincial’.89 Given the relative parochial nature of paramilitary organized crime in Northern Ireland, this is not as challenging as we might think.

Conclusion The proceeding discussion on the Northern Ireland case study indicates that there is an urgent requirement for a new conceptual lens by which to evaluate the persistence of paramilitary structures, terrorism, and organized crime in a society where the major fault-​lines are primarily ethno-​national in nature. As this chapter has argued, the application of the dark networks lens to this security environment raises several important analytical points, ranging from the increasingly decentralized activities of militant groups, their capacity to mobilize in their post-​ceasefire environment, and their close proximity to organized criminality and illicit economies. As this chapter has made clear, the absence of Northern Ireland as a case study in the developing literature on New Wars and the Terror-​Crime Nexus is a curious anomaly. However, we must recognize that the broader security situation has changed and scholars, policymakers, and law enforcement practitioners must adapt their conceptual understanding of these threats or risks being outpaced by malign VNSAs. An interregnum of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive between 2017 and 2020 enabled paramilitary groups to capitalize on the power vacuum and fill it with their own shadow state structures, particularly in working-​class areas where many ordinary people experience the reality of paramilitarism in their everyday lives.90 The enforcement of these alternative sources of social power, like paramilitarism and criminality, enable malign enterprises to flourish in parallel with legitimate state structures. This is apparent in the convergence between traditional security challenges in the form of leaderless protests, paramilitary policing, and other forms of coercive control, alongside criminal profiteering by drug-​peddling, human trafficking, and smuggling. Such developments risk undermining local forms of democracy and place 88 

Oral evidence by Steve Rodhouse, Director General of Operations, NCA, Northern Ireland Affairs Committee Oral evidence: Cross-​border cooperation on policing, security, and criminal justice after Brexit, 4 November 2020. HC 766. 89 Sean S. Everton, Tracking, Destabilizing and Disrupting Dark Networks with Social Networks Analysis (Monterey CA, Naval Postgraduate School, January 2010), 181. 90  Sean Brennan, ‘From Warrior Regimes to Illicit Sovereigns: Ulster Loyalist Paramilitaries and the Security Implications for Brexit’, Small Wars and Insurgencies (published online March 2021), 1–​25.

Dark Networks   683 a huge strain on the safety and well-​being of communities that have tended to suffer disproportionately from the rigours of ethno-​national forms of conflict. This chapter has suggested new ways by which we might think of solving old problems.

Select Bibliography Asal, Victor, H. Brinton Milward, and Eric W. Schoon, ‘When Terrorists Go Bad: Analyzing Terrorist Organizations’ involvement in Drug Smuggling’, International Studies Quarterly, 59/​1 (2015), 112–​123. Basra, Rajan, and Peter R. Neumann, ‘Criminal Pasts, Terrorist Futures: European Jihadists and the New Crime-​Terror Nexus’, Perspectives on Terrorism, 10/​6 (2016), 25–​40. Edwards, Aaron, UVF: Behind the Mask (Newbridge: Merrion Press, 2017). Hutchinson, Steven, and Pat O’Malley, ‘A Crime–​Terror Nexus? Thinking on Some of the Links between Terrorism and Criminality’, Studies in Conflict Terrorism, 30/​1–​2 (2007), 1,095–​1,107. Jupp, John, and Matthew Garrod, ‘Legacies of the Troubles: The Links between Organized Crime and Terrorism in Northern Ireland’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 45/​5–​6 (2022), 389–​428. Makarenko, Tamara, ‘The Crime-​ Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay between Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism’, Global Crime, 6/​1 (2004), 129–​145. Monaghan, Rachel, ‘The Return of “Captain Moonlight”: Informal Justice in Northern Ireland’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 25/​1 (2002), 41–​56. Moran, Jon, ‘Paramilitaries, “Ordinary Decent Criminals” and the Development of Organised Crime following the Belfast Agreement’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 32 (2004), 263–​278. Rossi, Norma, ‘Breaking the Nexus: Conceptualising “Illicit Sovereigns”, Global Crime, 15/​3-​4 (2014), 299–​319. Shelley, Louise, ‘The Unholy Trinity: Transnational Crime, Corruption, and Terrorism’, Brown Journal of World Affairs, 11/​2 (2005), 101–​111.

E N DI N G I N SU RG E N C I E S A N D THE AFTERLIVES OF V IOL E N T DE C OL ON I Z AT ION

Chapter 36

T he Cy pru s Revolt a nd t he ‘Prickly Su bj e c t ’ of Tru c e s Maria Hadjiathanasiou

‘Is not every truce made witharms kept at the alert? What is the meaning otherwise of “truce”?’1

Introduction: On the ‘Prickly Subject’ of Truces Cyprus became independent from British rule after a Greek Cypriot anti-​colonial armed revolt lasting four years (1955–​1959). Scholarly attention has so far been given, mostly, to the political processes that took place as the revolt progressed, before eventually arriving at a mutual political agreement between the interested parties, namely Britain, Greece, and Turkey. Other aspects of the Greek Cypriot revolt and the British response have received less attention, with the research on the military aspects of the insurgency and counter-​insurgency campaigns only gradually expanding during the last twenty-​five years or so, including EOKA’s (National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) modus operandi and the British colonial government’s response during the ‘Cyprus Emergency’.2 In 1 Column

372, Hansard, Noel-​Baker https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​tes/​ 04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​c yp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 26 February 2021. 2 See for example the work of David Anderson, ‘Policing and Communal Conflict: The Cyprus Emergency, 1954–​60’, in Robert Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorder in the European Empires after 1945 (Oxford: Frank Cass, 1994), 177–​207; Panagiotis Dimitrakis, ‘British Intelligence and the Cyprus Insurgency, 1955–​1959’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence, 21/​2 (2008), 375–​394; David French, ‘British Intelligence and the Origins of the EOKA Insurgency’, British Journal for Military History, 1/​2 (2015), 84–​100; Maria Hadjiathanasiou, Propaganda and the Cyprus Revolt: Rebellion, Counter-​insurgency and the Media, 1955–​59 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2020).

688   Maria Hadjiathanasiou this chapter I focus on EOKA’s four unilateral truces declared during the revolt, starting with the first one taking place in August 1956, sixteen months after the start of the revolt on 1 April 1955, and finishing with the fourth one, in December 1958, three months before the official end of hostilities in March 1959 and shortly after the London–​Zurich Agreements. Upon reaching a consensus, the Cyprus colonial government, having not paused its operations at any moment during the Emergency, finally accepted giving general amnesty for the guerilla fighters and also demanded that Lieutenant-​C olonel George Grivas, EOKA’s military leader, would leave Cyprus. This chapter retrieves information about how and why the truces came into being and explores what they meant in the context of the Cyprus revolt, with wider implications for the utility of truces in putting a halt to an armed conflict. The research so far conducted on EOKA’s truces and the role these played has been minimal. With very few exceptions, the relevant literature on the Cyprus revolt as one of Britain’s ‘small wars’ only mentions them in passing, if it does so at all.3 This observation corresponds to the general academic literature for peace and conflict studies, where truces, to this day, have not yet been given extensive theoretical and analytical emphasis or have so far been only perceived as a means to an end.4 Nevertheless, a steadily growing literature corpus now looks at the multifaceted nature of truces and their varying impacts on the dynamics of conflict.5 Across time and space, various terms have been used, with more confusion than agreement, to describe an action that terminates or reduces the use of violence between warring parties for a period of time. Marika Sosnowski writes that ‘historically, the words truce and armistice were used interchangeably but in more recent times other terms such as cessation of hostilities, humanitarian pause and de-​escalation have been added to the lexicon’.6 Truces have been also called ‘a preliminary step that builds trust between belligerents’ and in the process space is provided for negotiation that should lead to a comprehensive ceasefire and/​or peace agreement.7 According to Sosnowski, truces (Sosnowski prefers using the term ‘ceasefires’) have generally been interpreted as a bridge between war and ‘peace’.8 However, what Malin Åkebo calls ‘the pattern’ of truces, namely ‘to talk while fighting, to declare temporary unilateral ceasefires for specific purposes and to settle the core conflict issues before mutually agreeing to ceasefire’, has not been followed in the case of Cyprus.9 It could be argued that EOKA’s truces cannot be considered ‘truces’ in the conventional sense of the word, as these were not accepted by the British authorities, who alleged they would only benefit one party, EOKA. The fact

3 One exception is Robert Holland’s 1998 book Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​ 1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 4 Malin Åkebo, ‘Ceasefire Rationales: A Comparative Study of Ceasefires in the Moro and Communist Conflicts in the Philippines’, International Peacekeeping, 28/​3 (2021), 366–​392, 367. 5  Ibid., 367. 6  Marika Sosnowski, ‘Towards a Typology of Ceasefires: Order Amid Violence’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 74/​5 (2020), 597–​598. 7  Ibid., 599. 8  Ibid., 597. 9  Åkebo, ‘Ceasefire Rationales’, 386.

The Cyprus Revolt    689 that British military operations in the island did not stop during the suspension of EOKA’s activities answers to the unilateral nature of the truces.10 In this chapter I argue that the ‘prickly subject’11 of truces—​a subject that was often discussed among the directly interested parties—​British, Greek Cypriot, and Greeks—​ affected the development of the conflict in a decisive manner, one that has not been acknowledged to this day. I argue that, across almost two and a half years, EOKA declared no less than four truces for a set of reasons, the most prominent one being to better serve its needs and interests at that specific point in time. In its public announcements, EOKA explained that the truce was to be seen as an opportunity to be seized by the British in order to modify their political position, so that this position could finally be accepted by Grivas and his organization: Archbishop Makarios, the Greek Cypriots’ religious figurehead and the political leader of the struggle and, by extension of the previous two, the Greek Cypriot people at large. EOKA’s truces were therefore meant to be perceived by the opponents and by public opinion as a safe—​however fragile—​space for political initiatives in the international arena. Furthermore, as something for international audiences to see and note, with EOKA taking a public stand on its projected willingness to end the fight, when and if the Greek Cypriot demands for enosis with Greece (political union) were answered. Although EOKA’s intentions above could arguably be characterized as sincere in nature, showing a genuine readiness to allow for the negotiations to bear fruit, they were not received as such by the British who were distrustful of the guerrilla organization (and of Archbishop Makarios) until the very end, and until political manoeuvring, from all sides concerned, had finally reached a consensus. As Stedman et al. have argued, the potential for truces ‘to alter military campaigns’ by giving time and space to the conflicting parties to rearm, manoeuvre troops, or resupply is well known.12 It is also a well-​known fact that warring parties ‘do not always negotiate in good faith but rather use deception and sleight of hand in ceasefire negotiations to their own ends’.13 Although the negotiating part was not left to Lieutenant-​Colonel Grivas and his men, but to Archbishop Makarios, ‘deception’ was certainly a perceived characteristic of EOKA by their opponents that did not allow the latter to show trust or faith in the guerrilla’s organization’s declared truces. EOKA, nevertheless, was equally distrustful of their British ‘counterparts’. I argue here that an equally important reason for EOKA’s pausing of violence was to tactically manoeuvre, thus allowing for some breathing space for the core members of the organization to recoup and reorganize, nevertheless allowing British security forces to

10 

Andreas Karyos, ‘EOKA, 1955–​1959: A Study of the Military Aspects of the Cyprus Revolt’, PhD dissertation, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2011, 161; Andreas Karyos, ‘The Armed Struggle against British Colonial Rule in Cyprus, 1955–​1959: EOKA’s Strategic Mentality and Tactics’, in The Creation of New States and the Collapse of Old Empires in 20th Century, eds Dani Asher, Benny Michelsohn (Potsdam, GER: Walter de Gruyter, 2019), 264–​269. 11  TNA FCO 141/​ 4219 Red 87–​86. Roger Allen, British Embassy, Athens to A.D.M. Ross, Foreign Office, 5 Dec 1958. 12  Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens, Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002), 12; Marika Sosnowski, ‘Negotiating Statehood Through Ceasefires: Syria’s De-​escalation Zones’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 31/​7–​8 (2020), 1,397. 13  Stedman, Rothchild, and Cousens, Ending Civil Wars, 12.

690   Maria Hadjiathanasiou do the same. Neither side could defeat the other outright. EOKA’s truces could therefore be also interpreted as a tacit recognition of this. The fact that the British colonial government reacted to EOKA’s initiatives by importing more troops could also be interpreted as a sign of a similar recognition. EOKA, though a small organization, enjoyed widespread public support (either genuine, out of intimidation, or both), allowing it thus to extend its activities and reach both urban and rural areas. Therefore, truces were a tactic that added to EOKA’s strategy, creating temporary order that allowed the belligerents to manage conflict, always, however, with a very vocal threat of relapsing into violence whenever EOKA deemed necessary. At the same time, truces were an opportunity for the British to improve their counter-​ insurgency response, for example by importing more troops. In other words, as Kalyvas et al. argue, ‘clearly, order is necessary for managing violence as much as the threat of violence is crucial in cementing order’.14 Truces have implications not just for military dynamics, but also for political strategies and future negotiations, with conflict actors using truces as a way ‘to consolidate their military and political advantage’.15 This argument bears validity in the case of Cyprus where ‘the warring parties, internal political dynamics and the external context’ all interacted in such a manner that affected the development of the revolt.16 Sosnowski interestingly suggests that truces may be better conceptualized as ‘a space (or different spaces) of wartime order that function as a “negotiation table” ’ wherein issues that concern the warring parties are being negotiated and formalized.17 Although EOKA was not authorized to take part in the formal negotiations, and although issues of concern were essentially only communicated by Grivas and selected members of EOKA to Archbishop Makarios and other Greek Cypriot and Greek individuals, it could be argued that EOKA nevertheless provided this ‘space of wartime order’ at will and with no prior indication, via its unilateral truces. Τhe case study of EOKA’s truces gives validity to the claim that the time during a truce ‘should be understood as being deeply intertwined with both preceding and subsequent conflict dynamics’ and that such pauses in violence ‘provide an excellent vantage point from which to survey the machinations for authority by different international and local actors’.18 Cyprus is a fitting example wherein ‘the machinations of authority’ could be observed, be that British, Greek, Turkish, or Cypriot, while also being aware of other international authorities, such as the United States, that had a role in the development of events in the island. It therefore becomes important to consider ‘the aims, ideologies and strategies of the conflicting parties and how this shapes their approach’19 to a truce, by focusing on the two predominant conflicting parties of the ‘Cyprus Emergency’: EOKA and the British colonial government.

14 Stathis N. Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro, and Tarek Masoud, ‘Integrating the Study of Order, Conflict, and Violence’, in Stathis N. Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro, and Tarek Masoud (eds.), Order, Conflict, Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 397. 15  Sosnowski, ‘Towards a Typology of Ceasefires’, 597–​598. 16  Åkebo, ‘Ceasefire Rationales’, 388. 17  Sosnowski, ‘Negotiating Statehood Through Ceasefires’, 1,397. 18  Sosnowski, ‘Towards a Typology of Ceasefires’, 608. 19  Åkebo, ‘Ceasefire Rationales’, 366.

The Cyprus Revolt    691

Evasions and Intransigence: The Harding–​M akarios Negotiations on the Future of Cyprus In the fall of 1955, negotiations between Archbishop Makarios and Field Marshal John Harding, the new governor of Cyprus, in search of a mutually acceptable solution on the future of Cyprus,20 proved futile and eventually collapsed. Harding, who had considerable experience in dealing with colonial ‘trouble spots’ such as Malaya and Kenya, had refused Archbishop Makarios’s request for an unconditional amnesty for all EOKA fighters, including those considered responsible for murder or attempted murder. Harding was adamant in not granting amnesty to ‘dastardly terrorists’, as he called them. The governor soon imposed martial law, issuing a state of emergency in November 1955, not even two months after his arrival in Cyprus.21 As Sebastian Ritchie has written, the directive given to Governor Harding ‘left him with few potential courses of action other than those employed, the military emphasis being on “boots on the ground” on a very substantial scale’, estimating also that it was very unlikely to have an outright cessation of hostilities until the British government changed direction.22 Arguably, one of the reasons why EOKA called a truce in the first place was for the truce to be considered by the British as an opportunity to change direction. In fact, EOKA’s intention—​though not its only one—​had been openly admitted in the organization’s leaflets. The first truce was not acted upon by the British side, and later on this inaction was perceived by some British influential personalities, such as the Labour MP Noel-​Baker, as a ‘lost chance’ to find an agreeable solution to the Cyprus problem.23 As David French writes, for the British the next round of talks, taking place in December of the same year, represented ‘a make or break opportunity’.24 If Harding could not persuade Makarios to accept the British constitutional offer, the British would make a final break with him and publicize the story in order to gain the maximum international support. After consulting with Lieutenant Colonel Grivas, Archbishop Makarios demanded from the British the granting of an amnesty to EOKA fighters, ‘for all political offences’, and an ‘early

20

 Andreas Karyos, ‘Britain and Cyprus, 1955–​ 1959: Key Themes on the Counter-​ Insurgency Aspects of the Cyprus Revolt’, in Michalis Kontos et al. (eds.), Great Power Politics in Cyprus: Foreign Interventions and Domestic Perceptions (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 40–​ 41; Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, The Cyprus Questions, 1878–​1960: The Constitutional Aspect (Athens: Greek Letters, 1998), 76–​83 (in Greek); Andrew R. Novo, ‘An Insoluble Problem: The Harding-​Makarios Negotiations, Turkey, and the Cause of Cypriot Enosis’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 24/​1 (2015), 89. 21  Christopher Paul et al., ‘Paths to Victory: Detailed Insurgency Case Studies (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2013), 97. 22   Sebastian Ritchie, The RAF, Small Wars and Insurgencies: Later Colonial Operations, 1945–​1975, Royal Air Force, Centre for Air Power Studies (UK: Ministry of Defence/​RAF CAPS, 2011), 136–​137. 23 Column 363, Hansard, Lennox-​ Boyd https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​ tes/​04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​cyp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 26 February 2021. 24  David French, Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-​ Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–​1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 103.

692   Maria Hadjiathanasiou repeal’ of the emergency laws. Amnesty, as Robert Holland writes, was indispensable to any agreement between the British and the Greek Cypriots.25 In the archbishop’s words, these terms constituted ‘every possible concession beyond which our national conscience and natural dignity do not permit us to go’.26 It seemed that Makarios, Andrew Novo argues, was ‘moving the goal posts in London, pushing for new and impossible concessions just as an agreement approached’.27 With Alan Lennox-​Boyd, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, in Cyprus attempting to secure a deal, Makarios was asked to condemn violence and offer his aid in restoring peace in Cyprus.28 In exchange, according to Lennox-​Boyd, the British government was willing to take on a number of undertakings in return, consisting of an amnesty for all detainees, with the exception of those involving violence against the person or the illegal possession of arms, ammunition, or explosives; the repeal of the emergency regulations ‘at a pace commensurate with that of the reestablishment of law and order’; and the drafting of ‘a liberal and democratic constitution in consultation with representatives of all sections of opinion in the Island’.29 Makarios counter-​proposed, asking for the following: 1) there had to be an elected Greek Cypriot majority in the Legislature; 2) the elected representatives, and not the governor, must control the police; and 3) the British must grant an amnesty to all EOKA fighters.30 Amnesty was ‘a point that Grivas was particularly insistent on’.31 The counter-​offer was declined. ‘The British were not prepared to guarantee a Greek majority control of the legislature and would not agree to an unconditional amnesty for those EOKA members who were responsible for murder or attempted murder.’32 As French put it, ‘the British refused to budge on all three issues’, also due to pressure from Ankara.33 Amidst a blame game between the two sides, the talks once again collapsed at the end of February 1956. The cabinet accused Makarios of putting the agreement in jeopardy by asking for an amnesty for all political offenders in Cyprus,34 by refusing to denounce violence, and by insisting on enosis, thus ignoring ‘the reality that such a claim was impossible because of the Turkish factor’.35 On the other hand, the archbishop put the blame on British intransigence. Harding, being convinced that Makarios ‘had thus become an obstacle that had to be removed’,36 deported the archbishop to the Seychelles on 9 March 1959 where he was to stay until ‘law and order’ was restored in the island. With Makarios out of their way, Harding was in discussions with the Secretary of State regarding the issue of the surrender terms. The governor had requested information

25  Robert Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​ 1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 109–​110. 26 Archbishop Makarios in Andrew R. Novo, ‘An Insoluble Problem: The Harding-​ Makarios Negotiations, Turkey, and the Cause of Cypriot Enosis’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 24/​1 (2015), 100. 27  Ibid., 98. 28  TNA FCO 141/​4212 Red 4-​1, Cyprus Surrender and Amnesty Terms. 29  Novo, ‘An Insoluble Problem’, 99. 30 French, Fighting EOKA, 103. 31 Ibid. 32  Jan Asmussen, ‘Terrorism in Cyprus—​The Grivas Diaries’, Journal of Cyprus Studies, 13/​32 (2007), 1. 33 French, Fighting EOKA, 103. 34  Novo, ‘An Insoluble Problem’, 98. 35  Ibid., 98. 36  TNA FCO 141/​3370, Red 13–​1.

The Cyprus Revolt    693 regarding ‘similar steps taken in Kenya and Malaya, particularly with regard to actual terms offered’,37 and he supported the idea of using ‘something similar to Kenya terms’.38 However, London and Nicosia were not in agreement. The Secretary of State believed that even if Grivas was killed or captured in the operations which were underway, it would be premature to publish surrender terms until the British had struck deeper into EOKA. Surrender terms had to be reserved for a subsequent phase when the British would want to make conciliatory moves to increase the attraction of their political policy.39 On the other hand, Harding thought that surrender terms should be announced without delay if Grivas were killed or captured. He believed that EOKA was being kept going, in the face of losses and counter-​ measures taken by the British, mainly because of the personal leadership and ‘ruthless determination’ of Grivas, who was supported by his few ‘determined lieutenants’ left in the mountain groups.40 If Grivas were captured or killed in the current operations, that moment would offer the best chance of inducing the other mountain groups, by the offer of surrender terms, to give themselves up, thus to ‘take the mainspring out of terrorism’ not only in the mountains but also in the towns.41 Nevertheless, London was adamant, estimating that the political considerations were more important than the operational,42 showing how ‘actors are bound in large part by the international political environment in which they operate’.43

EOKA’s First Truce: ‘As Much a Threat as a Gesture’? Amidst this atmosphere of mutual frustration, a discovery on the ground offered the British the possibility for getting out of the deadlock. In the summer of 1956, chunks of Grivas’ diary and other documents written by or addressed to the EOKA leader were found buried in a number of glass jars close to the village of Lyssi. The publication of material from the diary was turned into a propaganda coup for the British government because it supposedly proved Makarios’s involvement in EOKA’s activities and therefore allowed the government to regain political initiative. The incriminatory material included details on ‘critical guerrilla espionage tasks, guerrilla communication networks, hiding practices, and EOKA’s financing’.44 37 

TNA CO 926/​426 Red 3. From Cyprus to SoS, Meeting with Archbishop, 1 March 1956; Harding’s reply, 13 March 1956; FCO 141/​4350 Red 27–​26. Surrender terms for Kenya and Malaya. TNA FCO 141/​ 4350. Cyprus Governor to Secretary of State ‘Surrender Terms and Outlawry’, 8 June 1956; CO 926/​426 Red 9. Deputy Governor, Sinclair to SoS, 8 June 1956; FCO 141/​4212 Red 100–​95. London thought that ‘further details, e.g. concerning timing of the offers and the nature of the propaganda campaign are [not] likely to be of much interest to you in view of the different circumstances in Cyprus and these two territories . . . ’. 9 April 1956. 38  TNA CO 926/​426 Red 9. Deputy Governor, Sinclair to SoS, 8 June 1956. 39  TNA FCO 141/​4350. Secretary of State (Sinclair) to Cyprus Governor, 12 June 1956. 40  TNA FCO 141/​4350. SoS, Colonial Office to Cyprus Governor, 16 June 1956. 41  TNA FCO 141/​4350. Cyprus Governor to SoS, Colonial Office, 13 June 1956. 42  TNA FCO 141/​4350. SoS, Colonial Office to Cyprus Governor, 16 June 1956. 43  Lise Morjé Howard and Alexandra Stark, ‘How Civil Wars End: The International System, Norms, and the Role of External Actors’, International Security, 42/​3 (Winter 2017/​18), 171. 44  Paul et al., ‘Cyprus, 1955–​1959 Case Outcome’, 99.

694   Maria Hadjiathanasiou Martin Thomas has written on the importance of remembering ‘how little we know about the intelligence dimension of anti-​colonial struggles as opposed to the counter-​insurgency and counter-​intelligence operations of colonial states’, whereas ‘that which we do know has often come from captured (and translated) intelligence documents’,45 and this case is evidently one of these. Furthermore, what we seem to learn about the intelligence dimension of anti-​colonial struggles is often merely the final act of an intelligence operation; for example, in relation to EOKA’s truces, the British were often taken off guard by the announcement of a truce, and this was because the intelligence they were receiving on EOKA’s plans was often false. Indicative is a short phrase by a British MP on this ‘misfortune’: ‘Oh, those terrible spies!’46 The publication of the documents coincided with a surprise move by Grivas who, on 16 August, ‘quite out of the blue’,47 as Robert Holland put it, declared EOKA’s first truce. Grivas, by accusing ‘the enemy’ of ‘intransigence’ and for effectively leading the Greek Cypriots to their ‘liberation struggle’, was now exposing the British for using EOKA’s armed violence as a pretext to justify its refusal in reaching an agreement.48 Fitting to the above is an argument made by Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless, who explain that insurgent groups insist that their resort to violence is a justifiable response to colonial exclusion, in spite of the highly coercive nature of their actions, and, at the other end of the scale, imperial authorities do their utmost to discredit insurgents as ‘unrepresentative, predatory and illegitimate’.49 In projecting what he perceived as an honourable stance, Grivas, as one can read in his Memoirs, had decided that ‘it was my duty as a soldier to make a generous gesture. By creating an atmosphere of peace I would leave the field clear for diplomacy to find a political solution to our troubles’.50 He believed, and the Greek government reiterated, that in this way the British would have to show their true intentions, which were supposed to be the peaceful solution of the Cyprus problem.51 Nevertheless, the prospect of a peaceful solution was carved in violence and coercion in the name of duty and the cause. Andreas Karyos writes that it was the Greek government that directed Grivas towards that first truce, believing that the political objectives of EOKA ‘could be pursued not only by action, but also by calculated inaction . . . so it strengthened the efforts to direct Grivas towards appearing more flexible’.52 Angelos Vlachos, the Consul-​General of Greece in Cyprus, persuaded Grivas to declare a truce using the argument that this move would sabotage Anthony Eden’s government from saying that no talks could take place as long as

45 Martin Thomas, ‘Insurgent Intelligence: Information Gathering and Anti-​ Colonial Rebellion’, Intelligence and National Security, 22/​1 (2007), 155–​156. 46 Column 362, Hansard, Lennox-​ Boyd https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​ tes/​04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​cyp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 27 February 2021. 47 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​1959, 148. 48  Spyros Papageorgiou, Cypriot Storm 1955–​1959 (Nicosia: Epiphaniou Publications, 1977), 522. 49  Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless, ‘Decolonisation, Conflict and Counter-​Insurgency’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless (eds.), Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 2. 50 Georgios Grivas, The Memoirs of General Grivas, ed. Charles Foley (London, UK: Longmans, 1964), 87. 51 Papageorgiou, Cypriot Storm 1955–​1959, 523. 52 Karyos, EOKA, 1955–​1959, 162; Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​1959.

