How tyrants fall and how.., p.11
How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive, page 11
Sometimes, even a single corporate ‘benefactor’ can make a huge difference. In the early 1980s, the champagne corks must have popped at Mannesmann HQ. The German conglomerate had just won a $160-million contract to build 278 kilometres of pipeline from Colombia’s oilfields to the Caribbean coast. There were only three small problems: first, the pipeline had to be built through the Andes mountains. Okay, that’s an engineering problem the Germans could solve. Second, the Marxist-Leninist National Liberation Army (ELN) was active in the area. Trickier. Lastly, Mannesmann was supposed to finish the project in a year.36 It was quite a task.
Then one of the German engineers and two of his Colombian colleagues were kidnapped and the company’s managers had a decision to make: would they strike a deal with the rebels to get their employees back and stand a chance of finishing the project on time, or would they try their best to do the work they were hired to do without such an arrangement? Neither was a great option. Making a deal with the rebels would mean paying a lot of money to criminals who had just abducted colleagues; not paying it could lead to their colleagues’ deaths and endanger the entire pipeline.
In the end, the company reportedly struck a deal. According to a former manager working on the project, they paid millions in ransom.37 According to the rebel leader, even those millions were only one part of a series of payments the ELN received from Mannesmann. The relationship became so close that the company was issued with stickers for their cars and lorries. When a Mannesmann lorry drove through a remote settlement, these stickers alerted villagers to the fact that the vehicle was ‘protected’ by the ELN. This benefited the ELN, in that the stickers also made known to the villagers that the ELN was bringing money into the region.38 Mannesmann managed to complete the contract, but the ELN, fuelled by German money, went from strength to strength. The rebels would later say that it allowed the group to grow by 500 per cent.39
Those are the ‘usual’ ways of financing a rebellion. More unorthodox ways exist, such as those that political scientist Michael L. Ross calls ‘booty futures’. When they are not funding insurgencies, futures are contracts in which one party agrees to buy an asset at a specified time in the future. One of the advantages of these types of contracts is that they can reduce volatility. Imagine an airline company that is worried by fluctuating kerosene prices, for example. The company’s managers know that they need to buy a certain amount of fuel in June next year because they know how many flights the company usually does when people go on holiday. If the airline’s managers think the price of fuel might go up a lot by then, they can lock in the price now and be sure of what they are going to pay.
Obviously, this type of instrument can be used not only to safeguard against risk but also to speculate. This is where the rebels come in. But instead of entering into a legal agreement through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to sell a fixed amount of kerosene by next summer, rebels can try to sell a future for the ‘booty’ they have yet to capture. Through that, they can make the capture more likely. This might sound like something from the Golden Age of Piracy, but it’s a little more recent.
Congo’s president Pascal Lissouba feared that his predecessor, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, wanted to become president again. Worryingly for Lissouba, Sassou had a private militia. When Lissouba sent government forces to surround Sassou’s private compound, his militia fought back and the civil war began.40 The funding for Sassou’s militia reportedly came in part from the sale of future exploitation of Congo’s oil to the French company Elf-Aquitaine. Sassou supposedly received $150 million and the firm might have helped him buy arms.41
Hard to believe as it is, this episode occurred in 1997.
Whether it be voluntary fighters, forced recruits, diamonds or even booty futures, the rebels now have fighters, arms and enough money to keep the insurgents marching. What they still need in order to topple the tyrant is a place to hide. This is where geography plays a role. If you’re near a map, take a look at continental Europe, specifically the Netherlands. Obviously, the Netherlands has been a liberal democracy for decades – the Dutch are among the freest people in the world. But let’s say a sizeable number of Dutch people decide to wage an insurgency on account of some grievance or other. How would that work? It wouldn’t. Fighting an insurgency in Holland (or in Friesland or in Limburg) would be all but impossible.
Much of the reason this is because hiding is impossible. Driving from Groningen to Eindhoven takes less than three hours and the country’s widest point is perhaps two hundred kilometres at most. While there is a mountain of some nine hundred metres within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, it’s in the country’s overseas territory in the Caribbean. On the mainland, there are no jungles and no remote areas beyond the control of the central government. You could of course try to hide in a neighbouring country. But as it stands, the Netherlands borders on Germany and Belgium, and neither Berlin nor Brussels is likely to be particularly supportive once told that you’re planning to march on the Binnenhof. As a result, a Dutch insurgency wouldn’t last a day against the Royal Netherlands Army.
It’s not true to say that all small, flat and easily accessible countries are governed by democrats, but it’s a fact that many autocrats operate in countries that look nothing like the Netherlands. When the Tajik government faced a civil war in 1992 after the Soviet Union imploded, one of its big problems was that the opposition was difficult to pursue because large tracts of the country were covered in snow-capped mountains. The Ismoil Somoni Peak (Stalin Peak until 1962, then Communism Peak until the late 1990s) in Tajikistan has an elevation of 7,495 metres, making it more than twenty-three times higher than the highest ‘mountain’ in the European Netherlands. And obviously, Ismoil Somoni Peak doesn’t stand in isolation – Tajikistan is full of mountains which are difficult to access for outsiders (or even the central government). They were the perfect hiding place not just for fighters but also for their Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades. Insurgencies work best when the rebels are likely to win a game of hide-and-seek with the government.