The Cyprus Revolt    695 violence was underway. Furthermore, this move would put pressure on London as it would be under the scrutiny of international public opinion.53 Sosnowski’s analysis here becomes valid. Interim truces may be interpreted as a stalling mechanism that is ‘often used by parties for the optical win they create and to cover political machinations between ceasefire signatories or other local actors’.54 Nevertheless, while indeed EOKA’s first truce was, to an extent, meant to allow for diplomacy to play its designated role, it was arguably more than that. Importantly, the ceasefire would give time to EOKA to regroup and reorganize given the vital information that had been exposed. After the discovery of Grivas’s diaries, British counter-​insurgency operations ‘appeared at first to have a better chance of success than they did in the first phase’,55 and this was the point when Grivas played the truce card for the first time. In a public statement, Governor Harding revealed his disbelief regarding EOKA’s supposed good intentions in calling off ‘the present senseless violence’ in order for ‘a new and more hopeful situation’ to be created.56 His government ‘would certainly not be backward in responding to such a welcome change. But commonsense requires that the Government should heed the old advice “By their deeds ye shall know them” and should see whether in fact violence ceases’.57 It would be a stretch to claim that the British really knew what EOKA’s truce offer meant; the material shows that they could not agree upon its exact meaning. Harding’s disbelief in this sense is representative of a greater disbelief found across the ranks of British officials regarding the guerrilla organization’s intentions. For example, Lennox-​Boyd’s words exemplify this: ‘This truce offer was as much a threat as a gesture. The terrorists made it absolutely clear that they intended to take up arms again if things did not go the way that they wished’.58 Noel-​Baker’s response, though, contained a valid question that arguably speaks volumes regarding the nature of truces: ‘Is not every truce made with arms kept at the alert? What is the meaning otherwise of “truce”?’59 As the author of a secret report candidly wrote, the British premise was that ‘the EOKA-​ists are utterly unprincipled and that they will certainly take no action for disinterested or magnanimous reasons’.60 Perhaps to an extent rightly so, the British also interpreted this truce as a sign of weakness. According to information they had received from what was believed to be a reliable source in touch with EOKA, the organization was planning to remain quiet, pausing activities, until the government showed its hand over constitutional matters. If, however, the government failed in making sufficient concessions, or if any particularly violent anti-​EOKA measures

53 

Angelos Vlachos, Upon a Time a Diplomat, 5 Vols., Vol. 4 (Athens: Estia, 1999), 270–​271 (in Greek). Sosnowski, ‘Towards a Typology of Ceasefires’, 608. 55  Paul et al., ‘Cyprus, 1955–​1959 Case Outcome’, 98. First phase of operations: April 1955–​June 1956; second phase of operations July 1956–​March 1959. 56  TNA FCO 141/​4105 Red 2–​1. Governor to Secretary of State, 16 Aug 1956. 57 Ibid. 58 Column 372, Hansard, Lennox-​ Boyd https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​ tes/​04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​cyp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 26 February 2021. 59  Column 372, Hansard, Noel-​Baker https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​tes/​ 04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​c yp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 26 February 2021. 60  TNA FCO 141/​4105 Red 8a–​b. Author unknown, to Acting Secretary, 19 Aug 1956. 54 

696   Maria Hadjiathanasiou were taken, the organization was to resume activities. The organization was believed to use this time to regroup, swear in new recruits, seek to obtain more arms, and undertake various non-​operational jobs such as shadowing suspects and potential victims.61 Based on this estimation, London was unwilling to ‘negotiate in Cyprus with terrorists’, especially ‘while they retained their arms ready to strike again . . . no responsible Government at any time like the present in the Eastern Mediterranean could conceivably adopt an attitude of that kind’.62 As Robert Holland has argued, in Cyprus ‘the crystallization of an “anti-​truce” logic’ within senior British officials at this juncture was significant and representative of the stance followed during the rest of the Emergency where the Security Forces resisted in having their operations ‘turned “on” and “off ” for purely political purposes’.63

Offer of Surrender and Amnesty Terms: ‘Calling EOKA’s Bluff’? It was six days after EOKA’s truce that an offer of surrender and amnesty terms was made on 22 August 1956.64 Harding hoped that if there was ‘a genuine response’ to the offer, this would assist in creating the right conditions in which ‘real progress’ could be made in the introduction of responsible self-​government.65 During this time, Lord Radcliffe was working on a constitution for Cyprus that was to act as a basis for the settlement of the dispute. The offer of surrender terms was to remain open for three weeks. A surrendered insurgent would have the choice of either opting to leave Cyprus for Greece without being prosecuted for any crime he had committed before the announcement, ‘whatever the crime was—​even if it were murder or involving violence in other ways against the person’,66 or opting to remain in Cyprus (subject to terms). The promise of a future amnesty was conditionally offered, as peace and order had to be restored first. The carrying of arms and the possession of arms and explosives without lawful authority continued to be illegal and were in fact offences punishable with death and life imprisonment respectively.67 The surrender terms were supposed to give ‘the terrorists’, as the insurgents were called, ‘the opportunity of extricating themselves from the position into which their action in taking up arms against the established 61 

TNA FCO 141/​4105 Red 7. Security Liaison Officer, D.R. Johnston-​Jones to Governor, Police-​Special Branch, 18 Aug 1956. 62 Column 372, Hansard, Lennox-​ Boyd https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​ tes/​04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​cyp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 26 February 2021. 63 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​1959, 150. 64  TNA FCO 141/​3370 Red 13–​1. The first draft of the ‘Surrender and Amnesty Terms’ for EOKA was made on 7 July 1956, before EOKA’s first truce, however the offer finally took effect from midnight of 22 August 1956, after several revisions. 65  TNA FO 371/​123921/​1081/​1895. Governor to Secretary of State for the Colonies, Suggested version of statement, 22 August 1956. 66 Column 373, Hansard, Lennox-​ Boyd https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​ tes/​04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​cyp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 27 February 2021. 67  TNA FCO 141/​3370 Red 42–​40. Governor to Colonial Office, last draft 22 Aug 1956.

The Cyprus Revolt    697 government of the country has led them’.68 The government was offering them their personal safety but, as Noel-​Baker aptly put it, ‘Does the Secretary of State really think they care about their personal safety? It is the cause they care about’.69 Yet, what the insurgents ‘care(d) about’ was not what concerned the government. The Secretary of State, for example, echoing Harding’s general distrust of EOKA, and ‘in dealing with a very dangerous conspiracy in a part of the world . . . vital [to] British interests’ was expecting nothing less but surrender of their arms and trust, and only then would he be willing to seriously consider the offer of a truce. He seemed unable to fathom why the insurgents did not correspond as he would have liked to the ‘generous surrender terms’ but also to the undertakings they had given them on the question of self-​government.70 In this respect there seemed to exist a definite break in communication between the two sides of the conflict. EOKA’s reply to the surrender terms was a swift and categorical ‘no’, the leaflet they issued boldly stating that ‘The Victors do not Surrender’—​this was the first among more to follow.71 EOKA declared that the fighters would not surrender, also giving an ultimatum that Grivas would resume his freedom of action if negotiations on the lines laid down by Archbishop Makarios were not resumed by midnight on 27 August. In another rather entertaining gesture of public defiance, a donkey was paraded through the streets of Nicosia carrying a placard with the inscription ‘My Marshall, I Surrender’. As becomes evident, the surrender terms offer incited bad feeling and anger rather than appeasing spirits, and this was due to its offensive content. Essentially, two parallel monologues were taking place between the belligerent sides, with Harding thinking that ‘they [EOKA] are still suffering, probably deliberately, from their long-​standing and severe attack of self-​deception’ regarding the conditions that had to be established before the government was to introduce self-​government.72 Evidently not a public relations person, and almost oblivious to the consequences of his hardline rhetoric, Harding insisted on publicizing the fact that ‘mere suspension of terrorist activities by no means implies that law and order have been restored’ and that these will only be restored ‘when the terrorist organisation has been destroyed’,73 thus further inciting the other side. When the offer of surrender terms finally lapsed, zero surrenders had been received. The British official stand understood that the rejection of the surrender terms by EOKA constituted a ‘failure to take advantage of the generous terms offered’, proving that ‘EOKA did not wish to end violence’.74 Further reading into EOKA’s response, Harding decided that

68 Ibid.

69  Column 373, Hansard, Noel-​Baker https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​tes/​ 04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​c yp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 27 February 2021. 70 Column 374, Hansard, Lennox-​ Boyd https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​ tes/​04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​cyp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 27 February 2021. 71  TNA FCO 141/​3370 Red 55–​4. EOKA leaflet ‘The Victors do not surrender’; TNA FCO 141/​4105 Red 14 PEKA not accepting government’s surrender terms, Red 16 PEKA leaflet ‘The Victory is ours’ 25 Aug 1956, Red 18 PEKA leaflet ‘Now the Struggle Comes Before Everything Else’ 28 Aug 1956. 72  TNA FCO 141/​3370 Red 53. Governor to Colonial Office, 25 Aug 1956. 73  TNA FCO 141/​3370 Red 53. Governor to Colonial Office, 25 Aug 1956. 74  TNA FCO 141/​3370 Red 63. Governor to Secretary of State, also to Athens, Ankara, Washington, UK Delegation New York, UK Delegation Paris.

698   Maria Hadjiathanasiou the organization’s truce was a tactical manoeuver to gain time to repair the damage caused to their organization by the steady pressure of the Security Forces. Importantly, Harding even identified a win for the British side as the surrender terms ‘had in fact successfully called EOKA’s bluff ’.75 David French, in agreement with this reading, explained that when EOKA operations resumed in September, Grivas could take advantage of the fact that the British now faced ‘a massive distraction’: the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian President Nasser in July 1956. With London focusing British military efforts on overthrowing the Egyptian government, EOKA’s first truce had given them time to reorganize and plan a fresh campaign.76

Second Truce: Lull Before the Storm The issue of Cyprus was debated in February 1957 at the United Nations General Assembly. There, the Greek government insisted that union with Cyprus was a legitimate demand of the majority of the island’s population and that the current crisis had been created by the British in order to justify their occupation, whereas in the past Greeks and Turks of Cyprus had been coexisting peacefully. At the other end of the scale, the British replied that the insurgency had been encouraged and supported by the Greek government. The General Assembly accepted an anodyne resolution through a resumption of negotiations.77 By this time the Turkish Defense Organization (TMT) had come into existence (December 1956) and immediately sided with the British counter-​insurgency effort, along with a Turkish Cypriot police regiment that was already part of the colonial police force.78 A month later, British Security Forces were informed that Grivas was considering declaring a second truce. After the Greek government’s diplomatic rebuff at the United Nations, and forecasting EOKA’s vulnerability after ‘a series of hammer blows from which it might not recover’, as David French writes, the Greek government prompted Grivas to use the UN resolution for a truce in order for EOKA to win some much wanted breathing space.79 As Grivas wrote in his memoirs, the efforts of Angelos Vlachos the Greek Consul, and Anthimus the Bishop of Kitium, also contributed to Grivas’ decision on a second truce.80 Evanthis Hatzivassiliou further argues that the truce of March 1957 was part of a low-​key strategy pursued by Athens to further its own diplomatic purposes, while the fact that EOKA was not disbanded remained an important ace up its sleeve.81 Announcing a truce at this point would have further benefits for EOKA: it would prevent Turkey from using EOKA’s activities as a pretext for inter-​communal strife; assist the Greek leadership in persuading 75  TNA FCO 141/​3370 Red 63. Governor to Secretary of State, also to Athens, Ankara, Washington, UK Delegation New York, UK Delegation Paris. 76 French, Fighting EOKA, 140. 77 French, Fighting EOKA, 140. 78  Panagiotis Dimitrakis, ‘British Intelligence and the Cyprus Insurgency, 1955–​ 1959’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 21/​2 (2008), 381. 79 French, Fighting EOKA, 156–​157. 80 Grivas, Memoirs, 158–​159; Vlachos, Once Upon a Time a Diplomat, 324–​328; Karyos, EOKA, 1955–​ 1959, 163. 81 Karyos, EOKA, 1955–​1959, 163.

The Cyprus Revolt    699 London to release Archbishop Makarios from exile; and mend Anglo-​Hellenic relations while ruling out partition as a solution to the Cyprus Question.82 Hence, on 14 March Grivas issued another EOKA leaflet expressing his readiness to order the suspension of operations as soon as Archbishop Makarios was set free.83 Upon releasing Archbishop Makarios after a year in exile in the Seychelles, he was sent to Athens. He was not to return to Cyprus for fear of further exciting Cypriot spirits. It was at this point that a second surrender offer was extended to EOKA, offering safe conduct to EOKA members still at large.84 Similarly to the first one, this was also left to lapse.85 Reoffering the surrender terms showed that the British and colonial governments were not particularly creative in the handling of the EOKA matter and, as one colonial official put it, ‘the question of surrender and amnesty terms for EOKA becomes a live issue from time to time’, noticeably with a touch of irony.86 According to Nancy Crawshaw, EOKA was, at this time, on the verge of defeat. Therefore, that second truce, which lasted more than a year, came as a blessing as it gave the organization the opportunity to regroup and regain its strength. By the time it came to an end, EOKA was ready to resume fighting.87 Major-​General Darling, Director of Operations in Cyprus, explained in a note how such a ‘leaflet “truce” so often used in such circumstances’ enabled Grivas to turn to new methods, thus changing his tactics ‘quicker that we were able to appreciate’.88 With the assistance of EOKA’s sub-​groups (PEKA—​EOKA’s political arm and ANE—​Strong Youth of EOKA) and a powerful propaganda campaign,89 Grivas succeeded in ‘broadening the basis of EOKA throughout the Island by intimidation and a deep penetration in general’.90 Nevertheless, the guerrilla organization was not the only one to profit from the one-​year lull. British Security Forces also used this precious time to reorganize and strengthen their position, for example by enhancing the force by importing officers from outside the island.91 Between July 1957 and April 1958, the colonial government had information, in several instances, concerning EOKA’s imminent full-​scale resumption of violence, through island-​ wide ‘trouble’, processions, and student demonstrations in all the big towns of Cyprus. The organization’s ‘nuisance’ campaign and ‘bloodless acts of sabotage’ would continue unabated 82 Ibid.

83  TNA FCO 141/​4215 Red 1. EOKA’s declaration. ‘Our organisation, conforming with the spirit of the decision of the United Nations by which the desire is expressed of a peaceful and just solution of the Cyprus problem on the basis of the principles of the Constitutional Charter of the United Nations, and in order to facilitate the resumption of negotiations between the British Government and the real representative of the Cyprus people, Archbishop Makarios, DECLARES that it is ready to order the suspension of its operations at once if the Ethnarch Makarios were to be released’. 84  TNA FCO 141/​4212 Red 42–​40. Governor to Colonial Office, 22 Aug 1956. 85  TNA FCO 141/​4212 Red 91. January 1958. 86  TNA FCO 141/​4212, Red 38. K.J. Neale to Colonial Office, 12 July 1957. 87  Nancy Crawshaw in Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Bart Schuurman, ‘The Paradoxes of Negotiating with Terrorist and Insurgent Organisations’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39/​4 (2011), 680. 88  TNA CO 968/​690. Note by Major-​General K.T. Darling, Director of Operations, date unknown. 89  For more on propaganda in Cyprus during the 1950s with a focus on the ‘Cyprus Emergency’, see Hadjiathanasiou, Propaganda and the Cyprus Revolt. 90  TNA CO 968/​690. Note by Major-​General K.T. Darling, Director of Operations, date unknown. 91  Andrew R. Novo, ‘Friend or Foe? The Cyprus Police Force and the EOKA Insurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​3 (2012), 425.

700   Maria Hadjiathanasiou in conjunction with passive resistance until Archbishop Makarios returned to Cyprus.92 This information was, however, false, and Harding was said to be ‘in a state of uncertainty and confusion [in] adopting increasingly severe measures’, for example to prevent supplies from reaching the fighters.93 In December 1957, Governor Field Marshal John Harding was eventually replaced by Sir Hugh Foot, a diplomat, to bring this problem that cost so much to imperial prestige closer to a solution.

Changing of the Guard, a ‘Bad Summer’, and Another Truce Sir Hugh Foot, the new governor, was quick to denounce violence, murder, intimidation, and sabotage in his public statements. Hopes for ‘real peace’ were reiterated, and a pledge was made for ‘a just settlement’ if violence were to cease.94 As Major-​General Darling revealingly wrote in a note, the British intelligence machine in the island ‘was not geared, technically or organically, to defeat the highly organised underground movement before its activities had taken root during the summer of 1958’.95 Amidst this bloody summer, on 4 August Grivas declared a ‘half-​truce’ ceasing action ‘against the Englishmen and the Turks’ as long as no provocation was made.96 This truce came after an especially violent period of inter-​ communal clashes on the island, when during that summer Greek-​Cypriot fatalities reached fifty-​six and Turkish-​Cypriot fatalities fifty-​three.97 The truce lasted a little less than a month, before violence resumed. As Robert Holland wrote, ‘by this stage the “bad summer” of 1958 had taken on a special quality of endlessly recycled fear and bitterness’.98 By October 1958, EOKA operations had heightened to such a degree that October became known as ‘Black October’. Grivas’ execution groups in the towns fought a war of nerves. A number of street killings took place in the centre of the capital Nicosia. Andreas Karyos argued that EOKA’s harassment was so severe that by late 1958 the British Army had retreated into barbed wire encampments, cut off in almost every way from life in Cyprus.99 At the other end, EOKA’s assaults resulted in more punitive measures by the Security Forces targeting the Greek Cypriot population, such as curfew and searches,100 thus cementing ‘the splitting of sympathy’ between the public and the government.101 Christopher R. Day and William S. Reno have argued about how effective counter-​insurgency focuses on out-​governing rebels by providing security to people who provide essential intelligence on rebels (e.g. membership 92 

TNA FCO 141/​4215 Red 70. Political Intelligence, EOKA Policy, 12 April 1958. TNA, FCO 141/​4215 Red 33, SoS to Governor, 27 July 1957. 94  TNA FCO 141/​4219 Red 5. Governor’s public statement, 5 Aug 1958. 95  TNA CO968/​690. Note by Major-​General K.T. Darling, Director of Operations, date unknown. 96  TNA FCO 141/​4219 Red 2. Grivas orders to cease action, 4 Aug 1958. 97 Karyos, EOKA, 1955–​1959, 163. 98 Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​1959, 282. 99 Karyos, EOKA, 1955–​1959, 157. 100  Brian Drohan, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (New York: Cornell University Press, 2018), 63. 101  For further information on the concept of ‘splitting of sympathy’, see Hadjiathanasiou, Propaganda and the Cyprus Revolt. 93 

The Cyprus Revolt    701 and whereabouts), and also by separating rebels from non-​combatants,102 two things that British forces in Cyprus failed to achieve. On evaluating the reasons why EOKA declared yet another unilateral truce, Governor Foot wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies that EOKA did so because the organization was ‘hard pressed’ by recent measures against them; because EOKA had realized that its recent murder campaign against both Turks and British servicemen was getting a very bad world press and was therefore attempting to disengage from inter-​communal conflict;103 because the prime minister’s appeal gave an occasion for calling a halt in which EOKA hoped to get a breathing space to recover and make preparations for further violence.104 On the other hand, once again, Grivas justified pausing armed action so as to make the British respond to EOKA’s demands.105 One of EOKA’s advantages was its ability ‘to disengage at will at any time by declaring a spurious “truce” and going to ground’.106 It was then becoming more difficult for the Security Forces, both politically and militarily, to fight EOKA as effectively as when the organization acted out in the open. In the event of a self-​declared truce, ‘most of the tangible, operational targets for the Security Forces then disappear into thin air’, one government official animatedly wrote, with the majority of the insurgents—​except for a small number of known wanted men—​being reabsorbed in the Greek Cypriot community, essentially hiding in plain sight. This reading of the situation bore much greater validity at the end of 1958 than in the previous years, because by this time the organization was much more broadly based than previously.107 With government measures evidently failing, the perspective of Roger Allen, of the British Embassy in London, is refreshing, further proving that British officials were not all in agreement with the government’s counter-​insurgency approach. Upon writing on the ‘prickly subject’ of EOKA’s truces, Allen highlighted that, in fact, from a propaganda point of view it would have been more difficult for EOKA to restart operations if the British, for once, had called a halt to their ‘anti-​terrorist’ operations. However, Allen’s argument was not a good enough reason for the Foreign Office to risk calling off operations.108

‘Facilitating Negotiations for a Final Agreement’: A Fourth and Final Truce Lieutenant-​Colonel Grivas’ decision to declare a fourth and final truce on 24 December 1958 came once again after pressure was exerted by Archbishop Makarios and Greek diplomats. 102 Christopher R. Day and William S. Reno, ‘In Harm’s Way: African Counter-​ Insurgency and Patronage Politics’, Civil Wars, 16/​2 (2014), 105. 103  TNA FO 371/​136285. Governor’s Deputy to Lennox-​Boyd, 8 August 1958 in Karyos, EOKA, 1955–​ 1959, 164. 104  TNA FCO 141/​4219 Red 13. Governor to SoS, 5 August 1958. 105 Grivas, Memoirs, 272. 106  TNA FCO 141 4219 Red 107–​104. E. Melville to K.J. Neale, 16 Dec 1958. 107  TNA FCO 141 4219 Red 107–​104. E. Melville to K.J. Neale, 16 Dec 1958. 108  TNA FCO 141/​4219 Red 87–​86. Roger Allen, British Embassy, Athens to A.D.M. Ross, Foreign Office, 5 Dec 1958; TNA FCO 141 4219 Red 107–​104. E. Melville to K.J. Neale, 16 Dec 1958.

702   Maria Hadjiathanasiou Despite Grivas’ initial hesitations, he eventually gave his approval after Evangelos Averoff-​ Tossizza, the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, informed Grivas that Athens had opened secret talks with Ankara regarding Cyprus.109 Grivas therefore had to agree on a prompt suspension of operations to facilitate negotiations for a final agreement on the future of the island.110 Consistent with previous behaviour, Governor Foot was unwilling to call off British Security Forces operations in response to this truce, as the organization had partially ‘suspended, not abandoned, its campaign of terror’, and as intimidation was still very much a weapon used by the organization, while regrouping their forces and redistributing arms and explosives, ‘generally to prepare for further violence’.111 The only proof that the governor was willing to accept to bring an end to the Emergency was in fact the disbandment of the organization, the surrender of its arms, and the departure of its leaders from Cyprus.112 With negotiations being finalized at the beginning of the new year, this time it was Governor Foot who ordered a ceasefire on 28 February 1959, even though Grivas had instructed EOKA to ignore it.113 It was days later, on 9 March, and three weeks after the London Conference where an agreement on Cyprus’s independence had been reached between the governments of Greece, Turkey, and the UK on 19 February, that Lieutenant-​ Colonel Grivas finally announced that he was ‘obliged to order a ceasefire’.114 In the EOKA leaflet announcing it, he described the settlement simply as preferable to the national division that would follow a rejection on his part. A number of steps were therefore taken prior to the implementation of the Zurich–​London agreement, namely the amnesty, the revocation of the deportation orders of 1956 against Makarios, and the ending of the emergency measures.115

Conclusions It has recently been argued that truces ‘create an emergent form of order that has the ability to influence the accumulation of power and authority by different actors’,116 in a sense providing a window of opportunity wherein conflict actors may act in order to finally reach an agreement. Focusing on tracing how and why EOKA’s truces came into being has enabled 109  See letters of Makarios to Grivas on 3 December 1958 and Phrydas to Grivas on 19 December 1958 cited in Grivas, Memoirs, 339–​340; Rodis Roufos to Grivas on 28 November 1958 in Papageorgiou, Cypriots Storm, 632, cited in Karyos, EOKA, 1955–​1959, 164. 110  Letter of Averoff to Grivas on 27 December 1958 cited in Grivas, Memoirs, 337. 111  TNA FCO 141/​4219 Red 125–​22. Governor’s comments on the suggestion that the Security Forces ought to cease activities against EOKA in response to the truce which EOKA declared on 24 December. 112 Ibid. 113  Diana Markides, ‘The Politics of Honour and the Greek Divide at Cypriot Independence’, The Cyprus Review, 22/​2 (Fall 2010), 129. 114  Markides, ‘The Politics of Honour’, 130; TNA FCO 141/​4212 Red 160–​159, Red 165 Amnesty terms announced on 27 Feb 1959; Red 204 updates on the amnesty terms; Red 25–​24 Note on surrender terms. 115  Cyprus (British Information Services, July 1960), 8 as cited in Stephen G. Xydis, Cyprus: Reluctant Republic (Munich: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 1973). 116  Sosnowski, ‘Negotiating Statehood Through Ceasefires’, 1398; Sosnowski, ‘Towards a Typology of Ceasefires’, 608; Christian Lund, ‘Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship’, Development and Change, 47/​6 (2016), 1,199–​1,228.

The Cyprus Revolt    703 us to discover the potential of truces in the specific case of the ‘Cyprus Emergency’. In this case an agreement was never reached on the ground, as the warring parties never showed each other trust; hence all four truces by EOKA remained unilateral and therefore unfulfilled. The ‘prickly subject’ of truces was always received with suspicion by the British side. The colonial government, in refusing to believe in EOKA’s ‘magnanimous reasons’,117 and hence in refusing to call off counter-​insurgency operations until an agreement was reached outside Cyprus, proved that distrust and disbelief was the default mode of interaction between the guerrilla organization (and by extension the Cypriot people) and the colonial governments and its organs. Truces may be viewed as an effort by the parties ‘to move the conflict away from violence or to alter the use of violence (e.g. to exercise discipline; to stabilise control over territory/​ people; to ensure coherence within the ranks; or, in pursuit of ideological goals). But, in doing so, their aim is also to produce a wartime order that best serves a variety of other interests’.118 Cyprus’s case has provided fertile ground for examination of the above argument. The examination not only exemplified the self-​evident, in other words that when truces were declared during the Cyprus Emergency violence did cease for a while, but more importantly that the use of violence was ‘altered’, namely into attending to other considerations; for example EOKA pursuing its ideological goal for freedom from British imperial rule and union with Greece, regrouping, reorganizing, and ensuring coherence within its ranks, or in other words to ‘build up again by laying off ’.119 Nevertheless, what is also highlighted here is that EOKA was not the only party to benefit from its unilateral truces. The ‘wartime order’ achieved had also given space and time to the British forces on the ground to likewise regroup and import soldiers, but also to other actors participating in the effort to find a mutually agreeable solution to the Cyprus problem, such as the Greek government’s manoeuvring. Truce agreements often create momentum during a conflict due to the fact that they act as a bridge from to violence to a peaceful solution.120 However, the sense of originality and reserved optimism created by EOKA’s first truce, hinting towards a ‘peaceful solution’, gradually wore off and soon the affected parties became disenchanted with its potential. It would seem that intransigence was a common characteristic of the warring parties, one that to large extent was solidified on the ground due to mutual distrust and the ‘splitting of sympathy’. There was an evident unwillingness to enter meaningful discussion; and this of course was an element of the Cyprus imbroglio that had a top-​down direction. It seems appropriate to end this chapter with a quotation from Labour Party MP Francis Noel-​Baker that arguably captures the essence of the EOKA truces’ unfulfilled potential and the colonial government’s self-​fulfilling prophecy of an ever-​spinning cycle of violence, bad blood, and intransigence; a cycle that only broke with external interventionism, imposing in Cyprus a peace that, as history shows, did not last very long and was far from being a viable solution.

117 

TNA FCO 141/​4105 Red 8a–​b. Author unknown, to Acting Secretary, 19 Aug 1956. Sosnowski, ‘Negotiating Statehood Through Ceasefires’, 1398. 119  TNA FCO 141/​4219 Red 87. Roger Allen, British Embassy, Athens to A.D.M. Ross, Foreign Office, 5 Dec 1958. 120  Malin Åkebo, ‘The Politics of Ceasefires: On Ceasefire Agreements and Peace Processes in Aceh and Sri Lanka’, PhD dissertation, Umeå University, 2013, i. 118 

704   Maria Hadjiathanasiou The Government all this time were saying they could not negotiate or make proposals under the threat of force. At length, in August, E.O.K.A. . . . declared a truce, the kind of truce we made with the Irish in 1921, a truce to permit negotiations for a settlement. Then, just to prove that they are consistent in negotiating only under the threat of force, the Government refused to do so when the threat of force had been suspended. They said they had . . . inside information—​ oh, those terrible spies!—​that the truce was offered because E.O.K.A. were losing the battle and the people were turning against them. So instead of seeking a new basis of negotiation they called for unconditional surrender . . . The Government got the answer to their surrender call that was always certain . . . “Come and take it.” Not one single man surrendered . . . and the Cypriot people . . . showed the contempt they felt for the Government’s surrender terms. That is a tragic story I have told about the use of force and its results, but, alas, it is true.121

Select Bibliography Åkebo, Malin, ‘Ceasefire Rationales: A Comparative Study of Ceasefires in the Moro and Communist Conflicts in the Philippines’, International Peacekeeping, 28/​3 (2021), 366–​392. Asmussen, Jan, ‘Terrorism in Cyprus—​The Grivas Diaries’, Journal of Cyprus Studies, 13/​32 (2007), 1–​4. Day, Christopher R., and William S. Reno, ‘In Harm’s Way: African Counter-​Insurgency and Patronage Politics’, Civil Wars, 16/​2 (2014), 105–​126. Dimitrakis, Panagiotis, ‘British Intelligence and the Cyprus Insurgency, 1955–​ 1959’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 21/​2 (2008), 375–​394. Drohan, Brian, Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (New York: Cornell University Press, 2018). Duyvesteyn, Isabelle, and Bart Schuurman, ‘The Paradoxes of Negotiating with Terrorist and Insurgent Organisations’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39/​4 (2011), 677–​692. French, David, Fighting EOKA: The British Counter-​Insurgency Campaign on Cyprus, 1955–​1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Grivas, Georgios, The Memoirs of General Grivas, edited by Charles Foley (London, UK: Longmans, 1964). Hadjiathanasiou, Maria, Propaganda and the Cyprus Revolt: Rebellion, Counter-​insurgency and the Media, 1955–​59 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2020). Holland, Robert, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–​1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Howard, Lise Morjé, and Alexandra Stark, ‘How Civil Wars End: The International System, Norms, and the Role of External Actors’, International Security, 42/​3 (Winter 2017/​18), 127–​171. Kalyvas, Stathis N., Ian Shapiro, and Tarek Masoud, ‘Integrating the Study of Order, Conflict, and Violence’, in Stathis N. Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro, and Tarek Masoud, eds., Order, Conflict, Violence (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 397–​421

121  Column 362, Hansard, Noel-​Baker https://​hans​ard.par​liam​ent.uk/​Comm​ons/​1956-​09-​14/​deba​tes/​ 04e4e​605-​e337-​4d1f-​8616-​cebcd​f0df​045/​Cyp​rus?highli​ght=​c yp​rus%20tre​aty%20l​ausa​nne#contr​ibut​ ion-​12d5b​0d6-​ea11-​4cde-​97d4-​65f5d​52b8​507, accessed 27 February 2021.

The Cyprus Revolt    705 Lund, Christian, ‘Rule and Rupture: State Formation through the Production of Property and Citizenship’, Development and Change, 47/​6 (2016), 1,199–​1,228. Markides, Diana, ‘The Politics of Honour and the Greek Divide at Cypriot Independence’, The Cyprus Review, 22/​2 (Fall 2010), 123–​138. Novo, Andrew R., ‘An Insoluble Problem: The Harding-​Makarios Negotiations, Turkey, and the Cause of Cypriot Enosis’, Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 24/​1 (2015), 89–​105. Novo, Andrew R., ‘Friend or Foe? The Cyprus Police Force and the EOKA Insurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 23/​3 (2012), 414–​431. Sosnowski, Marika, ‘Towards a Typology of Ceasefires: Order Amid Violence’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 74/​5 (2020), 597–​613. Sosnowski, Marika, ‘Negotiating Statehood Through Ceasefires: Syria’s De-​escalation Zones’, Small Wars & Insurgencies, 31/​7–​8 (2020), 1,395–​1,414, 1,396. Staniland, Paul, ‘States, Insurgents, and Wartime Political Orders’, Perspectives on Politics, 10/​2 (2012), 243–​264, doi:10.1017/​S1537592712000655. Stedman, Stephen John, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens, Ending Civil Wars: The Implementation of Peace Agreements (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002). Thomas, Martin, and Gareth Curless, ‘Decolonisation, Conflict and Counter-​Insurgency’, in Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless, eds., Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 1–​22. Xydis, Stephen G., Cyprus: Reluctant Republic (Munich: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 1973).

Chapter 37

To Forget an d Re me mbe r The Paradoxical Legacy of French Military Actions in Algeria Raphaëlle Branche The French–​Algerian War was not simply a war of independence. At stake was the future of Algeria: Would the country and its inhabitants remain under French rule, or would it become a nation of Algerian people, ruled by Algerian people? French security forces tried to enforce the first option from the end of 1954 until September 1959, when President Charles de Gaulle, the French head of state, announced that France was willing to consider a future for Algeria that he identified as ‘self-​determination’. Yet the war against the Algerian National Liberation Front (in French, FLN), which sought full independence, continued until March 1962. Negotiations between the two parties started in June 1960, but it took several rounds of talks before a definitive ceasefire agreement was reached and the future relationship between France and Algeria was settled in outline. Apart from these two opposing sides—​which I will refer to as ‘national’ (the FLN insisting that the conflict pitted two nations—​France and Algeria—​against each other, while the French authorities maintained there was only one nation: France, whose constitutional reach included every inhabitant of Algeria or France who was not a foreigner), other groups took part in the violence that convulsed Algeria for almost eight years. From the outset, the war had other internecine dimensions, which are fundamentally reducible to three: Algerian nationalists opposing each other; Algerian people engaged in the French armed forces either by necessity (conscription or the need for work) or political convictions; and French people from the Secret Army Organisation (in French, OAS) who violently opposed de Gaulle’s political agenda of eventual withdrawal in the final two years of the war. In addition to these three principal categories, one should mention others: draft dodgers or French people who supported the FLN. The issue of amnesty might be viewed differently depending on which—​and whose—​ dimension of the war we consider. While the expectations related to a war amnesty were the same, the reality was different for these various constituencies mentioned above, and so were its consequences. After a brief overview of the reasons behind the wartime amnesty for serving security force personnel, I will look separately at the amnesty laws that were passed after the war ended as well as the amnesty linked to the 1962 ceasefire. I will then address

To Forget and Remember    707 the consequences of amnesty in terms of knowledge, judgement, and compensation, ideas explained below.

Why an Amnesty? Invented by Thrasybulus in 403 bc, after the Thirty Tyrants installed in power following the Peloponnesian War were overthrown, the Athenian Amnesty sought to reverse the motto ‘never forget’ into ‘never remember’ in order to break the cycle of revenge among Athenian citizens left bitterly divided after their defeat by Sparta. Each citizen was individually required to swear not to recall the woes of the past. As brilliantly demonstrated by Nicole Loraux, amnesty had a political goal: to keep the city united. Amnesty meant the desire for a new future and, as Giorgio Agamben has observed,1 the acknowledgment of the civil war that preceded it. The destructive power of the evocation of the past was undermined.2 In the case of the French–​Algerian War, there were two main reasons behind the amnesty: to silence troublesome memories and to grant impunity.

To Silence the Memories That Might Fuel Anger and Revenge The amnesty laws following the end of the French–​Algerian War shared these characteristics. These laws successively addressed each French internal aspect of the armed opposition that arose during the war. Several presidential pardons were pronounced around the same dates in 1964 and 1968.3 Thus, the executive and legislative branches of French government indicated their shared interest in forgetting, then erasing (or erasing then forgetting) the convictions of dozens of people still in jail or in exile. This history was a strictly French one: Algerians were not covered under the terms of these laws that marked the definitive defeat of the last extremist defenders of French Algeria, who had attempted to assassinate the president of the republic several times over the preceding years. The amnesties also contributed to the political process of healing the nation’s wounds and building a ‘new’ 1 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Du bon usage de la mémoire et de l’oubli’, postface to Toni Negri, Exil, Paris: Éditions Mille et Une Nuits, 1998. 2  ‘Comme si le présent n’était pensable qu’au passé, à condition toutefois que, dans l’évocation qui en est faite, le passé, débarrassé de toute valeur virtuellement subversive, puisse servir de modèle édifiant’. (Nicole Loraux, La cité divisée (Paris: Payot, 1997), 273–​274). 3 Loi n° 64-​ 1269 du 23 décembre 1964 portant amnistie et autorisant la dispense de certaines incapacités et déchéances. And décrets de grâce des 14 et 23 décembre 1963, 27 mars, 9 juillet et 21 décembre 1964. In total, approximately 500 people had been granted a full pardon and 220 a partial pardon by the time of the 1964 amnesty law. See Victor Delaporte, Une répression négociée: les agents de l’État et les derniers partisans de l’Algérie française (1960–​1965), MA in History, 2017, 309. Loi n° 66-​396 du 17 juin 1966 portant amnistie d’infractions contre la sûreté de l’Etat ou commises en relation avec les événements d’Algérie; Loi n° 68-​697 du 31 juillet 1968 portant amnistie de tous les membres de l’OAS qui étaient encore détenus.

708   Raphaëlle Branche France after the loss of its empire and the reintegration of almost one million people who had arrived in metropolitan France from French Algeria in less than a year after the March 1962 ceasefire agreement. Former members of the OAS were included in this amnesty process, as stated by Prime Minister Georges Pompidou in December 1962: ‘The government hopes that wisdom will prevail and that measures can be envisaged to reincorporate into national life all those [individuals] who were mainly victims of the events and who were not led so far astray as to spill French blood’.4 Pompidou’s aim was twofold: to demobilize the diehard terrorists and to lay out a path for a cultural demobilization of remaining OAS members—​what Hubert Beuve-​Mery, a famous editorialist, called a ‘moral demobilization’.5 The electoral agenda was also an issue at the time of the first pardon law of 1964, since the first presidential election by direct universal suffrage was scheduled for 1965: there was a strong need for French unity. Indeed, almost half of those convicted of terrorism offences were released as a result of the pardons and the amnesty of December 1964.6 The 1968 amnesty law was meant to be total: Article 1 stated, ‘Full amnesty is granted for all the offences committed in relation to the Algerian events’.7 Each of these laws also had an impact on the narrative of the war. Quashed convictions were not to be mentioned anymore, but individuals could still claim that their actions had been legitimate. Former members of the OAS were strongly supported within some French social milieux, be they political or military. They published numerous books sharing their vision of the past, which gained them a wider audience beyond their hard-​core supporters. Their influence became starkly apparent in 1982. France had just elected the socialist François Mitterrand as president. A former key minister during the French–​Algerian War, Mitterrand had made his way up the echelons of the Fifth Republic. He had managed to win a wide gamut of support, ranging from the communists on the one hand, to some former French ‘repatriates’ from Algeria on the other. Therefore, despite outspoken opposition from many socialist and communist MPs, a new amnesty law was passed. However, for the first time, in order to secure passage of the 1982 amnesty law, the government had to resort to the provisions of Article 49.3 of the Constitution, thereby forcing the legislation through the National Assembly. Among other provisions, the leaders of the failed April 1961 coup attempt in Algiers were reintegrated into the French Army and granted their full rights to a military pension.8 More than twenty years after the 1982 amnesty law, a more right-​wing National Assembly passed another law meant to address the status and pension entitlements of the OAS ‘rank and files’ as well. In 2005, compensation was awarded to anyone whose court conviction or disciplinary sanction had been amnestied: the vast majority of the 4 JORF, Assemblée nationale, séance du 13 décembre 1962. Discours de politique générale. Le gouvernement espère que la sagesse l’emportera et qu’il lui sera possible d’envisager les mesures tendant à réincorporer dans la vie nationale tous ceux qui ont été surtout victimes des événements et qui ne se sont pas dévoyés au point de faire couler le sang français. 5  On the perspective of an amnesty, he wrote, ‘Geste de clémence ou froid calcul, générosité d’un jour de liesse au terme d’une période troublée, l’amnistie est un acte politique. Comme la justice, elle comporte sa part d’injustice . . .Moins grande le plus souvent que ne le serait au lendemain de luttes intestins une inflexible rigueur . . . L’Histoire, elle, enseigne que s’il peut être glorieux de vaincre un adversaire, la victoire n’est vraiment acquise qu’à celui qui a su aussi le désarmer moralement’. Sirius, ‘Amnistie’, Le Monde, 12 juin 1963. 6  See Delaporte, Une répression négociée, 311. The figure is of almost 1,500 people. 7  ‘Sont amnistiés de plein droit toutes infractions commises en relation avec les événements d’Algérie’. 8  Loi du 3 décembre 1982.

To Forget and Remember    709 people concerned were former members of the OAS.9 This compensation, like other aspects of this law,10 illustrated the political influence of nostalgic narratives about French Algeria. Former members of the OAS, a subversive organization that had attempted to assassinate the French head of state on several occasions and had committed hundreds of deadly terrorist attacks against civilians and military personnel, had been reconstructed in right-​wing popular memory as the ‘martyrs’ of French Algeria since the 1960s.11 Its vision had gradually gained a wider audience as French society proved to be less and less immune to racism and prone to consider the French Empire, its grandeur and civilization, with some nostalgia.

To Grant Impunity to the French Military Very different from these laws aimed at restoring civil peace within French society was the amnesty that followed the ceasefire agreement between the French armed forces and the Algerian National Liberation Army (in French, ALN). The ceasefire was due to take effect at noon on 19 March 1962, and the amnesty decree was issued three days later. Its concerns were twofold: one related to the individuals who had been convicted of ‘taking part in, or assisting directly or indirectly, the Algerian insurrection’ and the other concerned those who committed offences ‘during the operations to maintain order directed against the Algerian insurrection’. Behind the appearance of reciprocity (each party was being granted amnesty), the situation was far from symmetrical. During the war, which France considered a mere ‘police operation’, a vast French repressive apparatus had imprisoned or detained in camps hundreds of thousands of Algerian people, who were either convicted or simply suspected of being members of the FLN and/​or ALN, or of providing assistance to them. The FLN had no equivalent punitive apparatus and was unable to arrest or bring to trial French soldiers or policemen. It did manage to capture a thousand or so French military personnel and civilians, but it never brought them to trial. Nor did it control the infrastructure necessary to jail them. The asymmetrical dimension of the war was still obvious when it came to amnesty terms. Indeed, whereas the Algerians had been arrested and convicted or detained, most of the members of the French forces had never had to face any judicial process. Therefore, not only did this amnesty prohibit any criminal convictions or sanctions from being remembered, but it also meant that the very acts that should have been punished by the justice system would never be punished and could never be mentioned again. To put it even more clearly, French personnel committed war crimes throughout the war, most of them under orders or with their superior officers and authorities turning a blind eye: no one had prosecuted them, and no one would ever be able to do so. As the active whistle-​blower and historian Pierre Vidal-​Naquet argued in 1962: ‘No text would have absolved more totally the criminals of the military and police forces, had they been judged—​a rare occurrence—​or just accused, had they been named in the process of a judicial information, or by a witness. They are, from 9 

L’article 13 de la loi du 23 févier 2005. See Romain Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire. La controverse autour du ‘fait colonial’ (Bellecombes-​en-​ Bauge : Éditions du Croquant, 2006). 11  The OAS is held responsible for 1,600 to 2,400 deaths. See Alain Ruscio, Nostalgérie: l’interminable histoire de l’OAS (Paris: La Découverte, 2015). 10 

710   Raphaëlle Branche now on, as white as snow . . . More than a plain amnesty, it is indeed a legitimization’.12 The question that begs itself is whether it was really the intention of the French authorities to grant France’s army and police total impunity through this amnesty? The answer is undoubtedly yes, and a blanket amnesty was anticipated within army ranks years before the war ended. In this sense, the amnesty did not lay out new patterns of responsibility and remembrance; rather, it affirmed the expectations that French forces in Algeria held since the beginning of the war. In a nutshell: war crimes were committed such as torture and summary executions or the use of prohibited weapons., The civilian authorities were aware of this, but were either unable or unwilling to stop such military actions, provided that the security forces were winning the war on the ground. Even when autonomy for Algeria was put on the agenda, the military was still given free rein. The only limit to their doings actions would be openly disobeying political instructions. When he decided that French Algeria would have to be abandoned, de Gaulle acted to regain control of the military forces by sparing its men in all possible senses (for instance, by recruiting more Algerians within the French military to alleviate the burden on French conscripts, and by establishing a new legislative framework for the use of illegal methods in order to keep them within authorized—​albeit not quite legal—​boundaries).13 The first reference to an amnesty dated back to September 1958, just after de Gaulle returned to power. By a referendum vote, French citizens overwhelmingly agreed to change the constitution. The impression created was that the war in Algeria was a legacy of the Fourth Republic. For a while, the Fifth Republic considered the possibility of an amnesty that would render all the crimes committed under the former regime by French armed forces null and void.14 In an October 1958 speech directed at Algeria’s guerrilla fighters, de Gaulle offered what he called ‘the peace of the brave’: a sort of virile oath from man to man whereby insurgent fighters were promised fair treatment if they surrendered. The proposal did not attain its goal, even though we know that it was discussed within the ALN maquis. Instead, the war went on. Repression became tougher from that date forward, and the ALN, as Saphia Arezki’s chapter in this volume indicates, had to break up into smaller groups to try to survive until the end of the war. Although the French Army managed to turn the war on the ground in their favour, the political outcome envisaged by de Gaulle’s government remained on the agenda. Three years later, as the end of the war drew closer, the civilian authorities in Algeria gathered information concerning what the Army called ‘the acts of repression conducted by the military’ (actes de répression menés par l’armée).15 They particularly wished to resolve the issue of the ‘disappeared people’ in order to ensure that all affected families received an 12 ‘Aucun

texte ne pouvait absoudre plus complètement les criminels de l’armée et de la police françaises, qu’ils aient été jugés, chose rare, qu’ils soient simples prévenus, que leur nom ait été prononcé à l’occasion d’une information contre X, ou cité dans un témoignage. Ils sont désormais blancs comme neige . . . Plus qu’une véritable amnistie il s’agit en vérité d’une légitimation’, Pierre Vidal-​Naquet, La Raison d’Etat (Paris: Minuit, 1962), 323–​324. 13  Raphaëlle Branche, ‘ “The Best fellagha Hunter is the French of North African Descent” (General Challe). Harkis in French Algeria’, in Brian Hughes and Fergus Robson (eds.), Unconventional Warfare from Antiquity to the Present Day (Basingstoke: Palgrave/​Macmillan, 2017), 47–​66. 14  Prime Minister Debré envisaged an amnesty for ‘violence committed during the maintenance of order’ and asked for a summary of the complaints. It is only thanks to this request that the project is known to us. It was filed as it stood at the beginning of October 1958. 800293/​9* (National Archives). 15  Fiche du Deuxième bureau de l’EMI, 22 May 1961, 1H 1240/​9* (Defence Archives).

To Forget and Remember    711 official certification of their relative’s death. The délégué général, who represented the French government in Algeria, informed the military of the government’s determination to ‘contribute to fixing the material or moral consequences of the events of Algeria, whoever the victims were’.16 For the military, the principal concern was different: to secure their impunity. When war crimes were committed, they were very rarely sanctioned or condemned. Most of the time, victims were unable to complain or go to court. More broadly, certain of these war crimes had indeed been legitimized by the state as aspects of counter-​insurgency, especially two of them: summary executions followed by public display of the corpses, and the massive use of torture against suspects.17 Yet these methods were forbidden under law and should therefore have been legally prosecuted. On the rare occasions when prosecutions did take place, military personnel were judged by military courts. By 1961 these courts were blatantly stalling the process in order to gain time. Their unwillingness to proceed to judgment was obvious in the two most famous cases of the war, both of which came to public attention thanks to the efforts of committees set up to support the victims: the cases of Maurice Audin and Djamila Boupacha. Audin disappeared at the hands of the military in 1957: he was said to have escaped. His supporters seeking to bring the case to trial argued that he had been tortured to death.18 Boupacha was accused of placing bombs, but her lawyer argued that she had been tortured and raped in 1960 and that her torturers and rapists should be prosecuted as well.19 Despite extensive publicity, in both cases the military firmly opposed any effort to help identify the military personnel involved. Other cases did find their way to court meanwhile. The death under torture of Sadia Mebarek was one of the last: in January 1962, the officers held responsible were acquitted. An amnesty was imminently expected by that point. Judges already shared a common view that soldiers should not be punished for actions that had been encouraged, if not formally authorized, by numerous military instructions that complied with the spirit (if not the letter) of the repressive guidelines, and that were frequently presented as being an efficient means to win the war.20 Similar arguments were widely used within the judiciary in metropolitan France, and judges came down in favour of acquittals there as well. Some cases are known to us even though the archives on the topic have yet to be thoroughly scrutinized. A year before the Mebarek case, in March 1961, another officer had already been acquitted in Paris. He was prosecuted over the deaths of six people, alleged to involve five summary executions and one fatal dog bite. One of de Gaulle’s judicial advisers merely had to comment: ‘the present situation is worrying since it is transforming the judicial privilege of the Military [i.e. to be judged by its peers] into a lack of justice’.21 He did not, though, anticipate any change, and 16 ‘volonté du gouvernement de contribuer à réparer toutes les conséquences matérielles ou morales des événements d’Algérie, quelles qu’en soient les victimes,’ in ibid. 17 Raphaëlle Branche, ‘The French Military in its Last Colonial War: Algeria, 1954–​ 1962, the Reign of Torture’, in Simone Tobia and Christopher Andrew (eds.), Interrogation in War and Conflict. A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 169–​184. 18  Pierre Vidal-​Naquet, L’Affaire Audin (1957–​1978) (Paris: Minuit, 1989). 19  Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Pour Djamila Boupacha (Paris: Minuit, 1962). 20  Several arguments were deployed: the need to use counter-​terror against terror; the limited mentality of Algerian people that made violent means more understandable; the ticking bomb argument . . . 21  Jean-​Jacques de Bresson to Charles de Gaulle 11 March 1961, 5AG1/​1772 (National Archives): la situation actuelle est préoccupante en ce qu’elle tend à transformer le privilège de juridiction de l’Armée en une absence de Justice (Delaporte, Une répression négociée, 55).

712   Raphaëlle Branche instead advised de Gaulle that the obstructiveness of the military tribunals was ‘one of the numerous manifestations of the trouble the nation has run into due to the Algerian War’. He therefore suggested that war crimes ‘be put on the negative side of the balance-​sheet of the Algerian conflict and that the first opportunity be seized to pardon such offences’.22 The opportunity was seized indeed: on 22 March 1962, a decree endorsed the dismissal of all proceedings under way at the time. For instance, the Djamila Boupacha case was dismissed in April 1962, the official rationale being that the acts of violence committed while she was arrested and detained were ‘undoubtedly part of the operations to maintain order. Therefore, the public action has to be dropped’.23 The consequences of the decree would become more evident in the longer term. Two discrete set of circumstances require scrutiny: firstly, those for which a judicial file existed, and, secondly, those instances in which judicial proceedings were never initiated against individuals for their actions in relation to ‘operations to maintain order’. Amnesty is a mandatory oblivion of convictions or sanctions. As stated under article 133–​11 of the Penal Code, ‘It is prohibited for any person who, in exercising his functions, becomes aware of criminal convictions, disciplinary or professional sanctions or prohibitions, forfeitures and incapacities erased by the amnesty, to refer to the existence [of these amnestied penalties] in any form whatsoever or to leave any references in any kind of document. However, this prohibition does not apply to the original court records, decrees and decisions. Moreover, the amnesty shall not be an obstacle to the execution of publication ordered for the purposes of reparation’.24 In 1995, archivists interpreted this statement in the broadest terms: they did not destroy documents related to amnestied deeds.25 Later, the Commission monitoring Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) took a step forward by considering that an amnesty equates with other state secrets specified by law. Therefore, documents mentioning amnestied deeds should be disclosed after fifty years, since these documents fall within the ‘protection of privacy’ category.26 Does this rule apply for the documents produced during the Algerian War? Military justice files had long been a difficult fortress for the historian to breach. In 2008, a new law on archival access was promulgated that shortened the closure period for the vast majority of files, including those of the military justice system. In December 2021, general access was theoretically granted to files inaccessible hitherto.27 More than a year later, actual access to many files has, in practice, become 22 ‘une des nombreuses manifestations du trouble que la guerre d’Algérie a causé à la nation. Il conviendrait alors . . . de considérer que les exactions doivent être inscrites à la partie négative du bilan du conflit algérien et de saisir la première occasion favorable pour amnistier le genre d’infractions’: Delaporte, Une répression négociée. 23  Letter from the procureur de la République of Caen to the procureur général, 4 April 1962, 800293/​ 120A* (National Archives). 24 ‘Il est interdit à toute personne qui, dans l’exercice de ses fonctions, a connaissance de condamnations pénales, de sanctions disciplinaires ou professionnelles ou d’interdictions, déchéances et incapacités effacées par l’amnistie, d’en rappeler l’existence sous quelque forme que ce soit ou d’en laisser subsister la mention dans un document quelconque. Toutefois, les minutes des jugements, arrêts et décisions échappent à cette interdiction. En outre, l’amnistie ne met pas obstacle à l’exécution de la publication ordonnée à titre de réparation’. 25  Circulaire AD 95-​1, 27 January 1995. 26  Aude Roelly and Marie Ranquet, ‘Entre oubli et mémoire, l’archiviste funambule’, K@iros [online], 2, | 2017, http://​rev​ues-​msh.uca.fr/​kai​ros/​index.php?id=​256. 27  https://​www.leg​ifra​nce.gouv.fr/​eli/​arr​ete/​2021/​12/​22/​MICC2​1367​15A/​jo/​texte.

To Forget and Remember    713 increasingly complicated.28 As more than two-​years of political and judicial struggle over the issue of classified documents from the 1930s to the 1970s has shown,29 access to archives regarding the French Algerian War is still a highly sensitive topic, regardless of soothing political discourses about the need to move on and build a future based on a wide knowledge of the past. But the good news is that the files have not been destroyed. In some instances irreversible damage has been done to the records in question because convictions or sanctions were redacted using black ink, as is the case for files dating back to the Second World War. Apparently, for the Algerian War, the fact that an amnesty was granted is indicated by a stamp affixed to the court judgement that does not obscure the text, allowing historians to work on the judicial convictions or disciplinary sanctions detailed. Yet the legal grounds for unfettered access are not entirely solid, as is evinced by the European discussions on the processing of personal data,30 which were later followed by debates in the French Parliament. It took several years of discussions to accept the principle that historical material should not be considered merely to be data whose accessibility must be tightly restricted for the protection of the person’s privacy. Fortunately, Article 89 permitted derogations (effectively, exceptions) to the regulation for ‘archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes’.31 The French Law passed on 20 June 201832.

28 

See the newspaper article by historian Marc André, ‘L’accès aux documents liés à la guerre d’Algérie reste toujours aussi difficile’, Le Monde, 15 November 2022. 29  Raphaëlle Branche and Gilles Morin, ‘Archives et sécurité nationale: des fonds communicables, ou non, au bon vouloir des services’, 20&21. Revue d’histoire, 152 (octobre-​décembre 2021), 141–​144. For a brief presentation at the beginning of the struggle: Constant Méheut, ‘France Eases Access, a Little, to Its Secrets’, New York Times, 9 March 2021. 30  Regulation (EU) 2016/​679 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 April 2016 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. 31  1. Processing for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes, shall be subject to appropriate safeguards, in accordance with this Regulation, for the rights and freedoms of the data subject. Those safeguards shall ensure that technical and organisational measures are in place in particular in order to ensure respect for the principle of data minimisation. Those measures may include pseudonymisation provided that those purposes can be fulfilled in that manner. Where those purposes can be fulfilled by further processing which does not permit or no longer permits the identification of data subjects, those purposes shall be fulfilled in that manner. 2. Where personal data are processed for scientific or historical research purposes or statistical purposes, Union or Member State law may provide for derogations from the rights referred to in Articles 15, 16, 18 and 21 subject to the conditions and safeguards referred to in paragraph 1 of this Article in so far as such rights are likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of the specific purposes, and such derogations are necessary for the fulfilment of those purposes. 3. Where personal data are processed for archiving purposes in the public interest, Union or Member State law may provide for derogations from the rights referred to in Articles 15, 16, 18, 19, 20 and 21 subject to the conditions and safeguards referred to in paragraph 1 of this Article in so far as such rights are likely to render impossible or seriously impair the achievement of the specific purposes, and such derogations are necessary for the fulfilment of those purposes. 4. Where processing referred to in paragraphs 2 and 3 serves at the same time another purpose, the derogations shall apply only to processing for the purposes referred to in those paragraphs. 32 

the personal data protection act n° 2018-​493

714   Raphaëlle Branche The situation is totally different in relation to crimes that were not prosecuted during the war or in the months that followed, during which special high courts were set up to judge members of the OAS. The ‘amnesty’ forbade prosecution of people for ‘deeds committed during operations to maintain order against the Algerian rebellion’. From then on, it was impossible even to name any military personnel whose involvement in war crimes was obvious. The legal system would back any man who claimed that his respectability or honour was being impugned. Libel suits would result and would typically be won by the plaintiff except if he had publicly claimed that he had, indeed, committed such acts (such was repeatedly the case for Jean-​Marie Le Pen, for instance). Even if a libel suit was won by someone accused of naming alleged criminals, no other judicial consequences would follow. Most of the soldiers involved in war crimes against members of the Algerian Liberation Army and the Algerian Liberation Front were conscripts. As veterans, they were in no hurry to address this issue. They had to wait thirteen years after the war to be granted the status of ‘veterans’ comparable to former soldiers from the two World Wars or the Indochina War. Their associations have continued to lobby to the present day to broaden the criteria required to secure veteran status. War crimes have certainly not been on the agenda of these associations. However, since 2000, former rank-​and-​file soldiers have spoken out and written their memoirs mentioning crimes such as rape, torture, napalm bombing, and summary executions of prisoners, among other things. This new awareness does not mean that they accept legal responsibility for the actions in question. Indeed, no one will hold them or their hierarchy accountable. From the standpoint of the armed forces’ senior hierarchy, the situation was quite clear after 1962. The French Army had to move on. Individuals who had been compromised in the failed 1961 coup and, more broadly, who had remained committed to the cause of French Algeria until the end, were dismissed or invited to leave the armed forces. Conscripts were discharged and sent home. No lessons were learnt from the defeat since the officers felt that the war had been won on the ground. The blame was put on French politicians or the wider geopolitical changes that made withdrawal unavoidable. This line of argument has long been very powerful: the war was lost by the politicians and not by the military; a military victory was overruled by a political defeat. Indeed, the civilian authorities had to regain control over the armed forces after a war lasting more than seven years, which itself immediately followed an eight-​year war in Indochina and, for some officers, service prior to that during the Second World War. Letting this line of argument develop quietly within the ranks of the armed forces would be the price to pay to regain confidence. In parallel, the French Army exported some of its officers to be advisers in several Latin American or African countries. How to wage ‘modern war’, ‘revolutionary warfare doctrine’, and other seminal ‘lessons’ of counter-​insurgency were elements of French expertise in tackling insurgency. The efficiency of its methods was unquestionable, as was their legality. The proof of the pudding was in the eating: the French–​Algerian War had been won on the ground by tailor-​made methods. I will not address this aspect of French COIN doctrine here. Yet the link with the issue of amnesty needs to be stressed. If no one had ever been prosecuted or convicted for torturing or making people ‘disappear’ during the War in Algeria, why not recommend these methods as useful and efficient? Impunity paved the way for these practices to spread during the war, as did amnesty after the ceasefire. Neither the line of official military thinking nor the attendant toleration of war crimes was made public. The military does not speak publicly,

To Forget and Remember    715 and the people who had tried to monitor these crimes during the war would probably have protested against any attempt at public justification. It was not until 9/​11 that former French officers who had tortured or assassinated people during the Algerian War came regularly to media attention, notably on television, to justify the use of torture with the same kinds of arguments that had been used during the war (essentially the ticking bomb argument). The ‘War against Terror’ waged by George W. Bush unleashed debates, not only in France, but globally about the expediency of committing what were, plainly, war crimes.

Amnesty for OAS Members The situation is quite different when we look at the other amnesty, the one concerning former members of the OAS. Having been convicted, then amnestied and pardoned, their crimes had become public knowledge. Thanks to their amnestied status, they were authorized to live freely in France and would fight to justify their actions—​which remained ‘crimes’ according to the courts. Lacking any realistic prospect of a reversal in the legal judgments against them, their battleground shifted to the media, the public sphere, and the contest over collective memory of the war upon which convicted former militants would try to impose their views, effectively contradicting their judicial sentences. In 1982, before the amnesty law was passed, one of the four generals who plotted against the Fifth Republic in April 1961 and then joined the OAS could address a large TV audience praising the amnesty in these words: ‘Talking about reparation means a lot to us, it means that we were not to be blamed for all the wrongs. It’s a kind of rehabilitation of our history as pied-​noirs [i.e. French repatriated from Algeria]’.33 Emotive terms such as ‘martyrs of French Algeria’ or ‘sacrifice’ that were commonly used to dismiss the legitimacy of the courts and the convictions handed down in the 1960s gained a wider audience from the 1980s onwards. Indeed, a struggle for memory and recognition was engaged in the long run. Shared hatred also bound the militants together. For instance, in 2007, the general assembly of one of their biggest lobby groups referred to the death of Pierre Vidal-​Naquet in the following terms: he ‘left to join the throat-​cutters of the FLN whom he loved so much’.34 The meeting started with a homage to ‘our fallen comrades [who] died while fighting Stalinist-​Gaullist villainy’.35 They even succeeded in placing a plaque at the foot of the Paris Memorial to the Algerian War erected in 2003. This plaque commemorated French civilians killed by the military a few days after the ceasefire in Algiers, on 26 March 1962. The civilians had responded to the OAS’s call not to let the military enter the urban zone in which the clandestine organization was hiding and from which it launched its attacks, in particular against the French military, whom they labelled ‘foreign

33  General Jouhaud on the TF1 Channel, 8 p.m., 29 September 1982. Quoted in Ruscio, Nostalgérie, 235. ‘C’est pour nous extrêmement important de parler de réparation, ce qui prouve que nous n’avions pas tous les torts. C’est une sorte de réhabilitation de notre histoire de pieds-​noirs.’ 34  ‘Pierre Vidal-​Naquet est parti rejoindre les égorgeurs du FLN qu’il a tant aimés.’ Ordinary General Assembly of the ADIMAD-​OAS, 25 February 2007. 35  ‘Camarades morts les armes à la main en luttant contre l’infamie stalino-​gaulliste.’

716   Raphaëlle Branche troops’.36 French army personnel shot into the crowd and killed dozens of people, probably around fifty. Over the preceding days, twenty-​five military personnel had been assassinated by the OAS. Thanks to the determined lobbying of the former OAS activists, these men and the civilian victims were commemorated at the same memorial site as French soldiers ‘fallen for France’. In addition, the civilians’ names (which had initially been inscribed on a plaque in the grass) were added to the memorial in 2010.37 By that stage, the victim paradigm had secured widespread public support. Starting with OAS members, this dynamic became clear in relation to the former Algerian auxiliaries of the French Army—​the harkis—​as well. In 2003, they were granted a national day of remembrance on 25 September and, subsequently, several legal dispositions secured additional rights for them and their children, culminating in the 23 February 2022 Law n°2022-​229, which formally acknowledged the harkis’ service to the French nation. As for the French soldiers, it took their associations twenty-​five years to gain official recognition of a ‘war’ (in a 1999 law). At the end of 1974, they were named ‘veterans’, but under specific and restricted criteria. Their lobby groups henceforth sought to widen those same criteria. In the 1980s and 1990s, veterans’ associations emphasized the prevalence of post-​traumatic stress among former soldiers as part of their efforts to obtain recognition of the ‘war’. When the violence of the war came to the fore, inevitably putting the French Army’s actions under scrutiny, veterans insisted on their unwillingness to go to war and the brutal character of the conflict: again, their discourse was largely one of victimization.

Silencing the Algerian Victims What about those who were only victims of the war? By that, I mean people that were not both victims and perpetrators (as can be said of many Algerians serving in the French Army or in the ALN). The amnesty silenced them. Although hundreds of thousands of Algerians lived in France after the war, their vision of the war in Algeria was totally ignored by the French public. There was no viable scope for legal redress available to them. The only valid course of action would have been by filing a libel suit. No one did so. I do know of one Algerian who managed to break the silence by filing a suit with the Pension Court. His name was Mohamed Garne. Born in 1960 as a result of a rape in a resettlement camp during the war, he filed a suit in 1998 to obtain a pension on the grounds that his mother had been raped several times and then beaten in order

36 

‘CRS, gendarmes mobiles, soldats du quadrillage, vous avez jusqu’à jeudi 22 mars, à 0heure, pour ne plus vous occuper des quartiers (suit une liste de noms). Passé ce délai, vous serez considérés comme des troupes servant un pays étranger . . . Le cessez-​le-​feu de M. de Gaulle n’est pas celui de l’OAS. Pour nous, le combat commence’, 20 March appeal, quoted by Ruscio, Nostalgérie, 181. 37 On this evolution, see Sylvie Thénault, ‘La Guerre d’indépendance algérienne. Mémoires françaises’, Historiens et géographes (2014), 75–​90: ‘Alors qu’il a été pensé dans une logique minimaliste mais apaisante d’hommage national envers ceux qui avaient péri en Algérie sous la responsabilité des autorités françaises qui les y avaient envoyés, le monument y associe désormais des manifestants contre l’autorité de l’Etat et le processus de sortie de guerre devant conduire à l’indépendance. C’est une nouvelle fois l’issue de la guerre qui est remise en cause et qui trouve ici une officialisation.’

To Forget and Remember    717 to make her miscarry.38 He found out the truth decades after his birth, having been partly raised in an orphanage, and he claimed a pension for this, too. The resulting judicial process took three years. Eventually, Mohamed Garne was granted a pension. The court psychiatrist insisted that Garne had numerous psychiatric disorders, all of them ‘attributable to the State’s responsibility’ (brain lesions caused while he was still a foetus, separation from his mother, and the later revelation of his origins). The judges reluctantly followed this expert advice, even though they reduced the level of Garne’s disability from 60 to 30%. More important for our topic are the words of the public prosecutor, who acknowledged the reality of the multiple rapes. At the outcome of this trial, a state official formally acknowledged that French soldiers committed rapes. Admittedly, no rapist was named, and no trial would ever be possible, due to the amnesty (or, in any case, because the statute of limitations had expired for this crime). Yet some sort of official admission made its way to public attention thanks to this highly publicized case. The Mohamed Garne case raised two issues regarding amnesty: firstly, was it possible to grant a pension to a victim of acts of violence that had been amnestied? Secondly, was it possible for an Algerian to file a suit? The answer to the first question was obviously ‘yes’. Although the crime had been amnestied and no culprit ever condemned, the French state could name the offence and recognize it. It was on the grounds that rapes had been committed that the child’s disabilities were compensated. The answer to the second question considerably narrows the range of permissible victims since Mohamed Garne’s case came under investigation because he was a French citizen (he had been granted French nationality earlier in the 1990s). Although his case had high stakes for the French state, its eventual impact was minimal because Garne was a French citizen, whereas most of the victims of the French security forces were Algerian. Furthermore, the court-​appointed psychiatrist was a veteran who knew the specificities of the war. He did not doubt the possibility of rape or violence, he knew that such crimes had occurred, and he was well aware what a resettlement camp was, contrary to his younger colleagues.39 I am not aware of any other legal cases. Some people might have tried to secure compensation from the courts. Yet a dramatic twist took place in February 2018 when an Algerian man won his case before the Constitutional Court.40 In 1962, as a consequence of its independence, the Algerian state had to endorse the decisions previously voted in 1955 by the ‘Algerian Assembly’ (effectively, the colonial parliament of Algeria). In 1963, despite the fact that the Algerian state refused to pay, the French law made the position very clear:41 the French state would take into consideration any claim for compensation for acts of violence

38 On rape during the war, see Raphaelle Branche, ‘Sexual Violence in the Algerian War’, in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 247–​260. 39  On another topic, I interviewed several veterans who had been taken prisoner by the ALN. The Pension Court was not aware of the ALN’s ability to capture French soldiers and could not imagine what their experience had been. They had to struggle against this ignorance which had a direct effect on the pensions they might hope to get. On the contrary, in Mohamed Garne’s case, Dr Louis Crocq was a former officer during the war and the leading expert in France on PTSD. 40  Decision n° 2017-​690 QPC dated 8 February 2018. Another decision on March 23, 2016 (n° 2015-​530 QPC) had preceded this one but was more limited. 41  Article 13 of the Law n° 63-​7 78, 31 July 1963.

718   Raphaëlle Branche committed during the war if this claim came from a French citizen. Yet in 2014, Abdelkader K., an Algerian man living in France, asked for a pension. As a child, he had been injured during a terrorist attack in Algeria. His claim led to the decision of 8 February 2018: nationality restrictions could not be invoked against claimants. The French state had to grant Abdelkader K. a pension. Following that decision, any civilian living in Algeria during the war42 is eligible to request compensation for ‘a terrorist attack or any other act of violence related to the events of the Algerian War’.43 Interestingly, the Constitutional Court stated that its decision, acting against discrimination based on nationality, was motivated by an ‘objective of national solidarity’, telling phrasing in this postcolonial decision. What are the particular consequences of this decision in light of the effects of the amnesty? Evidently, the decision opens the door to people to demand pensions as victims or eligible survivors. As in the Mohamed Garne case, in order to assess the damages, the Pension Courts will require an assessment of the acts of violence committed. At best, victims will be recognized, but no perpetrators will ever be named or sanctioned. The effects of prescription and amnesty compounded the silence about their responsibility. Yet the possibility of awarding the victims compensation means that the state (and the nation) is taking some measure of responsibility for these acts. This is a sinuous path unlikely to endanger the civil concord but one which may, at last, compel France to face up, for the first time, to its responsibilities in waging a war against civilians. The court’s decision did not erase amnesty provisions, but it charted a path to circumvent them legally.

Select Bibliography Branche, Raphaëlle, La Guerre d’Algérie: une histoire apaisée? (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005). Cohen, William B., ‘The Algerian War, the French State and Official Memory’, Historical Reflections /​Réflexions Historiques, 28/​2 (2002), 219–​239. Gacon, Stéphane, L’Amnistie. De la Commune à la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Le Seuil, 2002). Ruscio, Alain, Nostalgérie: l’interminable histoire de l’OAS (Paris: La Découverte, 2015). Teitgen-​Colly, Catherine, Gilles Manceron, and Pierre Mansat (eds.), Les disparus de la guerre d’Algérie suivi de La bataille des archives 2018–​2021 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2021).

42  The period is indeed bigger since it includes the period between the ceasefire and the proclamation of the first Algerian government (29 September 1962). The choice of these dates would need further comment. 43  ‘Provided that he or she did not harm his/​herself willingly or did not participate in a direct or indirect manner in organizing or executing terrorist attacks or any other act of violence related to the events or in stimulating these actions.’

Chapter 38

Violence a nd ( Di s ) Order in the C a ri bbe a n P ostc ol ony Guyana and Jamaica Gareth Curless Introduction By the turn of the twenty-​first century, many postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean states were in crisis.1 Nowhere was this more apparent than in Guyana and Jamaica.2 In both cases, forms of everyday insecurity, characterized by economic deprivation, crime, and high homicide rates, were accompanied by episodes of low-​intensity political conflict.3 Many observers attributed these interlinked crises to the adoption—​or imposition—​of neoliberal political and economic reforms from the 1980s onwards.4 This state of affairs was by no means unique

1  For a summary of the challenges facing Caribbean states in the early 2000s, see: Selwyn Ryan, ‘Democratic Governance in the Anglophone Caribbean: Threats to Sustainability’, in Brian Meeks and Folk Lindahal (eds.), New Caribbean Thought (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2001), 73–​103. 2 Brian Meeks, ‘Reinventing the Jamaican Political System’, Souls, 3/​ 4 (2001), 9–​21; Perry Mars, ‘Security and Development: Searching for Critical Connections’, in Neclâ Tschirgi, Michael S. Lund, and Francesco Mancini (eds.), Security and Development: Searching for Critical Connections (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner, 2009), 255–​300. 3  In Jamaica, debates concerning the causes of this violence also had a moral dimension. Middle-​ class anxieties regarding the violent effects of political malfeasance, crime, and economic stagnation found expression in arguments that framed working-​class Afro-​Jamaican cultural practices and idioms associated with so-​called slaknis culture in negative terms. On these respective points: Amanda Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process in Jamaica, 1944–​2007 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2010), 161–​ 64 and David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), chap. 8. 4  Trevor Munroe, ‘Caribbean Democracy: Decay or Renewal’, in Jorge I. Dominguez and Abraham F. Lowenthal (eds.), Constructing Democratic Governance: Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean in the 1990s (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 104–​117.

720   Gareth Curless to Guyana and Jamaica, or, indeed, the wider Anglophone Caribbean.5 Across the Global South, the democratic transitions that swept through the postcolonial world during the late 1980s and early 1990s coincided with increases in violence, criminality, and intra-​state conflict.6 Mono-​causal explanations that attributed this insecurity to the failure of democratic processes or state collapse have proved inadequate, largely because these explanatory models depend upon normative conceptions of democracy, civil society, citizenship, and the state.7 Rather, as Achille Mbembe and others have argued, violence, criminality, and conflict should be understood less as an impediment to state-​building, ‘good governance’, and economic development, and instead be viewed as the outcome of how states and political systems function in neoliberal postcolonial settings.8 In the postcolony, violence, far from being a symptom of societal or political breakdown, has been selectively deployed by a variety of actors, including state agents and their surrogates, political elites and their supporters, bandits and criminals, rebels and insurgents, and even ‘ordinary’ citizens.9 These groups, who often defy the labels assigned to them, have used violence to claim rights, maintain or challenge the socio-​political order, extract economic resources, and pursue retributive justice.10 This is not to argue that the instrumentalization of violence has facilitated the creation of political order. The pursuit of political and economic liberalization by international institutions and Western governments since the 1980s has had a highly destabilizing impact on the political ‘ecologies’ of many postcolonial states.11 Of course, some autocrats, oligarchies, and kleptocracies have adapted and survived, but the introduction of democratic elections and economic deregulation has reconfigured the ‘political marketplace’ by altering how patrons and clients access and distribute the material resources that sustain reciprocal relationships.12 Where elites once relied on siphoning off funds from foreign loans 5  A 2007 UN-​World Bank study documented the socio-​economic implications of crime-​related violence and insecurity for the Caribbean, see: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Bank, Crime, Violence, and Development: Trends, Costs, and Policy Options in the Caribbean, Report No. 37820 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2007), [online], available at: https://​openkn​owle​dge.worldb​ank. org/​han​dle/​10986/​7687, accessed 28 July 2021. 6  Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012); Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001). 7 On this point and for a wider critique of normative conceptions of ‘good governance’ in the Latin American context, see: Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein, ‘Violent Pluralism: Understanding the New Democracies of Latin America’, in Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein (eds.), Violent Democracies in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–​34, especially 1–​13. 8  Achille Mbembe, ‘At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa’, Public Culture, 12/​1 (2000), 259–​284. 9  Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction’, in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff (eds.), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 1–​54, specifically 9 and 17–​19. 10  For an example of vigilante violence in a context where neoliberal reforms have marginalized the urban poor, see: Daniel M. Goldstein, The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 11  Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, 4. 12  Ibid., 9–​10. On the concept of the ‘political marketplace’, see: Alex de Waal, The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and the Business of Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    721 and subventions dispensed by Cold War superpowers, in recent decades they have derived rents from a new combination of sources. Typically, these include income from the sale of national assets either to global corporations or state-​run enterprises linked to emerging economies, and multilateral aid provided in the name of poverty reduction, development, and environmental protection.13 That said, however, elites’ access to alternative revenues has been offset by the shrinking of the postcolonial state. The imposition of structural adjustment programmes has limited patrons’ ability to distribute public sector jobs, contracts, and other state resources to clients.14 Consequently, in many postcolonial settings, political and economic liberalization has had the effect of transforming elections into a zero-​sum game, whereby elites and their supporters deploy violence to capture the state and its diminishing resources.15 These trends have been apparent in one form or another in the Anglophone Caribbean. Since the late 1980s, Anglophone Caribbean states, regardless of whether their political institutions have a long history rooted in the ‘Westminster model’, or they emerged from the Cold War having a undergone a democratic transition, have been subject to a range of pressures associated with neoliberalism, often with violent consequences.16 In Guyana, where competitive multiparty elections returned in 1992, elites associated with the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) responded by mobilizing their respective supporters among the Afro-​and Indo-​Guyanese populations.17 The strong correlation between racial identity and political affiliation was exacerbated by the PPP’s failure to reverse historic patterns of neo-​patrimonial governance, in spite of promises to the contrary.18 The result was violent clashes that marred the 1997 and 2001 elections and deepening racial polarization which continues to affect Guyanese socio-​political life to this day.19 In Jamaica, by contrast, the introduction of structural adjustment programmes during the 1980s and 1990s had the effect of displacing election-​related violence.20 Violent clashes involving supporters of the island’s two principal parties, the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), had been a feature of Jamaica’s electoral

13 

Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, 8–​13. discussions regarding the impact of structural adjustment on patron-​client networks in the African context include: Patrick Chabal and Jean-​Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999), chaps. 7 to 9 and Frederick Cooper, Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 7. For a broader introductory overview see: Robert H. Bates, When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-​Century Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 6. 15  See, for example: Daniel Branch and Nic Cheeseman, ‘Democratization, Sequencing, and State Failure in Africa: Lessons From Kenya’, African Affairs, 108/​430 (2008), 1–​26. 16 On the Westminster model, Selwyn D. Ryan, Winner Takes All: The Westminster Experience in the Anglophone Caribbean (St Augustine: University of West Indies Press, 1999); Kate Quinn, ‘Introduction: Revisiting Westminster in the Caribbean’, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 53/​1 (2015), 1–​7. 17  David Hinds, ‘Ethnicity and the Elusive Quest for Power Sharing in Guyana’, Ethnopolitics, 9/​3–​4 (2010), 348–​352. 18 Tarron Khemraj, ‘Politics and Underdevelopment: The Case of Guyana’, in Arif Bulkan and D. Alissa Trotz (eds.), Unmasking the State: Politics, Society and Economy in Guyana, 1992–​ 2015 (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2019), 103–​114. 19  Mars, ‘Security and Development’, 259–​263. 20 Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process, chap. 5. 14 Classic

722   Gareth Curless system since the mid-​1940s, but the introduction of neoliberal reforms coincided with an expansion in transnational drug and gun trafficking.21 The greater revenues which could be derived from these illegal trades meant gang leaders in downtown Kingston, the so-​called dons, who mobilized and intimated voters on behalf of the PNP and JLP, were no longer so dependent on the reduced public resources distributed by their political patrons.22 Instead of deploying violence to contest elections, Kingston’s gangs prioritized the fight for control over rents obtained from the increasingly lucrative drug trade and other associated black-​market activities.23 The Jamaican example, where the introduction of neoliberal reforms and the expansion of the drug trafficking industry intersected, underscores the fact that the increased integration of postcolonial states into the global economy, with its deregulated flows of capital and goods, has enabled the boundary between the formal and the informal to become increasingly blurred.24 In Guyana, by the early 2000s the country had become a key node in the regional drug trade, with its export sectors, including the timber and gold industries, serving as convenient channels to smuggle narcotics.25 Similarly, in Jamaica, the patronage that gangs have enjoyed, in the form of political protection and public sector contracts, provided dons with opportunities to establish legitimate businesses to launder the proceeds from their illegal activities.26 The notorious Shower Posse gang, for example, was controlled by Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke and operated from the JLP stronghold of Tivoli Gardens.27 These political connections became the subject of intense public debate when Bruce Golding, the JLP prime minister and member of parliament for Tivoli Gardens, sought to delay Coke’s extradition to the United States (US). Golding may have relented eventually, leading to the infamous 2010 Tivoli Gardens ‘incursion’, but prior to his extradition Coke’s relationship with the JLP had enabled him to acquire significant financial interests in the construction, private security, and entertainment industries, all of which acted as fronts for the Shower Posse’s illegally generated income.28 The intertwining of the legal and the illegal is indicative of the ‘hybrid’ character of postcolonial states and their fragile institutional capacity which has been eroded by neoliberalism over the past three decades.29 One outcome of this fragility has been the 21 Colin Clarke, ‘Politics, Violence and Drugs in Kingston, Jamaica’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 25/​3 (2006), 420–​440; Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), 286–​290. 22 Amanda Sives, ‘Changing Patrons, from Politician to Drug Don: Clientelism in Downtown Kingston, Jamaica’, Latin American Perspectives, 29/​5 (2002), 66–​89. 23  It is important to emphasize election-​related conflict did disappear altogether. Since the 1990s violence has been confined to particular constituencies, where political divisions intersect with simmering gang rivalries centred on the drug trade. Clarke, ‘Politics, Violence and Drugs’, 431–​432. 24  Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, 1–​12, especially 5. 25  Mars, ‘Security and Development’, 271; Owen and Grigsby, In Transit Gangs, 10. 26  Anthony Harriott, Organized Crime and Politics in Jamaica: Breaking the Nexus (Mona: Canoe Press, 2008). 27  Amanda Sives, ‘A Calculated Assault on the Authority of the State? Crime, Politics, and Extradition in 21st Century Jamaica’, Crime, Law, and Social Change, 58 (2012), 419–​421. 28 Rupert Lewis, ‘Party Politics in Jamaica and the Extradition of Christopher “Dudus” Coke’, The Global South, 6/​1 (2012), 47; David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (London: Hurst & Company, 2013), 91. 29  On the ‘hybrid’ state in the Jamaican context, see Jaffe, ‘The Hybrid State’, 735.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    723 transformation of the postcolonial state into a form of ‘licensing-​and-​franchising authority’ which subcontracts basic functions to intermediaries.30 In downtown Kingston, for example, during the 1980s and 1990s dons went from ‘brokers and patrons’ to ‘partners-​in-​governance’ as a variety of state actors, citing the neoliberal rationales of ‘decentralization’ and ‘cost efficiency’, transferred responsibility for the provision of basic public goods to the criminal leaders of the capital’s inner-​city neighbourhoods.31 This dynamic has also been evident in the realms of policing and justice. In Guyana, the PPP responded to an upsurge in crime and insecurity during the early 2000s by establishing a death squad linked to the known drug trafficker, Roger Khan.32 It is estimated that Khan’s ‘Phantom Squad’ was responsible for between 200 and 500 extra-​judicial killings during this period. Far from restoring order, however, the PPP’s decision to lease the state’s monopoly on violence contributed to a cycle of low-​intensity conflict with the result that state repression, criminality, and inter-​racial violence became increasingly entangled.33 The increasingly globalized nature of the world economy means these forms of inter-​ connected violence have rarely been contained within national borders.34 In the context of the Americas, the proliferation of regional free trade agreements since the 1980s has contributed to an exponential growth in inter-​American trade and thereby created a greater number of trading networks and routes which can act as fronts for the illegal transportation of narcotics, capital, guns, and, increasingly, people.35 The result has been that rival Latin American and Caribbean gangs, such as the Jamaican posses which facilitated the flow of cocaine from South America to the US during the 1980s, have transferred their violent turf wars to major North American cities.36 In this way, economic deregulation has contributed to an upsurge in violence, in its physical, structural, and symbolic forms, at the ‘urban margins’ in the US, where deindustrialization and the retrenchment of public services have fuelled the drug economy and its associated social ills.37 This is not to suggest that ‘pathological’ and ‘delinquent’ violence has been imported from the south to the north. Instead, it is to argue that insecurity and conflict in the Americas are part of a hemispheric ‘continuum’ of violence that has been generated by the shared experience and effects of neoliberalism.38 Indeed, although the US’ economic and foreign policies have contributed to a domestic drug epidemic, urban 30 

Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, 16. Jaffe, ‘The Hybrid State’, 736–​737. 32 Taylor Owen and Alexandre Grigsby, In Transit Gangs and Criminal Networks in Guyana (Geneva: Small Arms Survey, 2012), 32–​33. 33  Mars, ‘Security and Development’, 261–​262. 34  Phillippe Bourgois, ‘Postface: Insecurity, the War on Drugs, and Crimes of the State: Symbolic Violence in the Americas’, in Javier Auyero, Phillipe Bourgois, and Nancy Scheper-​Hughes (eds.), Violence at the Urban Margins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 305–​322. 35  Ibid., 316. 36  On the emergence of Jamaican gangs in the US and Jamaica’s role as a transshipment centre for cocaine in the 1980s, see Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process, 133–​137. 37 Kristine Kilanski and Javier Auyero, ‘Introduction’, in Auyero, Bourgois, and Scheper-​ Hughes (eds.), Violence at the Urban Margins, 1–​18. 38 On the ‘continuum’ of violence, see Bourgois, ‘Postface’. On the Caribbean specifically, Deborah Thomas, ‘The Problem With Violence: Exceptionality and Sovereignty in the New World’, Journal of Transnational American Studies, 5/​1 (2013), 1–​20 and Deborah Thomas, ‘The Violence of Diaspora: Governmentality, Class Cultures, and Circulations’, Radical History Review, 103 (Winter, 2009), 83–​104. 31 

724   Gareth Curless segregation, and increased gang-​related violence, successive administrations have opted to pursue the ‘war on drugs’ more aggressively than their predecessors with the same failed outcomes.39 Strategies designed to restore law and order, including mass incarcerations and militarized policing, have targeted the urban poor and, in particular, racial and ethnic minorities. These policing strategies have ensured the most vulnerable remain poverty outlaws outside the body politic, whose marginalization and dependency has created an unrelenting demand for narcotics and produced a series of generations who ‘cycle’ through the US’ carceral system in a war without end.40 Similar, and equally tragic, dynamics have been observable in the Global South.41 ‘Violent political pluralism’—​linked to political and economic liberalization, communal strife, increased lawlessness, and the retrenchment of the bureaucratic postcolonial state—​has led political elites to emphasize the importance of strengthening the rule of law, even as they loot public resources, facilitate the growth of transnational crime syndicates, and sponsor private militias.42 In response to violence and insecurity of this kind, many Anglophone Caribbean governments have repeatedly pledged to strengthen legal codes, modernize criminal justice systems, and initiate security sector reforms in an attempt to make the region’s police forces more accountable.43 In practice, reforms of this kind have been slow to materialize.44 In Guyana, the 2002 Prevention of Crime Act, which granted wide-​ranging and ambiguously defined powers to the security forces, contributed to the perpetration of various abuses by the police, including arbitrary arrests and cases of torture in detention.45 Likewise, in Jamaica’s garrison communities, mass detentions, destruction of property, enforced ‘disappearances’, and extrajudicial executions have been routine features of police operations.46 Unsurprisingly, these operations have devastating consequences for civilians—​as was the case with the Tivoli Gardens incursion.47

39 

As Bourgois points out, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s attempts to eradicate the importation of marijuana to the US was a contributing factor in the upsurge in the Colombian cartels’ decision to import cocaine in mass quantities, owing to the fact that it was more difficult to detect and easier to transport. Bourgois, ‘Postface’, 313. 40  Ibid., 314–​315. 41  Loïc Wacquant, ‘Toward a Dictatorship Over the Poor?: Notes on the Penalization of Poverty in Brazil’, Punishment & Society, 5/​2 (2003), 197–​205. 42  Arias and Goldstein, ‘Violent Pluralism’, 21–​27. On the increased importance of the rule of law and its relationship to (dis)order in the postcolony, see Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, 19–​31. 43  Anthony D. Harriott and Marlyn Jones, Crime and Violence in Jamaica, IDB Series on Crime and Development in the Caribbean, June 2016 [online], available at: https://​publi​cati​ons.iadb.org/​publi​cati​ ons/​engl​ish/​docum​ent/​Crime-​and-​Viole​nce-​in-​Jama​ica-​IDB-​Ser​ies-​on-​Crime-​and-​Viole​nce-​in-​the-​ Caribb​ean.pdf, accessed 2 April 2020. 44 Amnesty International, Waiting in Vain: Jamaica: Unlawful Police Killings and Relatives’ Long Struggle for Justice (London: Amnesty International, 2016) [online], available at: https://​www.amne​sty. org/​en/​docume​nts/​amr38/​5092/​2016/​en/​, accessed 16 July 2021. 45 Amnesty International, Guyana Human Rights and Crime Control: Not Mutually Exclusive (London: Amnesty International 2003), [online], available at: https://​www.amne​sty.org/​downl​oad/​ Docume​nts/​104​000/​amr​3500​3200​3en.pdf, accessed 16 July 2021]. 46  Amnesty International, Waiting in Vain. 47  The death toll was recorded as seventy-​four, but it is estimated that as many as 200 may have been killed during the operation. Deborah Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnesses, Repair (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2019), xi.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    725 Evidently, when observers point to the devastation resulting from politicized inter-​ racial violence in Guyana or the tragic loss of life in the Tivoli Gardens incursion, they are right to attribute the Anglophone Caribbean’s various maladies to the deleterious effects of neoliberalism. A deeper history informs the current crisis in the region, however.48 It is not that violence, criminality, and conflict are symptoms of ‘incomplete’ or ‘imperfect’ democracies.49 Rather, such violence should be understood as the historical outcome of how states and political systems function in the Anglophone Caribbean.50 This is a history rooted in two inter-​linked processes: late colonial state formation and the development of constitutionalist politics during the era of decolonization, when Carribbean elites focused on the attainment of ‘flag independence’ to the exclusion of building inclusive nationalist coalitions.51 This failure contributed to episodes of political conflict centred on clientalistic networks linked to party and trade union affiliation and communal identity, as nationalist leaders mobilized their supporters to capture the state and its resources.52 Nationalist elites’ increasingly limited horizons meant successive post-​independence governments left colonial state institutions and laws largely unmodified. The result was that the functioning of the nascent postcolonial state—​particularly in the spheres of policing and internal security—​ reflected the modus operandi of its colonial predecessor, albeit in ways that spoke to vernacular understandings of power and authority.53 The ‘coloniality’ of state power, combined with elites’ failure to construct forms of national identity and citizenship to which all social groups could belong, produced violent fractures which reconfigured local social orders and geographies of belonging.54 More often than not, these localized conflicts reflected wider national divisions, as political elites and their supporters deployed violence to create politically partisan neighbourhoods in Kingston and racially homogenous rural villages in Guyana. In other instances, violence within particular communities had its own ‘logic’ which did not always correspond with broader political conflicts because it was rooted in intimate and everyday grievances fuelled by perceived 48  This chapter owes an intellectual debt to the work of Deborah Thomas. See, in particular, the introduction to Thomas’ Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 49  Ibid., 13. 50  Anglophone Caribbean states are not unique in this regard, of course. See: Achille Mbembe, ‘At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa’, Public Culture, 12/​1 (2000), 259–​284. 51 This is not to absolve external actors, namely American and British policymakers, who were active participants in the creation of political and constitutional systems that fostered authoritarianism, corruption, and political disorder. Spencer Mawby, Ordering Independence: The End of Empire in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1947–​1968 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Euclid A. Rose, Dependency and Socialism in the Modern Caribbean: Superpowere Intervention in Guyana, Jamaica and Grenada, 1970–​1985 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002). 52 Anthony Bogues, ‘Politics, Nation and PostColony: Caribbean Inflections’, Small Axe, 6/​1 (2002), 1–​30. 53  On the ‘parasitic’ character of political power in Jamaica and the appropriation of vernacular understandings of authority by elites, particularly during the 1970s, see Gray, ‘Predation Politics’, 78–​81. 54  The ‘coloniality’ of power is used to refer to the social hierarchies, state institutions, and forms of governance that post-​colonial Caribbean states inherited from their colonial predecessors. For an elaboration of the concept in relation to the Caribbean context, see: Aaron Kamugisha, ‘The Coloniality of Citizenship in the Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean’, Race and Class, 49/​2 (2007), 20–​40 and Obika Gray, ‘The Coloniality of Power and the Limits of Dissent in Jamaica’, Small Axe, 21/​3 (2017), 98–​110.

726   Gareth Curless injustices, retributive desires, and struggles over scarce resources.55 Violence, however, could serve an altogether different purpose. In some cases, violence functioned as a form of resistance, as marginalized groups, such as Jamaica’s rude bwoys and Rastafarians, cultivated political subjectivities that rejected the authority of the state.56 By exploring the multivariate character of the violence that affected Guyana and Jamaica during the period of decolonization and the decades that followed, this chapter refutes essentialized interpretations of insecurity and conflict in the Caribbean—​in both the past and present.57 Instead, the chapter argues that we should understand violence as a historically contingent response to the process of late colonial state formation, the incomplete character of constitutional decolonization, and systemic inequities linked to the unequal place of the Caribbean in the world economy.58 In contexts where the poor and the marginalized have been denied fundamental political rights and exposed to various forms of socio-​economic deprivation, ordinary citizens have utilized violence—​in collaboration with political elites, in opposition to the state, and against each other—​to make themselves visible and assert their right to belong.59

The Making of the Postcolony The 1930s were a critical turning point in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean. The strikes and labour riots that swept through the region in the latter half of the decade were the catalyst for a fundamental shift in imperial policy.60 The Moyne commission, which was established in the wake of the unrest, made a number of key policy recommendations. These included the provision of public funds for improved social services, the introduction of greater legal protections for workers, and the incorporation of the Caribbean middle classes into the administrative and legislative structures of the colonial state.61 This programme of reform intersected with wider imperial thinking regarding the ‘transfer of power’ in the Caribbean, as British policymakers conceded colonial subjects should be granted a greater 55  See, for example, Imani Duncan-​Waite and Michael Woolcock, Arrested Development: The Political Origins and Socio-​Economic Foundations of Common Violence in Jamaica (Manchester: Brooks World Poverty Institute, 2008). 56 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, chaps. 3 to 5. 57  For critiques, see: David Scott, ‘The “Culture of Violence” Fallacy’, Small Axe, 1/​2 (1997), 140–​147; Thomas, ‘The Violence of Diaspora’, 83–​104. 58 Thomas, Exceptional Violence, 12–​13; Gray, ‘The Coloniality of Power’, 98–​100. 59  For a study that documents the inter-​linked nature of different forms of violence in similar contexts in the Americas, see the chapters in Auyero, Bourgois, and Scheper-​Hughes (eds.), Violence at the Urban Margins. 60 The imperial reforms, which regional colonial governments implemented in the aftermath of the labour strikes of the 1930s, were not necessarily a reflection of the protestors’ grievances and aspirations. On this point, see Anthony Bogues, ‘History, Decolonization and the Making of Revolution’, Interventions, 12/​1 (2010), 76–​87. 61 On the strikes and the Moyne commission’s cautious recommendations regarding constitutional development, see respectively: O. Nigel Bolland, The Politics of Labour in the British Caribbean (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2001), chap. 5 and Cary Fraser, ‘The Twilight of Colonial Rule in the British West Indies: Nationalist Assertion vs Imperial Hubris in the 1930s’, Journal of Caribbean History, 30/​1 (1996), 16–​18.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    727 stake in the political system, albeit in gradual and incremental terms. Over the course of the next decade, a roadmap for constitutional advancement emerged. Firstly, the imperial authorities would extend the franchise to facilitate the election of local representatives to legislative assemblies. Secondly, once these elected officials had served a period of apprenticeship, the imperial state would devolve greater executive powers, culminating in independence—​although the assumption was that the region would become independent as part of a federation, rather than as individual states.62 Regardless of the final form independence would take, imperial policymakers hoped this extended period of colonial tutelage would inculcate a sense of civic duty in ordinary colonial subjects and their middle-​class leaders regarding the value of ‘responsible’ and ‘moderate’ politics.63 Afro-​and Indo-​creole elites, the professional middle classes who had emerged to lead the organized labour movement and the nascent nationalist parties in the wake of the protests, embraced this conception of political modernity.64 In Jamaica, Norman Manley cofounded the PNP in 1938 on the basis that he believed it was incumbent upon creole elites to direct the grievances and aspirations of the urban and rural poor.65 This paternalistic approach was underpinned by a specific form of cultural nationalism which was shared by many Jamaican creole elites. During the 1950s and 1960s, nationalist leaders from the PNP and the JLP crafted a particular vision for the Jamaican citizen by combining aspects of Afro-​ Jamaican rural life which were thought of as ‘African’ in origin and perceived to be most compatible with the colonial bourgeois values which creole elites had internalized and regarded as uniquely middle-​class attributes.66 Of course, by championing this conception of Jamaican nationalism, creole elites excluded alternative political subjectivities rooted in black racial consciousness, black internationalism, and black redemptive thought.67 In other words, as Maziki Thame argues, the Jamaican creole nationalist project constituted a form of racialized brown nationalism that belied its multiracial motto: ‘out of many, one people’.68 The exclusionary character of creole nationalism was by no means unique to Jamaica. Across the Anglophone Caribbean, the intersection of race and class contributed to the production of bifurcated nationalist movements.69 This was particularly true of territories with

62  On the rise and demise of the federal project, as well the evolution of British thinking regarding the ‘transfer of power’ in the region, see Mawby, Ordering Independence, chaps. 3 and 4. 63  David Scott, ‘Political Rationalities of the Jamaican Modern’, Small Axe, 7/​ 2 (2003), 1–​22, especially 19–​20. 64 Aaron Kamugisha, Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2019), chap. 2 and Percy C. Hintzen, ‘Reproducing Domination Identity and Legitimacy Constructs in the West Indies’, Social Identities, 3/​1 (1997), 47–​76. 65  Bogues, ‘Politics, Nation and PostColony’, 5–​12. 66  Deborah A. Thomas’ Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), especially chaps. 1 and 2 and, in particular, 60–​70. 67  Ibid., 69–​74. 68  Maziki Thame, ‘Racial Hierarchy and the Elevation of Brownness in Creole Nationalism’, Small Axe, 21/​3 (2017), 111–​123. 69  For a theoretical discussion of the various obstacles that prohibited the development of broad-​ based nationalist movements in the Caribbean, see: Anton L. Allahar, ‘Situating Ethnic Nationalism in the Caribbean’, in Anton L. Allahar (ed.), Ethnicity, Class, and Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra-​ Caribbean Dimensions (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 1–​22.

728   Gareth Curless significant South Asian populations.70 In British Guiana, during the 1920s and 1930s, Afro-​ Guianese advocates of political and social reform placed greater emphasis on the Afro content of creole culture, with a particular focus on ideas relating to racial uplift and Garveyism. This served to exclude emerging middle-​class activists among British Guiana’s South Asian population, who, in an effort to build a sense of collective identity among the Indo-​Guianese community, either looked inwards, focusing on shared ties of ethnicity, language, and religion, or outwards to the nationalist movement in India for inspiration.71 The result was that by the mid-​twentieth century the majority of Guianese civil society organizations, trade unions, and political parties had evolved to represent the sectional interests of either the Afro-​or Indo-​Guianese communities.72 The one brief exception to this was the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), which was established in 1950 and led by the Indo-​Guianese dentist, Cheddi Jagan, and the Afro-​Guianese lawyer, Forbes Burnham. Reflecting the Marxist orientation of its leadership, the PPP sought to build a multiracial nationalist movement by emphasizing the Afro-​and Indo-​Guianese populations’ shared experience of class exploitation under colonial rule. To this end, the PPP campaigned for rapid constitutional advancement, greater protections and rights for waged-​workers and peasant farmers, and an end to the extraction of excessive profits by European and North American private capital.73 The PPP’s Marxist agenda distinguished the party from its counterparts elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, where few nationalist parties questioned the state-​capitalist model of colonial development or the necessity of attracting foreign private investment. Consequently, when the PPP triumphed at the first legislative assembly elections to be held under universal suffrage in 1953, the imperial authorities, anxious that the new government threatened the ‘transfer of power’ model, suspended the constitution and reimposed direct colonial rule.74 The ousting of the PPP was a singularly dramatic episode, but it was indicative of wider Cold War concerns among imperial policymakers, who were inclined to view modes of political struggle and visions of sovereignty which did not conform with the constitutionalist framework for decolonization as security threats.75 Such anxieties meant that

70  This

is not to essentialize race, or to imply that racial divisions were immutable. Socio-​political interactions and the cross-​fertilization of cultural practices were more commonplace than the cultural pluralism model allows for. At particular moments, multiracial coalitions could come together, only to collapse as a result of internal fissures and external pressures. On the rise and fall of multiracial nationalisms in Trinidad and Guyana, see: Sara Abraham, Labour and the Multiracial Project in the Caribbean (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 71  On the emergence of racial consciousness and its relationship to political and civic activism among the Afro-​and Indo-​Guianaese communities, see: Clem Seecharan, Mother India’s Shadow over El Dorado (Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2010), especially chap. 25. 72 The racially homogenous composition of trade unions and their close ties to political parties underscores the extent to which race, labour, and citizenship were imbricated in British Guiana. Shona Jackson argues that this constituted a racially exclusive form of creole indigeneity, with both the Afro-​ and Indo-​Guianese populations’ making separate claims to the state on the basis that their labour on the plantations had built the nation. See Jackson’s Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 73 Bolland, The Politics of Labour, 602–​611. 74  Colin A. Palmer, Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana’s Struggle for Independence (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), chap. 1. 75  Deborah A. Thomas, ‘Rastafari, Communism, and Surveillance in Late Colonial Jamaica’, Small Axe, 21/​3 (2017), 63–​84.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    729 at a time when great emphasis was placed on the importance of liberalizing colonial politics, colonial rule, even as it ebbed away, continued to depend upon the illiberal powers of the colonial state.76 Significantly, the British authorities found creole elites to be willing—​ albeit troublesome—​partners in these efforts.77 The most notable example was Alexander Bustamante. As the leader of the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) and chief minister (1953–​1955), Bustamante lobbied for stricter anti-​communist legislation and deployed the security apparatus of the colonial state to harass not just left-​wing activists and trade unions, but other suspected ‘dissidents’, including followers of Rastafarianism—​a strategy that continued once Manley came to power in 1955.78 Creole leaders were not simply acting as proxies of the colonial state, however. Shared ideological concerns were important, but more frequently political elites were motivated by internal political considerations in settings where the creole nationalist project was struggling to attain hegemony. In Jamaica, Bustamante, although rabidly anti-​communist, supported the suppression of left-​ wing labour organizations and Rastafarian groups, including Leonard Howell’s Pinnacle community, because such movements threatened his support base among unionized Afro-​Jamaican workers.79 Political calculations were also important for Manley, who regarded the repression of the Marxist left, which had been expelled from the PNP in 1952, as a prerequisite for constitutional advancement.80 Similar strategic concerns were at play in British Guiana. In 1955, Forbes Burnham broke from the PPP to establish his own rival party, which became the People’s National Congress (PNC) in 1958. The PNC adopted broadly comparable policies to other creole-​led parties elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean. The PNC voiced its support for the West Indies Federation and advocated the development of a mixed economy based on export-​led industrialization and foreign investment by invitation which was also favoured by the PNP in Jamaica. In doing so, Burnham presented himself as a political moderate in contrast to the more ‘radical’ Jagan to assuage concerns among the imperial authorities and the Afro-​creole middle classes. Burnham’s departure from the PPP also had the effect of splitting the party along racial lines, as the Afro-​Guianese working-​class population rallied behind the PNC.81 In other words, one of the consequences of creole elites’ failure to build inclusive nationalist movements that could accommodate different social classes and ethno-​religious groups was to reduce decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean to the ‘machinations of party politics’.82

76  Spencer Mawby, ‘Mr Smith Goes to Vienna: Britain’s Cold War in the Caribbean’, Cold War History, 13/​4 (2013), 541–​561. 77  Ibid., 555–​559. 78  Ibid., 555–​557. 79  Deborah A. Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 101–​102. For a broader overview, see Daive A. Dunkley, ‘The Suppression of Leonard Howell in Late Colonial Jamaica, 1932–​1954’, New West Indian Guide, 87/​1–​2 (2013), 62–​93. 80  On the expulsion of the Marxist left from the PNP and its subsequent monitoring by the security forces, see: Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 168–​174. 81 On Burnham’s political manoeuvring during this period see: Percy C. Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilisation, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 2. 82  Bogues, ‘Politics, Nation and PostColony’, 6.

730   Gareth Curless Creole elites’ increasingly narrow horizons were exacerbated by the region’s electoral systems, which were premised on the winner-​takes-​all principles associated with the ‘Westminster model’.83 Far from facilitating an orderly transfer of power, elections became zero-​sum affairs, as political elites sought to seize the state by selectively mobilizing supporters drawn from specific communities and social groups. In British Guiana, where competitive multiparty elections returned in 1957, both Burnham and Jagan deployed racially coded language to warn their respective supporters among the Afro-​and Indo-​ Guianese populations about the potential implications of an opposition victory.84 The same was true in Jamaica, where Bustamante, in spite of his own creole credentials and sympathetic attitude to private capital, cautioned his followers, who were from the ranks of the Afro-​Jamaican urban poor and the landless peasantry, about the potential implications of a PNP victory.85 To consolidate this support, Bustamante cultivated a persona—​through speeches and his willingness to join the fray during violent election battles—​that positioned him as a champion of the poor, in contrast to the more genteel sensibilities associated with PNP creole elites —​although some PNP leaders could prove equally confrontational.86 Political elites paired inflammatory rhetoric with strategies designed to ‘instrumentalise disorder’.87 In Jamaica, elections became increasingly violent over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, as JLP and PNP supporters aimed to disrupt their opponents’ rallies and intimidate voters.88 Much of this violence centred on the impoverished neighbourhoods of West Kingston, where the selective use of violence to defend or assert a party’s influence in particular constituencies could determine the outcome of an election.89 The same was true of British Guiana. Following the PPP’s victory in 1957, the early 1960s, including the 1961 and 1964 elections, witnessed increased levels of inter-​racial violence. During this period, sporadic inter-​racial clashes, which occurred in both Georgetown and the rural countryside, were accompanied by episodes of violence directed by the PNC and the PPP for political purposes.90 Infamously, this included a 1962 riot against a PPP budget that left much of Georgetown in ruins; a violent twelve-​week general strike in 1963 which was financed by the CIA and led by the PNC-​affiliated British Guiana Trades Union Congress; and a PPP-​inspired strike that paralyzed the sugar industry in a failed attempt to delay the 1964 elections.91 83 In British Guiana, for example, at the 1961 legislative assembly elections, the PPP secured a commanding nine-​seat majority. The party’s share of the popular vote, however, was 46.7%, which was only fractionally higher than the PNC’s share of 44.7%—​a difference of just 3,000 votes. 84 Leo Despres, Cultural Pluralism and Nationalist Politics in British Guiana (Chicago: Rand MacNally, 1968), 222–​262. 85 On Bustamante’s populism, see: Gillian McGillivray and Thomas D. Roger, ‘Populism in the Circum-​Caribbean, 1920s–​1950s’, in John Abromeit et al. (eds.), Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 166–​171. 86 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, chap. 2. 87 Patrick Chabal and Jean-​ Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (London: James Currey, 1999). 88 Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process, chap. 1. 89  On the ebb and flow of the political parties’ fortunes in West Kingston and the connection between violence and electoral success, see: Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), chap. 2. 90  The National Archives, London (TNA), CO 1031/​ 3714, Intelligence Report, Monthly Summary, August 1961. 91 Palmer, Cheddi Jagan, chap. 6.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    731 Against this backdrop of increased political tension and violence, the state was no longer regarded as an instrument for social and economic transformation, as creole elites had initially envisaged in the wake of the labour rebellions. Instead, the state was understood as a resource to be captured in order to distribute patronage to supporters and consolidate party control. In British Guiana, the PPP’s 1961-​election manifesto focused on issues that were of specific concern to the Indo-​Guianese population, including: land reallocation for rice cultivation; working conditions and trade union rights in the plantation sector; and opportunities for small business owners—​another sector of the economy dominated by the Indo-​Guianese.92 In Jamaica, political elites from both the JLP and PNP developed patronage networks that linked party and trade union membership with access to jobs and other material resources, namely housing.93 It was in this way that political violence and corruption became institutionalized, as JLP and PNP officials were tasked with coordinating the mobilization of party and trade union members, paid picketers, and, increasingly, members of Kingston’s criminal underworld, all of whom expected to be rewarded for their willingness to engage in ever-​more violent street battles.94

Violence and (Dis)order The creole nationalist project may have marginalized more radical and potentially transformative visions for independence, but the violence it unleashed did produce significant change at the local level. Take West and Central Kingston, where the violence of the 1940s and beyond altered the political and social topography of the capital’s poorest neighbourhoods. During the early decades of the twentieth century, these were fluid and mobile spaces, where people came and went according to the ebb and flow of life.95 By the 1940s, however, violent confrontations involving supporters of the two parties had the effect of reordering the geography of belonging in West Kingston, as streets, yards, and even whole neighbourhoods came to identify with either the PNP or the JLP.96 The reorganization of space was formalized following the attainment of independence. In 1966, the JLP government razed the slum ‘Back O Wall’ to create Tivoli Gardens. Citing the need for urban renewal and the eradication of the criminal elements who allegedly resided in Back O Wall, the JLP demolished the area and allocated housing to its supporters, thereby evicting the largely pro-​PNP residents from the constituency.97 92 

Despres, ‘The Implications of Nationalist Politics’, 1,070–​1,071.

93 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 26–​30. 94 

Ibid., 41–​52 and 72–​90; Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process, chaps. 2 and 3. Colin Clarke, Decolonizing the Colonial City: Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), chap. 1. 96 Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 10, citing an interview with Richard Hart in Trevor Munroe, Jamaican Politics: A Marxist Perspective in Transition (Kingston: Heinemann, 1990), 120. L. Alan Eyre, ‘Political Violence and Urban Geography in Kingston, Jamaica’, 74/​1, Geographical Review (1984), 24–​37; L. Alan Eyre, ‘The Effects of Political Terrorism on the Residential Location of the Poor in the Kingston Urban Region, Jamaica, West Indies’, Urban Geography, 7/​3 (1986), 227–​242. 97  On the demolition of Back O’ Wall and the creation of Tivoli Gardens, see: Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 72–​74. 95 

732   Gareth Curless Once the PNP returned to power in 1972, Michael Manley’s government responded by creating its own ‘garrison’, Arnett Gardens—​or ‘the Jungle’, as it was more commonly known.98 The development of ‘party territoriality’ had significant implications for the violence that affected Kingston during the 1960s and 1970s. JLP-​PNP violence was often centred on areas where party sovereignty was contested, such as constituency boundaries or areas where particular streets and yards lay outside the control of a nearby garrison.99 The result was intimidation and violence, as rival gangs attempted to evict opponents from particular neighbourhoods—​as was apparent in the neighbouring constituencies of South and South West St Andrew, both of which experienced significant levels of violence prior to the 1976 election.100 Simply put, by transforming Kingston into a patchwork of rival JLP and PNP constituencies, political elites facilitated the de facto partition of the capital.101 The violent clashes that affected British Guiana during the early 1960s also contributed to the reorganization of space. By 1964, inter-​racial violence, which was largely restricted to Georgetown in 1962–​1963, had spread to rural villages. These villages had first emerged as part of the free village movement in the wake of emancipation, and further settlements developed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the contracts of indentured South Asian labourers expired.102 The result was that coastal villages tended to be composed of either Afro-​or Indo-​Guianese residents, but this was not universally true and there was often significant socio-​economic interaction involving members of neighbouring settlements that crossed racial boundaries.103 The violence that swept along the coast in 1964 changed all of this. Reports indicate violence and fear of retributive attacks drove many from their homes to seek shelter in ‘African’ or ‘Indian’ villages, as the Afro-​and Indo-​Guianese communities became increasingly polarized.104 In fact, as Alissa Trotz’s oral history research has revealed, for those who experienced the events of 1961–​1964, this period constitutes a decisive break in Afro-​Indo-​Guyanese relations. Trotz’s informants divide their accounts into ‘before’ and ‘after’ the violence, with many expressing shock and disbelief that informal acquaintances, neighbours, and even friends could turn on each other with devastating consequences.105 98 On the complexity of ‘garrison community’ as a concept, see: Beverley Mullings, ‘Garrison Communities’, in The Antipode Collective (eds.), Keywords in Radical Geography: Antipode at 50 (Oxford: Wiley, 2019), 142–​145. 99  L. Alan Eyre, ‘The Ghettoization of an Island Paradise’, Journal of Geography, 82/​5 (1983), 236. 100 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 209–​214. 101 Donald Robotham, ‘How Kingston was Wounded’, in Jane Schneider and Ida Susser (eds.), Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003), 111–​116, 117. 102 Lesley M. Potter, ‘Indian and African-​ Guyanese Village Settlement Patterns and Inter-​Group Relationships, 1871–​1921’, History Gazzette, 48 (1992), 1–​15. 103  Raymond T. Smith, ‘“Living in the Gun Mouth”: Race, Class, and Political Violence in Guyana’, New West Indian Guide, 69/​3–​4 (1995), 223–​252. 104  It was reported, for example, that the PNC deployed ‘defence squads’ to protect Afro-​Guianese residents in Georgetown and ‘African’ villages. See: TNA, 1031/​4758, Intelligence Report for March to June 1964. ‘Indo-​Guianese Fleeing from Buxton Village’, The Daily Chronicle, 1 June 1964, 5; ‘22 Injured in Racial Clashes in West Demerara’, The Daily Chronicle, 20 April 1964, 1. 105  Alissa Trotz, ‘1964: The Rupture of Neighborliness and its Legacy for Indian/​African Relations’, in Alissa Trotz (ed.), The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 58–​76, especially 65–​68.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    733 The most notorious incident of this period occurred at the interior mining town of Wismar on 25 May 1964. In retaliation for the murder of an Afro-​Guianese couple in the village of Buxton, the Afro-​Guianese residents of Wismar attacked their Indo-​Guianese neighbours.106 Wismar’s Afro-​Guianese inhabitants drove at least 1,600 Indo-​Guianese from their homes in an episode that involved instances of arson, looting, extortion, sexual assault, and murder.107 This initial attack was followed by further violence in July, when the remaining Indo-​Guianese residents of the town were attacked in response to the sinking of the Son Chapman.108 The catalyst for the violence at Wismar may have been deepening national racial divisions, but the reprisal attacks also reflected everyday concerns and highly personalized motives.109 Testimony collected by the subsequent commission of inquiry into the violence reveals that Wismar’s Indo-​Guianese community were property and business owners, who catered for the needs for the town’s Afro-​Guianese residents, many of whom worked in the nearby bauxite industry, where employment was relatively well-​remunerated but insecure.110 The highly selective nature of the violence suggests that amidst the insecurity produced by British Guiana’s turbulent transition to independence, Wismar’s Afro-​ Guianese residents targeted the owners and premises of the town’s pawnbrokers, rum shops, and commercial stores as symbols of Indo-​Guianese prosperity—​and from the attackers’ perspective—​exploitation. National and local divisions did not always correspond so neatly. Local factional politics could also contribute to violent episodes where race was not a factor. Marilyn Silverman has recorded that in the village of Rajaghar attackers threw a bomb at a prominent Indo-​Guianese resident, who, in 1964, ran as PNC candidate for election to the Rice Producers Association in opposition to three PPP affiliated candidates. According to Silverman, this incident was connected to long-​standing conflicts among prominent village residents over their ability to control and distribute resources, particularly land, and national political considerations only became a factor once local rivals involved the PNC or the PPP in an attempt to settle disputes in their favour.111 These examples serve as an important reminder that violent acts are imbedded in highly localized social relations and power dynamics.112 Violence, far from signalling societal collapse, is often crucial to the creation and maintenance of particular forms of social 106 

‘Buxton Farmer and Wife Murdered’, The Daily Chronicle, 23 May 1964, 1. TNA, CO 1031/​4353, Sir Richard Luyt, Governor-​General, to Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 28 May 1964; ‘1,600 Flee “Terror” Area’, Guiana Graphic, 27 May 1964, 1. 108 Alissa D. Trotz, ‘Lest We Forget: Terror and the Politics of Commemoration in Guyana’, in Suvendrini Perera and Sherene H. Razack (eds.), At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 289–​308. 109 Reports surrounding the Wismar massacre are conflicting. Some attributed the violence to residents; others blamed ‘outsiders’. There are also reports of the local PNC representative, Robert Jordan, who the governor-​general described as a ‘notorious negro racialist’, inciting the town’s Afro-​ Guianese residents. On these points, see respectively: ‘Strangers did all the Damage’, The Daily Chronicle, 29 May 1964 and TNA, CO 1031/​4342, Sir Richard Luyt, Governor-​General, to Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 13 June 1964. 110  See, for example, testimony provided by Walter Naraine to the Wismar Commission of Inquiry, Day 5 [online], available at: http://​www.guy​ana.org/​featu​res/​Day_​5.pdf, accessed 15 February 2018. 111 Marilyn Silverman, Rich People and Rice: Factional Politics in Rural Guyana (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 159. 112 David Anderson and Øystein Rolandsen, ‘Violence as Politics in Eastern Africa, 1940–​ 1990: Legacy, Agency, Contingency’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 8/​4 (2014), 544. 107 

734   Gareth Curless belonging and political order.113 Take, for example, the 1964 sugar strike, which the PPP-​ affiliated Guyana Agricultural Workers’ Union (GAWU) instigated. The strike included instances of inter-​racial conflict, as Indo-​Guianese members of the GAWU targeted Afro-​ Guianese strike-​breakers, but the protest also involved violent episodes that were not racial in character.114 Over the course of the strike, GAWU activists routinely burnt sugar cane fields.115 Denounced by the Sugar Producers Association as an act of wanton destruction by ‘terrorists’, the burning of cane, a common form of protest throughout the Caribbean, was a highly symbolic act.116 It impeded production, thereby amplifying the power of strike action, and it subverted the highly stratified nature of production relations in the plantation sector.117 Other acts of coordinated violence included the targeting of officials from the GAWU’s rival, the ManPower Citizens’ Association (MPCA), and the burning of homes and rice plots belonging to non-​striking workers, many of whom were Indo-​Guianese.118 Much of this violence was non-​lethal as GAWU activists sought to coerce and intimidate their fellow Indo-​Guianese workers into supporting the strike.119 In retaliation, the MPCA established self-​ defence groups, known as ‘Vigilance Committees’. The anti-​PPP press, including the MPCA’s newspaper, The Labour Advocate, presented the self-​defence groups as civic-​minded citizens concerned with community protection.120 US State Department records reveal, however, that Vigilance Committees were engaged in a campaign of counter-​terror, which included arson and property destruction, and the ‘taxing’ of local communities.121 The blurred boundary between justice and vigilantism and taxation and predation was even more striking in Kingston’s garrison communities.122 By the 1960s, Jamaica was emerging as a key hub in the international drug trade, first as a producer and exporter of marijuana, and later in the 1980s as a transshipment centre for cocaine destined for North America and Europe.123 The emerging gang leaders—​ who were in the process of consolidating their control over the garrisons—​were ideally

113 Stathis

N. Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro, and Tarek Masoud (eds.), Order, Conflict, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 114  TNA, CO 1031/​4758, Intelligence Report for the Month of February 1964. 115  Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick (MRC), MSS 292B/​ 972.8/​6, Report on British Guiana, 21–​26 March 1964. 116  ‘More Cane Burnt of Sugar Estates’, The Daily Chronicle, 24 February 1964, 1. 117  For a study that documents the shifting meaning and purpose of cane burning in the context of Cuba, see: Gillian McGillivray, Sugar, Communities, Class and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–​1959 (Durham, NC, 2009), especially the introduction. 118  ‘More Intimidation in Sugar Strike’, The Daily Chronicle, 22 February 1964; ‘Four Gunmen Stop Estate Workers’, The Daily Chronicle, 3 March 1964. 119  International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam, (IISH), ICFTU Collection, Box 5266, Report on British Guiana by Gene Meakins of the AFL-​CIO. 120  ‘La Penitence Army is Back’, The Daily Chronicle, 16 August 1964, 1. 121 State Department records provide extensive coverage of the violence. For a typical example, see: National Archives College Park, (NACP), Record Group 59, 1949-​POL 23 BR GU, American Consulate Georgetown to Department of State, 5 October 1964. 122  This point on the blurred boundaries in the postcolony is derived from Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, 5. 123 Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process, 61.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    735 positioned to take advantage of the burgeoning drug trade.124 In exchange for consolidating party influence within particular garrison communities, JLP and PNP patrons rewarded gangs with privileged access to public resources—​typically in the form of jobs and houses—​ and political protection in order to profit from the drug trade and other black-​market activities. The result was that gangs became embroiled in increasingly violent gun battles, as rivals fought for control of West Kingston.125 Out of these struggles emerged powerful figures, such as the PNP’s Aston ‘Buckie’ Thompson and Claude Massop, who served as a JLP enforcer and the so-​called top ranking for Tivoli Gardens in his capacity as the leader of the Phoenix City gang.126 Within Kingston’s impoverished neighbourhoods, the ability of party strongmen to distribute public resources, their role as community defenders, and their control of the drug trade and other illicit revenues meant that over time they were able to establish alternative geographies of sovereignty and jurisdiction and parallel modes of production and redistribution.127 To consolidate this authority, gang leaders styled themselves as champions of the urban poor by adopting the values associated with rude bwoy culture. This was a counter-​hegemonic vision of identity, which drew on an eclectic combination of transnational black thought and practice, including Rastafarianism and Black Power, the iconography of Third World solidarity and revolution, and the emerging dancehall culture associated with ska and later reggae.128 Rude bwoys’ embracement of these racial, revolutionary, and cultural ideals was accompanied by a vernacular understanding of masculinity, power, and authority. This vision of masculinity was premised on the valorization of sexual prowess, sporting ability, a mastery of weaponry, in particular the gun, conspicuous displays of consumption, and a capacity for self-​advancement through violent crime and other forms of ‘social outlawry’.129 These attributes found expression in rude bwoys’ style of dress, speech, and bodily comportment—​all of which defied the social conventions associated with the bourgeois creole nationalist project and its moral vision for the Jamaican citizen.130 Similar dynamics were observable in Guyana, where the largely Afro-​Guyanese population of South Georgetown—​in particular residents of neighbourhoods such as Albouystown and the infamous Tiger Bay—​had their own distinct forms of social outlawry which were a perceived threat to creole middle class sensibilities.131 It was common, for instance, for young Afro-​Guyanese men, aged between 15 and 30, to ‘lime’ on street corners, in close proximity to rum shops. In this way, streets became sites of sociability, where young men could find

124 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 80; Barry Chevannes, ‘The Rastafari and the Urban Youth’, in Carl Stone and Aggrey Brown (eds.), Perspectives on Jamaica in the Seventies (Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House, 1981), 392–​397. 125 Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democractic Process, chap. 4. 126 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 166–​178. 127  Ibid., chaps. 5 and 6. On overlapping sovereignties and modes of production in the postcolony see Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, 5 and 34–​35. 128 Obika Gray, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960–​ 1972 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 73–​76. 129 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 167–​169. 130 Gray, Radicalism and Social Change, 73 and Thomas, Modern Blackness, 70–​74. 131  David J. Dodd and Michael Parris, ‘Crime and Culture in Georgetown, Guyana’, Revista Inter-​ Amereicana, 6/​2 (1976), 174–​192.

736   Gareth Curless relative freedom and autonomy from the drudgery of home and waged-​work.132 As was the case in Jamaica, an emphasis on highly stylized forms of speech and physical behaviour were central to an individual’s reputation as a ‘sweet man’ or ‘tief man’. Particular ways of dressing, namely skin-​tight sports shirts and washed-​out denims, were also used by residents of South Georgetown to signify their status as a so-​called operator.133 Other factors that were important to identity construction were films, such as Kung Fu movies, and roots and reggae music, in both its Jamaican and Guyanese forms.134 This music, which addressed themes such as alcoholism, police violence, and political gangsterism, spoke to the sense of injustice that must have been felt by South Georgetown’s residents, many of whom regarded petty crime, such as vice and robbery, as legitimate forms of work that offered avenues for social advancement that were otherwise unavailable to them.135 In other words, what emerged in downtown Kingston and South Georgetown over the course of the 1960s and 1970s was ‘a simulacra of social order’; or, put differently, a particular moral ordering of the world that was acceded to by a significant proportion of the resident population.136 That said, regardless of the internal moral orders that existed in such neighbourhoods, it is problematic to presume that all residents of Kingston or Georgetown were accepting of the status quo.137 In Jamaica, many different groups spoke out against the violence that plagued the island during the 1960s and 1970s. Campaigns to end the violence included ordinary citizens, civic leaders, radical political activists operating outside of the two-​party system, such as the short-​lived Abeng Group, and even gang leaders, including Thompson and Massop.138 The same was true of Guyana, where various opposition groups campaigned against the venality of Burnham and his PNC regime, which had taken power shortly before independence in 1966.139 In both Guyana and Jamaica, this activism was driven by a recognition that the spoils of independence had been distributed unevenly. After all, in spite of politicians’ sloganeering, such as Michael Manley’s ‘better mus’ come’ and Burnham’s promise ‘to make the small man, a real man’, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of rising unemployment and deteriorating living conditions.140 This situation was exacerbated by the

132 

David J. Dodd and Michael Parris, Socio-​Cultural Aspects of Crime and Delinquency in Georgetown, Guyana (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 1976), 27. 133  David J. Dodd, ‘A Day in Bablyon: Street Life in Guyana’, Caribbean Review, 10/​4 (1981), 25–​26. 134  On the influence of films and music, see: Michael Parris, Violent Crimes and Ethnic Diversity in Guyana (St Augustine, Trinidad: University of West Indies, 1978), 8–​9 and Vibert C. Cambridge, Musical Life in Guyana: History and Politics of Controlling Creativity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015), 217–​220. 135  Dodd and Parris, Socio-​Cultural Aspects of Crime and Delinquency, 30. 136  Comaroff and Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder’, 5. 137  Faye V. Harrison research reveals that the survival strategies pursued by the garrison communities were as varied as the population itself and not every resident was involved in crime-​related activities. Harrison, ‘The Politics of Social Outlawry in Urban Jamaica’, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 17/​2–​3 (1988), 259–​277. 138 Gray, Radicalism and Social Change, chaps. 8 to 10. 139  Michael O. West, ‘Seeking Darkly: Guyana, Black Power and Walter Rodney’s Expulsion from Jamaica’, Small Axe, 12/​1 (2008), 93–​104 and Kate Quinn, ‘“Sitting on a Volcano”: Black Power in Burnham’s Guyana’, in Kate Quinn (ed.), Black Power in the Caribbean (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2014), 136–​158. 140  Clive Y. Thomas, ‘State Capitalism in Guyana: An Assessment of Burnham’s Co-​Operative Socialist Republic’, 27–​48 and Fitzroy Ambursley, ‘Jamaica: From Michael Manley to Edward Seaga’, 72–​104, both

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    737 imposition of structural adjustment reforms on Guyana and Jamaica in the late 1970s. The result was that by the turn of the 1980s, the majority of Guyana’s and Jamaica’s poorest citizens were forced to endure the worst effects of precarious employment, insecure tenure, and environmental degradation in urban neighbourhoods and rural villages that were without access to adequate sanitation and basic social services.141 The ‘slow violence’ that had been inflicted on the most vulnerable underscores the point that violence, however it is typologized, does not occur in isolation.142 Rather, violence exists as part of ‘a continuum’.143 The structural violence that was imbedded in Guyana’s and Jamaica’s inequitable political economy contributed to not only inter-​connected forms of state, and political violence, but also increased rates of ‘everyday’ inter-​personal violence linked to the effects of deprivation and precarity. In Jamaica, as political and economic insecurity deepened, there was a concomitant upsurge in violent crimes—​a trend that started in the 1960s and worsened over the course of subsequent decades.144 Much of this violence occurred in the overcrowded slums of West Kingston, where there was little or no distinction between the ‘private’ sphere of the home or yard and the ‘public’ arena of the street, with the result that individual circumstances, intimate household affairs, neighbourly disputes, and community infractions were all common knowledge.145 In a context where individuals earned self-​respect in public using highly stylized displays of language, posture, and physical aggression, perceived reputational threats could provoke a violent response.146 Likewise, gangs and petty theft had been a feature of life in Georgetown since at least the late nineteenth century, but the insecurity wrought by the violence of the early 1960s appears to have torn at the fabric of social life in both urban and rural communities. During this period and subsequently, cases of criminal and inter-​personal violence, including sexual assaults and street robberies referred to as ‘choke and rob’, increased.147 The insecurity reached its nadir in the early 1980s, when there was a rise in violent attacks perpetrated by Afro-​Guyanese gangs,

in Fitzroy Ambursley and Robin Cohen (eds.), Crisis in the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983). 141 Institute

for Commonwealth Studies Special Collections, Senate House, London (ICOMM), PP.GY.WPA.2, WPA, The Crisis and the Working People (1977) and ICOMM, JL689 GUY fol, GHRA, Annual Report, July 1981-​August 1982, 7–​10. 142 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011). 143  Philippe Bourgois, ‘Recognising Invisible Violence: A Thirty Year Ethnographic Retrospective’, in Barbara Rylko-​Bauer, Linda Whiteford, and Paul Farmer (eds.), Global Health in Times of Violence (Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 17–​40. 144  Dudley Allen, ‘Urban Crime and Violence in Jamaica’, in Rosemary Brana-​Shut and Gary Brana-​ Shute (eds.), Crime and Punishment in the Caribbean (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1980), 29–​ 51 and Lacey, Violence and Politics, chap. 4. 145  Diane Austin-​Broos, Urban Life in Kingston, Jamaica: The Culture and Class Ideology of Two Neighbourhoods (New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1984), 44. 146 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 104–​105. 147  Newspaper reports from the 1960s reference the emergence of so-​called ‘choke and rob’ crimes, particularly in Georgetown, where the boundaries between political, criminal, and racial violence were blurred. ‘Beaten to Death’, Guiana Graphic, 24 May 1964, 1; ‘No Flogging’, Thunder, 30 June 1962, 3. For further information on this phenomenon, see: Parris, Violent Crimes, 9 and Michael Parris, ‘Urban Crime and Violence in Guyana’, in Brana-​Shut and Brana-​Shute (eds.), Crime and Punishment in the Caribbean 83–​104.

738   Gareth Curless known as ‘kick down the door gangs’, who terrorized Indo-​Guyanese communities with impunity.148 This was violence that was inflicted on ‘known bodies’ in ‘small spaces’—​the home, the street, and the neighbourhood—​to protect reputations, create and maintain hierarchies, and mark who belonged and who did not.149

The Violent Afterlives of Decolonization During the period of decolonization, election-​related violence and the threat of political subversion created internal security challenges that the late colonial state was ill-​equipped to deal with. The ‘prose of counter-​insurgency’ permeated colonial intelligence assessments and police reports.150 Special branch officers frequently commented on the revolutionary intent of dissident groups and their capacity for armed insurrection.151 Officials also continued to update and circulate policy guidance regarding internal security schemes that determined when and how the colonial state should deploy military force in aid of the civil power. Such guidance—​although it emphasized the importance of escalating the use of force only when necessary—​defined forms of collective protest in terms that meant the boundary between civil unrest and insurrection was blurred.152 The result was that when Anglophone Caribbean colonial states conducted joint military–​police operations, they reflected the violent modalities that characterized late colonial counter-​insurgency campaigns elsewhere in the Empire, albeit on a smaller scale. Such anxieties were particularly apparent in late 1950s Jamaica, where colonial officials and even some nationalist elites suspected that elements of the island’s Rastafarian community harboured insurrectionary ambitions.153 These concerns appeared to be confirmed by the so-​called Henry Rebellion, when an alleged plot to instigate a revolt in Jamaica was discovered following a raid on the Africa Reform Church, which was led by Claudius Henry.154 The ‘Henry Rebellion’ did not constitute a meaningful military threat, but for 148 ‘More

Robberies’, Catholic Standard, 26 February 1984; ‘Bandits Continue to Spread Terror’, Catholic Standard, 4 September 1983. 149  Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, Freedom (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2010), 92. 150  Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-​Insurgency’, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (eds.), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 45–​88. 151  In British Guiana, Special Branch monitored the activities of the PYO, including the organization’s connections with Cuba and the alleged transshipment of Cuban weapons to the colony via British Guiana. One report, for example, noted the presence of nine Cubans from the Youth League of Cuba at a PYO conference. TNA CO 1031/​4757, Intelligence Report for the Month of November 1963. 152  Jamaica’s 1961 internal security scheme, for example, defined an unlawful assemblies and riots as incidents involving three or more people. Public Security a Guide for Police Officers in Dealing with Civil Disturbances (Kingston: Government Printer, 1961), 2–​3. 153 Deborah Thomas, ‘Rastafari, Communism, and Surveillance in Late Colonial Jamaica’, Small Axe, 21/​3 (2017), 63–​84. On the hostility of creole nationalists more broadly, see: Rex Nettleford, Mirror Mirror: Identity, Race, and Protest in Jamaica (Kingston: Collins and Sangster, 1970), 58–​65. 154  Space does permit a more detailed discussion of the Henry Rebellion, see: Frank Jan Van Dijk, ‘Sociological Means: Colonial Reactions to the Radicalization of Rastafari in Jamaica, 1956–​1959’, New West Indian Guide, 69/​1–​2 (1995), 67–​101, especially, 84–​94; Bogues, ‘Politics, Nation, Colony’, 22–​26; A. Barrington Chevannes, ‘The Repairer of the Breach: Reverend Claudius Henry and Jamaican Society’,

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    739 creole elites it confirmed that Rastafarians represented a latent source of insurrection.155 The result was that Rastafarians were subject to greater harassment and surveillance by the security forces. This persecution culminated in the Coral Gardens ‘incident’ of 1963, when a group of Rastafarians were involved in a firefight at a petrol station in Montego Bay. Fearing the episode was a prelude to a Rastafarian uprising, the JLP government dispatched the security forces to Montego Bay to restore ‘order’. In the weeks that followed, the police arrested hundreds of Rastafarians, many of whom were beaten, and some even suffered the indignity of having their dreadlocks shaved off.156 The shaving of Rastafarians’ dreadlocks by the security forces suggests that for all the attempts to codify repression, the authority of the state—​in both its colonial and postcolonial forms—​continued to rely upon demonstrative violence.157 In May 1964, British Guiana’s governor-​general, Sir Richard Luyt, responded to the deepening crisis by declaring a state of emergency and deploying British troops to the colony’s coastal region in an effort to end the inter-​racial violence.158 This operation included the establishment of a temporary interrogation centre. The activities of the centre went largely unmonitored until Luyt received reports that the police had tortured a PNC operative, Emmanuel Batson.159 News of Batson’s mistreatment prompted Luyt to investigate the methods being utilized by the Military Intelligence Officers (MIO) attached to the interrogation centre. The commanding officer, Major Nicholson, denied that suspects were mistreated, but he and other MIOs defended the use of stress positions and sleep deprivation by arguing that military guidelines permitted such practices.160 Other reports cited the importance of systematic intelligence-​gathering under the auspices of the military to the acquisition of information and the restoration of order in British Guiana. This strategy included the use of army patrols and so-​called Q-​ Squads, whose job it was to interrogate and detain suspects in the field, confiscate weapons, and implement reward schemes.161 The available evidence, however, suggests that in emphasizing the technical and bureaucratic aspects of interrogation and intelligence acquisition, military reportage obscured the centrality of physical violence to the process.162 There are numerous reports of British troops and local security forces mistreating suspects,

in Frances Henry (ed.), Ethnicity in the Americas (The Hague: Mouten Publishers, 1976), 263–​229; and Brian Meeks, ‘Obscure Revolt, Profound Effects: The Henry Rebellion, Counter-​Hegemony and Jamaican Society’, Small Axe, 2 (1997), 45–​48. 155 Thomas, Modern Blackness, 72.

156 For detailed discussion of the events surrounding the Coral Gardens ‘incident’, see: Thomas, Exceptional Violence, chap. 5. 157  The Guyana Human Rights Association recorded similar degrading treatment of Rastafarians in the early 1980s in the town of Linden (formerly Wismar-​Mackenzie). Senate House, ICOMM JL689 GUY fol, The Guyana Human Rights Report: July 1981 to August 1982, 24. 158  TNA CO 1035/​195, The Emergency Situation in British Guiana, Report by Colonel A. W. Cooper on a Visit to British Guiana 29 June to 1 July 1964. 159  On the Batson affair, see: Palmer, Cheddi Jagan, chap. 8. 160  TNA CO 1031/​4747, Note of a Meeting Held in the Colonial Office on 19 August 1964 and Sir Richard Luyt, Governor General, to Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for the Colonies, 15 August 1964. 161  TNA, CO 1035/​195, Tape Recorded Report on Situation in British Guiana, 11 August 1964. 162  Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 110–​115, especially 112.

740   Gareth Curless including the use of beatings and waterboarding.163 Such practices continued into the postcolonial period, with the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) documenting numerous cases of violent and degrading treatment of detainees by the state security services.164 In other words, as Allen Feldman argued, interrogation, or torture, was not simply a disciplinary response by the state to extract information: torture was an act of state terror, designed to project the state’s authority onto the body of the political subversive.165 Prior to independence, anti-​colonial activists and nationalist leaders had condemned the use of preventative detention and the mistreatment of political prisoners. However, as the evidence from the GHRA suggests, rather than dismantle the coercive legal apparatus of the colonial state, many postcolonial Anglophone Caribbean governments strengthened colonial-​era legal codes relating to internal security.166 In Guyana, Forbes Burnham and the PNC passed the 1966 National Security Act—​which enabled the state to detain without trial for an indefinite period.167 The PNC further strengthened the Act in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Guyana became a de facto one party state and the police were empowered to restrict freedom of movement, search without a warrant, confiscate property, and censor the press.168 In Jamaica, the centralization of power was less striking in comparison with Guyana under the PNC. Nonetheless, at a time when political elites were incorporating the language and symbolism of the urban poor into election campaigns and mobilizing criminal gangs for the purposes of political warfare, both the JLP and the PNP invoked discourses of law and order to justify the introduction of tougher legal measures which disproportionately affected Kingston’s Afro-​Jamaican working-​class population.169 In the mid-​1960s, the JLP implemented harsher sentences for the use and distribution of marijuana and strengthened the flogging regulation law to permit the use of the ‘cat-​o-​nine-​tails’.170 One effect of this legislation, which was added to in the 1970s by the PNP in the form of the Suppression of Crimes Act (1974), was to consolidate the perceived relationship between criminality, insurrection, and ‘blackness’ in the minds of Jamaica’s creole elites, thereby normalizing forms of legally codified state violence.171 Consequently, as the security situation deteriorated over the course of the late 1960s and 1970s, the state prosecuted, incarcerated, and, in the case of the 163  For typical examples, see TNA, CO 1031/​4720, Statement by Sarjoo Samaroo, 10 July 1964 and ‘PPP Men Kicked, Trampled at Station’, The Mirror, 5 April 1964, 1. 164 Senate House, ICOMM JL689 GUY fol, Guyana Human Rights Association, Guyana Human Rights Report 1983, 14–​16. 165 Feldman, Formations of Violence, 110–​115, especially 114–​115. 166  ‘Sir Alexander: Detention Bill a Crime Against Citizens’ Freedom’, The Daily Gleaner, 25 July 1960, 4 and ‘The Politics of Banning’, Ratoon, 6, May 1970), 1; Kate Quinn ‘Conventional Politics or Revolution: Black Power and the Radical Challenge to the Westminster Model in the Caribbean’, Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 53/​1 (2015), 71–​94. 167  ‘Jagan Wants Referendum on Guyana Security Bill’, The Daily Gleaner, 12 December 1966 10; ‘Guyana House Passes National Security Bill After Jagan Walkout’, The Daily Gleaner, 9 December 1966, 8. 168  On the deployment of the security forces for political purposes, see: Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, 172. 169  On the appropriation of working-​class symbols, dress, and language, see: Gray, ‘Predation Politics’, 78–​81; Anita Waters, Race, Class, and Political Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics, Reprint (Oxford: Routledge, 2017), chap. 4. 170 Gray, Radicalism and Social Change, 121–​122. 171 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 209.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    741 island’s growing number of murder convictions, condemned to death, ever greater numbers of impoverished working-​class Afro-​Jamaicans.172 The reliance on modes of lawfare enabled the security forces to commit violent acts under the guise of legality. Take the joint police–​military operations conducted by the security forces in West Kingston in 1966 and a decade later in 1976.173 Operating within the context of a state of emergency on both occasions, the security forces imposed restrictions on freedom of movement, in the form of roadblocks and curfews, conducted searches without a warrant, and detained hundreds of suspects.174 Such operations were significant for their scale and intensity, but they were symptomatic of a broader pattern of policing in post-​independence Jamaica, where coercion and lethal violence were routine. From the late 1960s onwards, fatal police shootings increased significantly.175 The targets of this violence included by-​ standers and civilians, petty criminals and rank-​and-​file members of party-​affiliated gangs, as well as notorious high-​ranking gang leaders, such as Claude Massop, who was shot and killed by the police in 1979.176 A similar upsurge in state violence occurred in Guyana over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s. Reports indicate that the Guyanese security forces and their auxiliaries, including the People’s Militia and the House of Israel, targeted political dissidents, low-​level criminals, and street-​vendors, whose black marketeering the PNC regarded as a threat to the self-​sufficiency principles which informed the party’s cooperative socialism.177 There were numerous cases of reported mistreatment in detention and fatal shootings in suspicious circumstances .178 One cannot interpret the impunity afforded to the security forces in Guyana and Jamaica as a symptom of the postcolonial state’s absolute authority. The economic downturn of the late 1970s and early 1980s intersected with deepening political problems. In Guyana, Burnham introduced a new constitution in 1980 to consolidate the PNC’s grip on the state.179 That same year, Jamaica experienced its most violent election since independence, as the PNP-​JLP struggle for power and parties’ dependency on criminal gangs pushed the island to the brink of civil war.180 At the same time, however, a new generation of political and social 172  James Campbell, ‘Death Row Resistance, Politics and Capital Punishment in 1970s Jamaica’, Crime, Histoire & Sociétés, 21/​1 (2017), [online], available at: https://​doi.org/​10.4000/​chs.1715, accessed 26 July 2021. 173  On the 1966 and 1976 state of emergencies, see: Lacey, Violence and Politics in Jamaica, 8794 and Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process, 82–​93. 174  ‘Emergency Continues in West Kingston’, The Daily Gleaner, 5 October 1966, 1; ‘At the Police-​ Military Check-​Points’, The Daily Gleaner, 4 October 1966, 14 and National Library of Jamaica, Keble Munn, Minister for National Security, Review of the State of Emergency, Ministry Paper No. 22 (1977), [online], available at: http://​www.nlj.gov.jm/​Min​istr​yPap​ers/​1977/​22.pdf, accessed 26 July 2021. 175  On the increase in police violence, see: Lacey, Violence and Politics in Jamaica, 72. 176  The killing of Massop had been preceded by the infamous ‘Green Bay Massacre’, when, in January 1978, pro-​PNP members of the JDF lured JLP gang members to an army fire-​ranging in a botched execution. On Green Bay, see Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 241–​242 and Laurie Gunst, Born Fi’ Dead: A Journey Through the Yardie Underworld (Reading: Canongate 2003), 97–​103. 177  ‘Justice for the Poor’, Ratoon, 3, January (1970), 2; ‘Government Carries Out Massive Raid on Parallel Market’, Catholic Standard, 18 November 1984; Labadie Collection, University of Michigan, Day Clean, 4/​32, 1977; ‘Expose: Inside a Rabbi’s Kingdom’, Caribbean Contact, June 1982, 8–​9. 178  Senate House, ICOMM PG.GY.GHRA.2, Guyana Human Rights Association, Statement on Recent Police Shooting Incidents, 2 February 1981. 179 Hintzen, The Costs of Regime Survival, 97–​98. 180 Waters, Race, Class and Political Symbols, chap. 6.

742   Gareth Curless movements aimed to challenge the established order. In Guyana, left-​wing organizations came together to establish the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in opposition to what these groups regarded as the ‘pseudo-​socialism’ of the PNC.181 In Jamaica, the late 1970s witnessed a short-​lived tacit alliance between the PNP and the Marxist-​Leninist Workers’ Party in opposition to the JLP and the IMF’s proposed austerity programme. Various forms of civic activism supplemented these political movements, including human rights associations which condemned the abuse of state power by political elites and grassroots organizations which mobilized across class and racial lines to demand enhanced rights and protections for the most vulnerable.182 Episodes of popular protest strengthened these campaigns for change, as ordinary people took to the streets to demonstrate against political marginalization and deteriorating socio-​ economic conditions. Jamaica witnessed significant street protests in 1979 and again in 1985, as the poorest sections of Kingston’s population paralyzed the city in opposition to public subsidy cuts on essential services.183 These protests constituted a form of ‘insurgent citizenship’, as demonstrators established roadblocks, damaged property, and clashed with the police and political rivals.184 Guyana experienced escalating social unrest during this period too, including the WPA-​coordinated ‘Civil Rebellion’ of 1979, which involved strikes and street protests which embraced sections of the Afro-​and Indo-​Guyanese population and aimed to topple the PNC government.185 The PNC responded by prohibiting public meetings, deploying the security forces and party auxiliaries to breakup demonstrations, dismissing striking workers, and detaining leading political activists.186 There were even instances of state-​sanctioned assassination, including Walter Rodney, who was killed in 1980 by a bomb planted by a PNC agent.187 Rodney’s death, which was followed by the JLP’s election victory in October 1980 and the US’ invasion of Grenada three years later, signalled the end of an era in the Anglophone Caribbean. The imposition of structural adjustment programmes, the growing influence of the Reagan administration in the region, political and criminal violence, and socio-​economic deprivation symbolized the failure of the creole nationalist project and its more radical alternatives linked to social democracy and Marxism.188 This did not mean movements for change disappeared, however. To take one example, women’s groups, such as Sistren in Jamaica and later Red Thread in Guyana, critiqued the exclusion of women in earlier socio-​political and revolutionary movements.189 In doing so, these organizations 181  Nigel Westmaas, ‘Resisting Orthodoxy: Notes on the Origins and Ideology of the WPA’, Small Axe, 8/​1 (2004), 63–​81. 182 Gray, Radicalism and Political Change, 220–​226. 183 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, 257–​261 and 284–​286. 184 James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) cited Deborah Thomas, ‘Caribbean Studies, Archive Building, and the Problem of Violence’, Small Axe, 17/​2 (2013), 40. 185  Hinds, ‘The Grenada Revolution and the Caribbean Left’, 226. 186 Abraham, Labour and the Multiracial Project, 125–​127. 187 Lewis, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought, 245–​248. 188  Hinds, ‘The Grenada Revolution and the Caribbean Left’, 237–​239 and Gray, Radicalism and Social Change, 229–​231. 189  Both Sistren and Red Thread grew out of their respective connections to the PNP and the WPA, but prominent figures, such as Honor Ford-​Smith (Sistren) and Andaiye (Red Thread), were sensitive to their relative privilege and they produced retrospectives on the difficulties of working collectively across social hierarchies and structures. See: Honor Ford-​Smith, ‘Ring Ding in a Tight Corner: Sistren

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    743 devised alternative strategies for mobilizing the marginalized and protecting the most vulnerable—​as exemplified by Sisten’s early plays and theatre workshops, which encouraged community engagement with the plight of women in downtown Kingston and Red Thread’s efforts to empower Guyanese women to enhance their socio-​economic status independently of the main political parties.190

Conclusion Thinking about alternative exit routes from moments of adversity returns us to the Tivoli Gardens incursion and the more recent political crisis which engulfed Guyana following the disputed 2020 national elections. In both cases, these political crises led observers to call for the introduction of new systems of political accountability and a rethinking of how citizens engage with democratic processes in Jamaica and Guyana.191 Others, however, have asked deeper historical questions. For Deborah Thomas, the Tivoli Gardens incursion prompted her to consider the meaning and value attached to black personhood in Jamaica.192 Of particular concern to Thomas are those alternative subjectivities, linked to Rastafarianism, Black Power, and so-​called slackniss culture, which cannot be accommodated within the moral framework of the creole nationalist project and its more recent iterations.193 Thomas argues that since these alternative forms of political and cultural identity exist outside the boundaries of citizenship, there is a need to think beyond policy changes and juridical solutions because it is too simplistic to assume the current political economy and its institutional framework can be extended to incorporate hitherto marginalized groups.194 After all, political and economic liberalization has contributed to more violence, not less. Moreover, although Thomas acknowledges that governmental mechanisms, such as investigative inquiries and truth and reconciliation commissions, can facilitate discussions about state violence and its material cost, she suggests they are often flawed because their architects typically conceive of the present as a ‘post-​violence, post-​conflict moment’.195 The Collective Democracy and the Organisation of Cultural Production’, in M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (eds.), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997), 213–​258 and Andaiye, ‘The Angle You Look from Determines What You See: Towards a Critique of Feminist Politics and Organizing in the Caribbean’, in D. Alissa Trotz (ed.), The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 3–​20. 190 Karina Smith, ‘Re/​ Telling History: Sisten’s Ida Revolt inna Jonkonnu Stylee as Neo/​Colonial Resistance’, Third Space: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture, 1/​7 (2007), 17–​36 and Kimberly Nettles, ‘Becoming Red Thread Women: Alternative Visions of Gendered Politics in Post-​independence Guyana’, Social Movement Studies, 6/​1 (2007), 57–​82. 191 Meeks, Critical Interventions, 183–​195. 192  Deborah Thomas, ‘Time and the Otherwise: Plantations, Garrisons and Being Human in the Caribbean’, Anthropological Theory, 16/​2–​3, (2016), 177–​200. 193  Deborah Thomas, ‘Blackness Across Borders: Jamaican Diasporas and New Politics of Citizenship’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture And Power, 14/​1-​2 (2007), 111–​133 and Don Robotham. ‘Blackening the Jamaican Nation: The Travails of a Black Bourgeoisie in a Globalized World’, Identities, 7/​1 (2000), 1–​37. 194  Ibid., 193–​194. 195  Ibid., 193.

744   Gareth Curless cumulative effect of these assumptions is that the structural forces that contribute to ongoing forms of state violence, persistent socio-​economic disparities, and continued political marginalization go unaddressed.196 The solution, Thomas argues, is to understand state violence, associated narratives of trauma, and contemporary inequalities in historical terms.197 Employing a method she terms Witnessing 2.0, Thomas, who has coproduced a film and cocurated an exhibition on the Tivoli Gardens incursion, demands that as witnesses we are attentive to the intertwined nature of the past and present and how this has produced a ‘constancy’ of violence in the lives of West Kingston’s residents.198 The aim is not to simply catalogue abuse and suffering, but to watch, listen, and feel, and thereby destabilize the boundary between ‘self and other’ so as to recognize our entangled histories, our shared responsibilities, and our shared humanity.199 Thomas is not alone in highlighting the inter-​connected nature of the past and present. In the case of Guyana, Alissa Trotz has argued that among Afro-​and Indo-​Guyanese communities, competing memories of past conflicts are inter-​woven with understandings of contemporary inter-​racial violence.200 Trotz cites the memorialization of events connected to the Wismar massacre. For Afro-​Guyanese communities, the Son Chapman disaster, which preceded the second assault on Wismar’s remaining Indo-​Guyanese residents, was a deliberate attack perpetrated by PPP agents. For Indo-​Guyanese communities, however, the sinking of the Son Chapman was an accident caused by PNC operatives, who were smuggling explosives intended for use in the campaign to destabilize the PPP government.201 Trotz argues these divergent memories are symptomatic of how both communities seek to position themselves as the ‘victim’ and the other as the ‘aggressor’ when it comes to the violence that swept through Guyana in 1964.202 The abdication of responsibility for this past violence has been exacerbated by the instrumentalization of commemorative acts by political agents, who invoke historic grievances and conflicts to mobilize support and explain inter-​racial antagonisms in the present.203 The effect has been to inhibit the emergence of a shared language and vocabulary that moves Afro-​and Indo-​Guyanese communities beyond their racialized definitions of victim and perpetrator. Trotz suggests without this shared language it is impossible for alternative pasts and futures to emerge.204 In short, if Guyana—​like Jamaica—​is to address contemporary challenges, political and institutional reforms are important, but so too is confronting the histories and afterlives of violent decolonization.

196 Thomas,

Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 213–​214. For an earlier critique by Thomas, see: Exceptional Violence, 223–​229. 197  Thomas, ‘Time and the Otherwise’, 193. 198  Ibid., 185. 199  Deborah Thomas, ‘Making Four Days in May’, Interventions, 22/​1 (2020), 93–​105, quote at 104. 200 Alissa Trotz, ‘Lest We Forget: Terror and the Politics of Commemoration in Guyana’, in Suvendrini Perera and Sherene H. Razack (eds.), At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 289–​308. 201  Ibid., 295. 202  Ibid., 295–​296. 203  Ibid, 296–​298. 204  Ibid., 301.

Violence and (Dis)Order in the Caribbean    745

Select Bibliography Bogues, Anthony, ‘Politics, Nation and PostColony: Caribbean Inflections’, Small Axe, 6/​1 (2002), 1–​30. Bogues, Anthony, ‘Power, Violence and the Jamaican “Shotta Don” ’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 39/​6 (2006), 21–​26. Bulkan, Arif, and D. Alissa Trotz, ‘Oil Fuels Guyana’s Internecine Conflict’, Current History, 120/​823 (2021), 71–​77. Clarke, Colin, ‘Politics, Violence and Drugs in Kingston, Jamaica’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 25/​3 (2006), 420–​440. Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff, ‘Law and Disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction’, in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, eds., Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 1–​56. Edmonds, Kevin, ‘Guns, Gangs and Garrison Communities in the Politics of Jamaica’, Race & Class 57/​4 (2016), 54–​74. Gray, Obika, Radicalism and Social Change in Jamaica, 1960–​1972 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991). Gray, Obika, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004). Mawby, Spencer, Ordering Independence: The End of Empire in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1947–​1968 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Meeks, Brian, ‘Obscure Revolt, Profound Effects: The Henry Rebellion, Counter-​Hegemony and Jamaican Society’, Small Axe, 2 (1997), 39–​62. Palmer, Colin A., Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana’s Struggle for Independence (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). ‘Racial Hierarchy and the Elevation of Brownness in Creole Nationalism’, Small Axe, 21/​3 (2017), 111–​123. Thomas, Deborah A., Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Thomas, Deborah A., Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Thomas, Deborah A., Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). Thomas, Deborah A., ‘Making Four Days in May’, Interventions, 22/​1 (2020), 93–​105. Trotz, D. Alissa, ‘Lest We Forget: Terror and the Politics of Commemoration in Guyana’, in Suvendrini Perera and Sherene H. Razack, eds., At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 289–​308. Trotz, D. Alissa, ‘1964: The Rupture of Neighborliness and its Legacy for Indian/​African Relations’, in D. Alissa Trotz, ed., The Point is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 58–​76.

Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.  Aden  Aden Protectorate Levies (APL)  418, 424–​ 26, 427, 428–​29, 430, 431–​34 Ali Ma’wer, Salim  426–​27, 430, 431, 433 Arab–​Jewish violence in  425–​26 British Army and  425–​26, 429, 431–​33 British involvement in  422–​24 Bufton, Air Vice–​Marshal Sidney Osbourne  427, 429–​30, 431–​32 Rabizi tribe  423–​24, 426–​28, 429–​ 30, 433–​34 RAF (see Royal Air Force) Robat  426–​28, 429–​32, 433 USSR in relation to  422–​23 Wadi Hatib  423–​24, 426–​28, 429, 430, 431–​33 Yemen in relation to  423–​24, 426–​27, 430, 433, 434 Afghanistan  American and British intervention in  49–​ 50, 60, 102, 117, 250, 397 Civil War  59 Emir of Bukhara (Sayyid Mir Muhammad Alim Khan) exile in  52–​53 Ibrahim Bek exile in  50–​51, 52, 53, 54 Soviet intervention in  44–​45, 49–​50, 49–​ 50n.19, 56–​60, 61–​62 women in  484 Africa  African soldiery and  29–​33, 34, 35–​37 colonial conquest of  27–​28, 30, 385, 440–​41 Free French in  34–​35, 209 Nationalism  29, 35–​36 Organisation of African Unity (OAU)  36, 38, 42, 647–​48

pre-​colonialism  30, 40–​41 slave trade in  28–​29, 30 Al Qaeda  137, 253 Algeria  Ahmed, Hocine Aït  382–​83, 397, 399–​ 400, 407 Algiers  31, 387, 393–​94, 399–​400, 401–​2, 406, 407–​8, 409, 410, 411, 415–​16, 642, 643–​44, 651–​52, 654–​55, 658–​59, 708–​ 9, 715–​16 amnesty laws in  707–​9, 712–​13, 717 Armée de libération nationale/​National Liberation Army (ALN)  36–​37, 384–​ 85, 386–​87, 388–​90, 392–​93, 394–​96, 398, 400–​2, 403–​4, 406–​8, 409–​10, 411–​12, 413–​16, 647–​48, 652–​53, 655–​57, 659–​60, 662–​63, 664, 665–​66, 709, 710, 714, 716–​17 Bedjaoui, Mohammed  201, 202, 207–​9 Challe offensive  391, 394, 398, 411–​12, 415, 664 communists in  382–​84, 389, 390 explosives  388–​89, 390, 391 French Army in  150–​51, 390, 393–​94, 396, 400–​1, 403, 406–​7, 408, 411–​12, 413–​14, 448–​49, 708–​10, 712–​13, 714 French involvement in  385, 660–​61, 707–​8 gun licences in  389 International focus on  209, 391, 400, 406, 410, 411, 656–​57 Morocco in relation to  384–​85, 387, 391, 401–​2, 409–​10, 411–​12, 414–​15, 648, 651, 652–​53, 654–​57, 660–​61, 662–​63, 665–​66 Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Freedoms Party (MTLD)  399–​400 national identity  706

748   Index Algeria (cont.) National Liberation Front (FLN)  9, 36–​37, 144, 154, 201–​3, 208–​9, 228–​29, 384, 386–​ 87, 388–​89, 390, 391, 393–​94, 396, 400, 401–​2, 403–​4, 406–​7, 408, 409–​10, 415–​16, 503–​4, 508, 636–​37, 647–​49, 651–​57, 658–​ 60, 661, 664–​66, 706, 709 Organisation de l’armée secrete (OAS)  633–​34, 639–​40, 706, 707–​9, 714, 715–​16 Organisation spéciale (OS)  385–​86, 399–​ 400, 403–​4, 407–​8 People’s National Army (ANP)  401–​ 2, 415–​16 Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA)  201, 209, 387, 396, 647–​48, 655, 656–​57, 662–​63 rural engagement in  383–​84, 385–​87, 390, 392, 400, 404 Sétif insurrection (1945)  389, 406–​7 smuggled weapons  391 Tunisia in relation to  384–​85, 387, 388–​89, 391, 397, 402, 411–​12, 413, 414–​16, 652–​53, 654–​57, 660–​61, 662–​63, 665–​66 war of independence  7, 384–​85, 391, 399–​ 400, 403–​4, 413, 706 wilayas  387, 389, 393, 403–​4, 407–​8, 412 Zbiri, Tahar  404, 413–​14, 415 Zighoud, Youssef  405–​7 Amnesty International  233, 236–​37, 245, 247–​ 48, 249, 250, 262 Amritsar massacre  162–​63, 232, 262–​63, 268, 288–​89 Angola  anti-​colonial violence in  468, 469, 517, 518 Belgian Congo in relation to  511–​12, 514, 517–​18 civil war  39, 507, 515–​16, 524–​25, 528, 557 international focus on  518 National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA)  37, 557, 648–​49, 663–​64 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA)  39–​40, 557, 661–​ 62, 663–​64 People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)  317–​18, 475–​76, 556, 557, 559–​60, 663–​64

Ribeiro, Orlando  527–​30 women in  507 anti-​colonial resistance  Guerrilla diplomacy  8–​9, 651–​52, 656–​57, 658–​59, 665–​66, 694 Guerrilla tactics  2, 288, 382–​83, 385, 444 legal courts and  386, 483–​84, 487 networks of  4–​5, 392, 393–​94, 395–​96, 409–​ 10, 448, 649–​50, 652–​54, 656, 661–​62, 671, 681–​82 organized violence  4–​5, 699 passivity  19, 367, 476–​77, 487, 495–​96, 514–​ 15, 545, 547–​48, 551 peasant populations  14–​15, 384, 385–​86, 389–​90, 392–​93, 394, 395, 445 sanctuary and  5, 18, 22–​23, 151, 304, 403, 411–​12, 650, 651, 652–​57, 658–​59, 661–​62 vanguard forces  382–​84, 385–​86, 396 Arendt, Hannah  5–​6 assassinations  60–​61, 64–​65, 68–​69, 76, 116–​ 17, 126–​27, 131–​32, 163–​64, 174–​75, 265–​66, 280–​81, 356–​57, 390, 391, 395, 403, 408, 659–​60, 661–​62, 668–​69, 672, 673, 742 authoritarian colonialism  3–​4, 28, 44–​45, 46–​ 48, 60–​61, 475–​76 Bangladesh/​East Pakistan  22–​23, 146–​47, 585–​86, 612 British Empire  capital punishment in  214–​16, 218, 219–​20, 222, 223–​24, 227–​29, 234–​35 identity and  323 martial law  77, 162, 168, 174–​75, 176–​77, 217–​ 18, 299–​300, 302, 306, 613, 691 martial race ideologies  30, 35–​36, 419–​ 20, 421 military recruitment  419–​20 rule of law in  215–​16 Second World War and  420–​21, 599–​600 Burma  allied reoccupation  598–​601 border demarcation and  6, 598, 601, 603, 608, 612 CIA in  610–​11 civil war in  609–​13 Kachin people  105, 109, 600, 604 Karen insurgency  599–​600, 608–​9

Index   749 military coup  610 Naga Hills  604–​5, 612–​13 San, Aung  599–​600 Cambodia  22–​23, 207, 353, 361, 575–​78, 651 Cameroon  34–​35, 74, 259, 548–​49 civilianization of violence,  1, 142–​47, 148–​56 Cold War  aftermath of  670–​7 1, 681–​82 anti-​communist support  237, 250, 631, 633, 637–​38, 640–​41, 643, 644 nuclear deterrence  422–​23, 639, 640 collaborators  9, 19, 55, 126, 129, 164, 314, 319, 369, 395, 419, 433–​34, 598 colonial knowledge production  agriculture and  535–​36 collaboration and  535, 537, 539, 637, 640–​41, 642, 645–​46 counter-​insurgency tactics  630–​31, 642–​46 geography and  527–​29, 536–​37, 539 colonial office (Britain)  148–​49, 164–​65, 234, 238, 245–​46, 423–​24, 490 colonial security forces  3, 147–​48, 440–​41, 442, 674, 700–​1, 702, 717–​18, 738–​39 colonial subjects  agency of  3, 142–​43, 421–​22 intermediaries as  144–​45, 311, 314, 322–​23, 421–​22, 534–​35, 536–​37, 722–​23 loyalty  152, 310–​13, 388, 418, 419, 421–​22, 425–​26, 434, 448, 493, 611, 614 race in relation to  319–​20, 322–​23, 459, 460, 472 rebels as  204, 314, 318–​19 settler victimhood  16–​17, 320, 368 concentration camp  73–​74, 173, 232, 257–​58, 262–​63, 339, 441, 446, 456, 457, 494–​95 Cuba  42, 111–​12, 441, 631, 738n.150 Cyprus  Archbishop Makarios III  234–​35, 242, 244, 689–​90, 691–​92, 697, 698–​700, 701–​2 British involvement in  693–​94, 695–​96 British politicians and  242, 248–​49, 691–​ 92, 693–​94, 701, 703 capital punishment in  218–​19, 223–​26 ceasefire negotiations  689–​90, 691, 694, 695, 700–​1, 702

Cyprus ‘emergency’,  687–​88, 690, 702, 703 Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston (EOKA)  222, 225, 226, 227–​28, 241, 243, 687–​88, 689–​90, 691, 693–​94, 697, 699, 701, 702–​3 Greece in relation to  241, 242–​43, 244, 245, 687–​88, 694–​95, 696–​97, 698–​99, 703 Harding, John  241, 243, 244, 691–​93, 694–​ 95, 696–​98, 699–​700 Trevaskis, Kennedy  245–​46, 428, 429, 430, 431 Turkey in relation to  318, 690, 692, 701 Turnbull, Richard  246, 247, 249 Darwin, John  10, 276–​77, 314, 320–​21, 322 De Gaulle, Charles  636–​37, 643–​44, 648, 658–​ 59, 706, 710, 711–​12 decolonization  globalization and  598, 601, 614 nation-​state and  598, 606–​7 process of  597–​98, 726–​27 Democratic Republic of Congo  Belgian involvement in  22–​23, 506–​7, 511–​ 12, 549, 551, 553–​54 Katangese Secession  36 second Congo war  39–​40 Seko, Mobutu Sese  39–​40 desertion  329–​30, 341–​45, 346, 361–​62, 388–​ 89, 390, 425–​26, 428–​29, 433, 661–​62 detention centre  21, 149, 168, 208, 224–​25, 227, 234–​35, 240, 241, 246, 252–​53, 339–​40, 482–​83, 484, 486, 487, 493–​94, 495–​96, 498, 499 dirty wars  14–​15, 16–​17, 156–​57, 163, 218, 225 East Timor  development policies in  581, 585–​86, 587–​ 88, 589, 591–​92 food production in  587–​89, 591–​92 Indonesia in relation to  581–​82, 589, 590 malnutrition  583–​85, 587 Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN)  581, 583–​84 strategic villages  582, 590, 592 El Salvador  114–​15, 374 Ethiopia  3–​4, 33–​34, 39, 379–​80 European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)  233–​45, 250, 256

750   Index famine  57–​58, 67–​68, 78, 287–​88, 389–​90, 392, 583–​84, 585–​86, 617 Fanon, Frantz  18, 486 fear  94, 95, 119, 132, 214, 226–​27, 230–​31, 245, 322, 332, 356, 379, 388, 409–​10, 427–​29, 565, 570–​7 1, 577–​78, 641, 732 Foucault, Michel  66, 224, 253 France  11–​12 Fifth Republic  708–​9, 710, 715 Fourth Republic  11–​12, 636–​37, 710 French involvement in Chad  637, 639 French involvement in Indochina  6, 154–​ 55, 402 Latin America and  714 Metropolitan repression  654–​55 French West Africa  Volta–​Bani War  32 Gandhi, Mohandas  253, 264–​65, 276–​77, 276n.5 Geneva Conventions  153, 155–​56, 157, 197, 201, 202, 205, 206, 208, 209–​10, 227–​28, 236, 414, 565 genocide  22–​23, 38, 288–​89, 440–​41 German South West Africa  297, 298, 299–​300, 301, 304, 305, 441, 652–​53 Global South  3–​4, 7, 156, 157–​58, 202–​3, 207–​8, 288–​89, 363–​64, 434, 632, 656–​57, 660, 719–​20, 724 oil export from  8, 501 Guevara, Che  108, 115–​16n.83, 644–​45 Guinea–​Bissau  468, 469, 637, 655–​56, 658–​ 60, 663–​64 Guyana  Afro–​Guianese in  727–​28, 730, 732, 735–​ 36, 744 British involvement in  738–​40 criminal justice system  724 drug trade  722 Georgetown  730, 732, 735–​38 Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA)  739–​41 identity construction in  735–​37 People’s National Congress (PNC)  721–​22, 729, 730, 733, 736–​37, 740–​41, 742, 744 People’s Progressive Party (PPP)  721–​23, 727–​29, 730, 731, 733, 734–​35, 744 rural violence in  732–​34, 737–​38 Working People’s Alliance (WPA)  741–​42

health  community  550–​51, 561–​62 diagnostic techniques  548–​49, 550–​ 51, 561–​62 diseases  543, 544 Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT)  545–​46, 547–​49, 551, 552–​53, 554, 555, 557–​58, 559, 561–​62 inter-​imperial approaches to  544–​45, 547–​ 49, 553 medical centres  546, 562 vaccines  544–​45, 548–​50, 551, 559–​60 World Health Organization (WHO)  543–​ 44, 549, 550, 552–​53, 557–​58, 561–​62 hearts and minds policy  21, 102, 105, 116, 117, 221–​22, 250, 354, 360, 362, 448, 454, 457, 461, 470, 472–​73, 491, 532–​33, 609, 611, 630–​31 hunger strikes  255, 263–​65, 266 Hussein, Saddam  115 imprisonment  173, 206–​7, 223–​24, 252–​53, 260–​61, 266–​69, 285, 293–​94, 305, 333, 339–​40, 493–​94, 650, 675 India  border demarcation  6, 598 Burma in relation to  601–​2, 612 Ghadar Party  283–​85 Indian National Congress (INC)  276–​77, 280–​81, 286–​87 Indian uprising of 1857  214–​15, 226–​27, 286–​87, 419–​20 Lahore  278–​79, 284–​85 migrant labourers and  281–​85 North-​East Frontier Agency (NEFA)  602, 603–​5, 608–​9, 611–​13 Quit India movement  277, 286–​88, 289 Rai, Lala Lajpat  281–​82 Singh, Bhagat  278–​81 Swadeshi movement  280–​81 Indonesia  Dutch Indonesian War  72, 78–​79, 86–​87, 180, 182–​83, 185, 186–​87, 189, 192, 195, 331–​32, 586 guerrilla groups in  86–​89 independence of  83–​85, 332, 335–​36, 338, 342 Indonesian Communist Party  84, 86–​87, 89 Indonesian National Army (TNI)  90–​92, 93–​94, 327–​28, 332, 334–​36, 339–​40, 341, 342–​45

Index   751 Java  81–​82, 83–​87, 88, 90–​91, 92–​93, 94–​95, 96–​97, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 332, 333, 335–​ 36, 338, 339–​40, 343, 344–​45, 585–​86, 590 Junani, Umar  92, 93–​95 Kartosuwirjo, Sekarmadji Maridjan  87–​88 Royal Netherlands East Indies Army (KNIL)  85–​86, 182–​83, 184–​88, 195, 333, 334–​35, 343 Siregar, Sahala  95–​96 Sosrodihardjo, Koesno (Sukarno)  83, 84, 210, 331–​32, 334, 342–​43 Spoor, General Simon  78–​79, 189–​90, 191 Sumatra  81–​82, 83–​85, 87, 88, 89–​90, 94–​95, 96, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 333, 335, 338, 590 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)  155–​56, 157–​58, 159, 197, 201–​3, 204, 205, 208, 209–​10, 233, 236, 245–​47, 249, 414, 584–​85 international law  disease control and  543–​44 human rights  16–​17, 154, 156, 197–​98, 200–​1, 204, 212–​13 lawfare  14–​15, 16, 159, 162, 216–​17, 234, 258, 741 Iraq  60–​61, 102, 115, 116–​17, 250, 391, 422–​23 Ireland  Belfast  132, 134, 672, 673, 677, 679, 680–​81 British forces in  74–​77, 254–​55, 256, 668–​ 69, 679, 680 controversial shootings in  256–​57, 677 Devlin, Bernadette and  258 Easter Rising  64, 217–​18, 221–​22, 226, 227, 229, 278–​79, 632, 672 emergence of nationalism in  67–​68, 254–​55 MI5 in  668–​69, 679, 680, 681 Oliver Cromwell and  72–​73 peace process  669, 675–​76, 677, 681–​82 post-​1998 paramilitaries  669, 675–​76, 678–​ 79, 680–​81 Progressive Unionist Party (PUP)  675, 677, 678 Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA)  65–​66, 68–​7 1, 75–​77, 78, 121–​23, 125–​27, 128–​29, 163–​64, 229, 254–​55, 256, 258, 263, 267, 269, 672, 673–​74, 676, 677, 679 religious communities in  668–​69, 672 Sinn Féin  69, 75–​76, 77, 263, 264, 267–​68, 269, 675, 676, 677

Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF)  672, 674–​75, 677, 678–​79 Ulsterization  260–​61 Islam  53–​54, 58–​59, 289, 536 Darul Islam movement  87, 88–​89, 90–​91, 92, 94–​95, 96 domestic space  149 Israel  175, 226, 658–​59 Holocaust and  222–​23 Tel Aviv  170–​7 1 Jamaica  Afro–​Jamaicans in  727, 729, 730, 740–​41 creole nationalism in  725–​26, 727–​28, 731 criminal justice system in  724 drug trade  721–​22, 734–​35 Kingston  721–​23, 731, 732, 735, 741, 742–​43 Labour Party of (JLP)  721–​22, 727, 728–​29, 730–​32, 734–​35, 738–​39, 740–​43 Morant Bay uprising  214–​15, 232, 320–​21 People’s National Party (PNP)  721–​22, 727, 729–​30, 731–​32, 734–​35, 740–​41 Rastafarians  725–​26, 738–​40 Tivoli Gardens  722, 724, 725, 731, 735, 743–​44 USA in relation to  723–​24, 742–​43 Japan  colonial occupation of Korea  152 Second World War and  83, 84–​85, 93–​95, 105–​6, 182–​83, 186–​87, 195, 210, 287, 316, 331, 333, 334–​35, 336–​38, 362, 444, 581, 585, 598, 599–​600, 623, 627–​28, 634 Johnson, Lyndon B.,  9, 101, 352–​53, 362–​63 Kennedy, John F.,  108–​9, 114, 637–​38, 643–​44 Kenya  British High Court and  486, 489, 493–​ 94, 498 British MPs and  239–​41 colonial enforcement policies in  484–​ 85, 488 Erskine, General George  219–​20, 636, 645–​46 gendered counter-​insurgency tactics in  484–​86, 489–​90, 491 Griffith–​Jones, Eric  232, 238 Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA)  224–​26, 227, 482–​83, 484,

752   Index Kenya (cont.) 485–​86, 487, 488, 491–​92, 493–​94, 495–​ 96, 498–​99 Lari massacres  218–​19, 227 Maendeleo ya Wanawake  453–​54, 490, 491, 492–​93, 497, 499 Mau Mau  36–​37, 136–​37, 214–​15, 219, 221–​22, 225–​27, 229, 232, 235, 238–​39, 241, 262–​63, 312, 313–​14, 315, 321, 344, 398, 442–​43, 446–​47, 454–​55, 482–​83, 487, 491–​92, 495–​ 96, 506–​7, 636 strategic villages  (see resettlement) villagization  488, 489–​90 Whyatt, John  220–​21, 238 Khmer Rouge  575–​76, 577–​78 Korea  110, 152, 336–​37, 353, 574–​75, 623–​24, 625, 635–​36 Laos  6, 22–​23, 109, 117, 207, 351, 353, 361 League of Nations  34–​35, 162–​63, 200, 543–​44 Lesotho (Basutoland)  34, 652–​53 Libya  388–​89, 411–​12, 652–​53 Italian invasion of  32–​33 Senussi War  32–​33, 34–​33 Magsaysay, Ramon  101, 106, 107–​8, 110 malaria  359, 498, 543, 546, 552–​53, 558–​59 Malawi  Chilembwe Uprising  217–​18 migration and  531–​32, 538 the Emergency  229–​30, 240 Malaysia  Chinese community in  315, 317–​18, 320, 321, 328, 331, 337–​39, 455–​56 Japanese occupation of  316, 331, 336–​37 Malayan Communist Party (MCP)  327–​28, 331–​32, 333, 334, 336–​39, 340, 342–​45, 346 process of decolonization  321 Templer, Sir Gerald  105–​6 the Emergency  221–​22, 338–​39, 351–​52, 636, 654 Mali  Tuareg people  32–​33, 34–​35, 36 Mandela, Nelson  264–​65, 267, 268–​69, 373–​ 74, 647–​48, 664, 665–​66 Mao, Tse-​Tung  108, 382, 387, 397, 618, 623–​24, 644–​45, 650–​51, 655 mass arrests  150–​51, 240, 283–​84, 285, 287, 338–​39

Milner, Alfred  294, 304–​5, 319–​20 Minh, Ho Chi  110–​11, 253, 349, 350, 351, 354–​ 55, 397, 573, 616–​17, 618, 625, 626, 628 Mozambique  Aldeamentos  474, 509–​11, 533–​34, 538–​40, 541, 554, 555, 556–​57, 558–​59 anti-​colonial violence in  468 Costa, Mário  515–​17 education in  468, 472–​73, 475, 510 family in  474, 478, 479 Female Portuguese Youth (MPF)  464–​65, 466–​69, 473–​74 gendered modernization in  466, 467, 471, 475, 478, 480 insurgent movements in  143–​44, 379–​80, 469, 478 Mozambican Liberation Front (FRELIMO)  9, 37, 143–​44, 475–​76, 477–​78, 509–​10, 531–​32, 534, 536–​37, 541, 556, 648–​49, 652–​ 53, 659–​60, 661–​62, 663–​64, 665 Niassa  515–​16, 525, 529, 531, 532–​34, 536, 539, 540 Portuguese forces in  154, 509–​10, 532–​ 33, 534 religion in  466, 468, 471, 475–​76, 527–​28, 529, 530, 536, 537 villagization in  458–​59, 510, 524–​25 women’s rights in relation to  465 napalm  74, 147–​48, 153, 446, 616, 714 Nehru, Jawaharlal  278, 286–​87, 604–​5, 612–​13 Netherlands  Germany occupation of  185 military doctrine  181–​82 The Hague  186, 191–​92, 338, 342 Niger  33, 34–​35 Toubous people  32–​33, 34–​35 Tuareg people  34–​35 Voulet–​Chanoine affair  34–​35 Nigeria  32, 40, 636 Biafran war  36, 157 Civil War  36, 205 Nixon, Richard  101, 112, 362–​63, 575–​76 non-​aligned movement  6–​7, 8, 22 non-​violent protest  365, 369, 370, 376–​77 North African Maghreb  22–​23, 209, 388–​89, 389n.29, 397, 397n.62 Pakistan  22–​23, 289, 316, 422–​23, 612

Index   753 Palestine  death penalty  173, 219–​20 Emergency Powers Act in  168, 175, 177 Israel and  156–​57, 175 Jewish population in  163, 221 Mandate Government and  161, 164–​ 66, 167–​68 Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)  348, 363–​64 Six Day War  156–​57 Peace of Westphalia  42 Philippines  Huk community  106–​8 Hukbalahap rebellion  101, 105–​6, 635–​36 insurgents in  101, 211, 634 United States in  107–​8, 111–​12, 116–​17, 211–​ 12, 441 political ecology  12–​13, 12n.32, 13n.35, 720–​21 Portugal  Lisbon  466–​67, 514, 522–​23, 533, 541 Portuguese colonialism  37, 515 Revolution (1974) in  37, 153, 509–​10 Portuguese Guinea  143–​44, 518, 545–​46, 549, 551, 554, 555, 557–​58, 562, 651–​53, 663–​64 African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC)  143–​ 44, 556, 557, 651–​53, 655–​56, 658–​60, 663–​64, 665 Postcolonialism  hybridity and  722–​23 modernization and  525–​26 science and  525–​26 Reagan, Ronald  46, 114, 207, 263–​64, 576–​77, 640, 742–​43 refugees  asylum  566–​68, 576–​77 population displacement  155–​56, 448–​49, 461–​62, 558, 565, 573 protection and  567–​69, 578 religion and  566–​67 resettlement  counter-​insurgent tactics and  445–​49, 450–​ 51, 482–​83, 488, 490, 509–​10, 511, 524–​25, 532–​33, 556, 569, 575–​76, 590 curfews  234–​35, 446, 447, 494 destruction of community  441, 449, 455, 574–​75, 580 land consolidation and  451–​52

long-​term effects of  439–​40, 457–​58 non-​government aid  449–​50, 453–​ 55, 458–​59 pacification as  440–​41, 459–​60, 489 rehabilitation centres  448, 493–​98 rural populations  439–​40, 442–​43, 446, 448–​49, 450–​51, 456–​57 women and children  (see violence) revolutionary warfare  2–​3, 357, 382, 400, 444, 630, 636–​37, 641, 644–​45, 656–​57, 714 Royal Air Force (RAF)  164, 344, 418, 422–​23, 424–​25, 426, 427–​28, 429, 431–​33 Russia  Central Asia  50–​54, 58–​59 civil war(s) in  51–​53, 54–​55, 59 communism overseas  634, 640 empire of  47–​48 Gorbachev, Mikhail  58–​59 involvement in Vietnam  353, 354, 575–​76 KGB 49 Lithuania and  44, 49, 54–​56 NKVD  55–​56 Soviet Union  37, 47–​48, 54–​55, 56–​58, 633, 634, 639 Stalin, Joseph  54–​55 Ukrainian Insurgent Army  47 Warsaw Pact  56–​57, 624 Rwanda  38–​40 Saudi Arabia  46, 61, 175, 205 Second World War  6–​7, 33–​34, 105, 124, 255, 312, 420–​21 aftermath of  8–​9, 179, 418, 597–​98, 609, 614, 632–​33 and post-​war international system  15–​16, 154, 236, 418, 503–​4, 524, 526–​27 security  education and  504–​6, 513 medicine and  508–​9, 543–​44, 546–​47, 555–​ 56, 560–​62 psychological implications  504–​5 trans-​imperial conception of  503, 513, 520–​21 Singapore 316 Somalia  39, 40 South Africa  African National Congress (ANC)  7, 37, 261, 265, 368–​7 1, 372–​73, 376–​78, 380–​81, 647–​49, 652–​53, 661–​62, 663–​64, 665–​66

754   Index South Africa (cont.) Anglo–​South African War (1899–​ 1902)  73–​74, 78, 217–​18, 292–​93, 294–​96, 442, 494–​95 Apartheid  7–​8, 11–​12, 205, 253, 264–​65, 365, 368–​69 Bechuanaland  34, 306, 315–​16 Botha, Louis  292–​94, 295, 299–​300, 301, 305, 306, 308 Cape Province  297, 303–​4, 306 De Wet, Andries  298, 300, 301, 302, 304, 305, 306, 307–​8 emergence of national identity  291, 293–​ 94, 307–​8 Johannesburg  294, 366, 369 Natal  294, 295–​96, 297, 299, 321, 546 Orange Free State (OFS)  73–​74, 291–​92, 294, 296–​97, 299, 304, 305, 306, 307–​8 Sharpeville Massacre  368–​69, 647–​48 Smuts, Jan  291, 295–​97, 299, 301, 303, 306 Transvaal  295–​96, 298 Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK)  368–​69​, 376–​77, 647–​48, 661–​62, 664–​65 Zulus and  317 Suez Canal  316, 639, 658–​59, 697–​98 Tanzania (Tanganyika)  38, 39–​40, 458–​59, 513, 516–​17, 531–​32, 538, 547–​48, 556, 585–​86, 652–​53, 661–​62, 663–​64 Thailand  108–​9, 285, 344, 576, 577–​78, 603, 651, 654 Tilly, Charles  5–​6 Uganda  38, 39–​40, 366–​67, 496–​97, 547, 548–​ 49, 653–​54 United Kingdom  abolition of capital punishment  229–​30 Defence of the Realm Act  167, 234 Second World War  632–​33 Special Air Services (SAS)  632, 633–​34, 642, 644 Special Operations Executive (SOE)  632–​ 33, 634 Westminster  68–​69, 164–​65, 254 United Nations  6–​7, 22, 200, 612–​13 General Assembly  407, 410, 411, 480, 698 Human rights  157, 236–​37, 502

Humanitarian emergency  531–​32, 575 International law  6–​7, 15, 202, 651 Security Council  209, 514, 517–​18 Third World bloc at  201–​2, 205–​7 United States of America  Apache Indians  103–​4 Green Berets (Special Forces)  108–​9, 110, 112–​13 Harvard University  108, 116 involvement in Latin America  638–​39 RAND Corporation  637, 638, 644–​45 September 11 attack (9/​11)  163–​64, 250, 714–​15 strategy in Vietnam  101, 353, 574–​75 War on Terror  46, 102, 117, 207, 649–​ 50, 714–​15 urbanization  291, 456–​57, 458–​59, 502, 526 Viet Nam  American involvement in  349, 350, 357, 358, 361–​62, 442–​43 Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN)  111, 351–​52, 353, 359, 361–​62 China in relation to  626–​28, 634–​35 CIA in  110–​11, 113, 570–​7 1, 642, 643 Democratic Republic of Viet Nam (DRV)  348, 569–​70, 571–​72, 573, 575–​76, 616–​17, 618–​19, 620, 621, 622–​23, 624–​25, 627, 628 Diem, Ngo Dinh  102, 110–​11, 350, 352, 574, 643–​44, 648 Dien Bien Phu  163–​64, 349, 361, 616–​17, 628, 650–​51 Duan, Le  350, 352–​53 French involvement in  349–​50, 363, 569–​70, 616–​17, 618–​19, 622–​23, 624–​25, 628, 651 Hanoi  156–​57, 348, 349, 350, 351, 353–​55, 357, 362, 570–​72, 573, 575–​76, 577, 618, 620, 625 Ho Chi Minh Trail  352–​53, 358–​59 Insurgency shifts in  351–​56 Lansdale, Major General Edward  101–​2, 103, 105–​6, 107–​8, 110–​13, 114, 116–​17 My Lai Massacre  207, 360–​61 People’s Army of Viet Nam (PAVN)  351, 352–​53, 355–​56, 357, 358–​60, 361, 363, 616, 618, 619, 620, 623–​24, 625–​26, 627

Index   755 Republic of Vietnam (RVN)  350, 351–​52, 360, 569–​70, 573–​74 rice and  617, 619–​20, 623, 624, 625–​27 Saigon  21, 112, 156–​57, 163–​64, 348, 350, 351, 352, 354–​55, 356–​58, 360, 362–​63, 442–​43, 565, 570–​72, 574–​75, 618, 641, 644, 645 Salan, General Raoul and  411–​12, 453, 617, 618, 619, 620, 621, 622 Tet Offensive  113, 156–​57, 163–​64, 356–​ 57, 361 UN concerns regarding  206–​8 Viet Minh  143–​44, 569–​70, 574, 621–​23, 636–​37, 665 Vietcong  103–​4, 113, 156–​57, 207, 351, 360, 442–​43 violence  choice and  329 civilianization of,  1, 142–​47, 148–​56 classification of victims and  142, 378, 380–​ 81, 716–​18 coercion  15, 17, 18–​19, 20–​21, 28–​29, 30, 47, 61, 66, 72, 122, 143–​44, 147, 163, 216–​17, 262, 322, 354, 370, 419, 461, 464–​65, 466, 486, 493, 497, 499, 503, 521, 532–​33, 544–​ 45, 547–​48, 551, 553, 556–​57, 597–​98, 601, 602, 605–​6, 608–​9, 612–​14, 636, 661–​62, 682–​83, 694, 740–​41 communal  3, 81–​82, 86–​87, 278, 288–​89, 318, 332, 341, 512, 678, 701, 724 elderly and  19, 143–​44, 583–​84 gender-​based  65, 77, 127–​28, 143–​45, 149, 221, 358, 372–​73, 374–​76, 378–​79, 380–​81, 445, 585 interrogation  239, 245, 246–​47, 248–​49, 252–​53, 257, 259, 260, 262, 371, 446–​47, 483, 495–​96, 739–​40 martyrdom  215–​16, 226, 227, 229, 230–​31, 277, 278–​79, 280–​81, 293–​94, 308, 708–​ 9, 715–​16 mercy  214–​15, 219–​21, 260 murder  74–​75, 76–​77, 91, 95, 115, 217–​18, 220–​21, 222, 227–​28, 229, 265–​66, 350–​51, 691–​92, 701, 733

paramilitary  19–​20, 146–​47, 288–​89, 673, 674 physical force  119–​20, 136, 246–​47, 258–​59, 288–​89, 354, 356–​57, 360–​61, 486, 519, 531–​ 32, 583, 585, 672 protest  3–​4, 66–​67, 165–​66, 261, 264–​65, 291, 296–​97, 351–​52, 365, 369, 370, 371, 375–​76, 380–​81, 452, 476, 503, 511, 522, 664, 669, 679, 733–​34, 738 psychological  148–​49, 259, 448, 460, 519–​ 20, 632, 633–​34, 635–​36, 642 rape  78–​79, 378–​79, 485–​86, 489, 714, 716–​17 sexual assault  259, 737–​38 technology and  147, 149, 180, 194 torture  60–​61, 78–​79, 110–​11, 154–​55, 163, 177, 190, 212, 227, 228–​29, 232, 233, 235, 239, 241, 242–​43, 245, 246–​47, 248–​50, 259, 268, 288–​89, 339, 371, 446–​47, 483, 485–​86, 498–​99, 583, 585, 710–​12, 714–​ 15, 739–​40 women and  150, 221, 357–​58, 360, 365–​68, 372–​73, 374, 375–​76, 379–​81, 452–​55, 470, 490–​91, 495–​96, 507, 583–​84 youth and  19, 40, 163–​64, 221, 360–​61, 365–​66, 371–​67, 376–​77, 379, 395–​96, 452–​ 53, 583–​84 West Germany  121–​22, 652–​53, 654–​57, 659–​ 60, 661 Western Sahara  468–​69, 474–​77, 480, 484–​85 World Bank  461, 480 Zambia (North Rhodesia)  529–​30, 547–​48, 652–​53, 661–​62 Zimbabwe (South Rhodesia)  16–​17, 37, 73–​74, 230, 319, 382, 419–​20, 515–​16, 554, 661–​62 Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU)  37, 652–​53, 661–​62, 665 Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU)  37, 267, 652–​53, 663–​64, 665