Sometimes, not only is a country remote, it borders on other countries which are remote as well. Going back to the Netherlands: Belgium is densely populated, and so are at least some of Germany’s regions on the Dutch border. In the case of a hypothetical Dutch rebellion, that would make it extremely difficult to traffic weapons or fighters. But in a country such as the Central African Republic, the government has to contend with a doubly difficult situation. The eastern part of the Central African Republic is underdeveloped and difficult for the central government to reach because of the geography and lack of infrastructure. On top of that, it is surrounded by regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Sudan and Chad which are themselves difficult to access. Given the porous borders and extent of the problems in neighbouring areas, that part of the country is almost impossible to control from the capital Bangui. Even the smallest armed opposition group can carve out a little fiefdom for itself and gradually that slice of land can serve as a springboard to a serious challenge.
In large part, civil wars are a contest between the rebels and the government as to who can win over the populace. Civilians are a resource that provides labour, opportunities for ‘taxation’ and intelligence to friendly troops – or the enemy. Because they are so important, both government and insurgents want to prevent them ‘defecting’ to the other side. That’s a particular concern in contested territories in which civilians regularly come into contact with both sides.42 And when dealing with that problem, insurgents often have a number of advantages. Government troops tend to be drawn from around the country. When their mission is up or the government changes, they leave. Rebels may well be local in the first place and may never leave. That permanence is an advantage when trying to prevent civilians from defecting. Another disadvantage for governments, both democratic and non-democratic, is that they tend to be more constrained when it comes to violence than rebels.43 There’s a story from the Algerian Civil War about an old man, who, when arrested by the French army for having sawn off some telegraph poles, explains why he has done such a thing:
Sir, the French come and tell me: you mustn’t saw off poles; if you do, you go to prison. I say to myself: I don’t want to go to prison, I won’t do it. The French leave. At night, the rebel comes and says: saw off the poles from here to there. I answer: no, the French would put me into prison. The rebel tells me: you cut the poles or I cut your throat. I calculate: if I don’t cut the poles, he’ll surely cut my throat; he has done it to others, in the next village. I prefer going to prison. So, Sir, I cut the poles; you caught me; put me in prison.44
This was a war in which French soldiers were exceptionally brutal. They razed villages, tortured, killed. But in the end, the rebel threat to that old man was simply more credible so he did what any rational person would do: he cut the poles.
But violence, even when it is brutal, is most effective when it is discriminate.45 If those who cut the poles receive no more punishment than those who do not, the locals might as well start cutting poles. To prevent that, the tyrant’s soldiers and the rebel army have to work out who is a ‘traitor’ and who serves the cause. Because of their permanence, connection to the local community and capacity for violence, this is easier for insurgents than it is for the government troops who might not even speak the local language.
As we can see, insurgents have a number of advantages against the tyrant on the battlefield. But importantly, rebels can topple tyrants even if they don’t succeed in beating the regime’s military. Just like rebels, tyrants need people, money and guns to keep fighting.46 People are relatively easy to come by if you already have an established fighting force – but rebels can sever the flow of money and weapons to the regime.
Both tend to depend, at least in some respects, on the tyrant’s ‘good’ standing. When rebels force the tyrant to fight a bloody civil war in which thousands of innocent civilians get killed, they can turn the incumbent into an international pariah.
No sanction will make it impossible to acquire weapons because someone will always sell them, but sanctions can ensure that weapons come at a premium, and that further reduces the effectiveness of a military that’s probably already proving ineffective. Sanctions can also cause hardship for the population, although that’s usually of little concern to autocrats. From their perspective, the main issue is that they risk running into a redistribution problem when foreign aid gets cut or trade routes are frozen due to civil war. Given that tyrants stay in power by dividing up a cake among the hungry elites that surround them, they generally don’t want that cake to be reduced.
There’s another problem that tyrants can run into even if the cake isn’t reduced. In some conflicts, dictators are able to buy off rebel groups with cash or patronage in the event that suppressing them is either too costly or simply impossible.47 If it’s just the rebels and the dictatorship involved, the considerations for either party aren’t too difficult. Is it better to settle (for a price) – the path of least resistance? Or is it preferable to fight? With these being the only options, the price to be paid for the rebels’ ‘allegiance’ is comparatively low. Unfortunately for modern tyrants, twenty-first-century civil wars tend to be incredibly messy and outsiders are almost always involved. Perhaps a neighbouring country has an economic interest in the conflict or they think a rebellion against the next-door neighbour is a good chance to get rid of a hostile leader they’ve long disliked. Now that this outside power is involved, a two-way negotiation between the dictator and the rebel commander turns into an auction. With the rebel commander able to choose to fight for the dictator, or the foreign power, or neither of them, the price the dictatorship has to pay automatically goes up. In some cases, this has led to truly bizarre outcomes.
These mechanisms were at work during the Darfur conflict of 2003 in western Sudan. When the level of unrest grew during 2002, the Sudanese regime made a miscalculation when they thought that they could buy off armed groups on the cheap. The result was a war for which neither the insurgents nor the government were prepared. Then, because of the violence, other powers became interested. But once peace negotiations began, they didn’t succeed in resolving the conflict. Instead, explains Alex de Waal, they ‘served perversely to increase political competition, lower the barriers for new entrepreneurs to enter the market, and (in the paradox of security markets) further inflate the price of loyalty’.48 This obviously doesn’t apply to every civil war and every rebel group but it does demonstrate that tyrants can run into trouble even if the size of the ‘cake’ never gets smaller. It’s already problematic enough for them if they have to cut bigger pieces.
All these problems are accentuated by corruption. Most authoritarian systems of government evolve around corruption, and the military is no different – it’s an institution where money is to be skimmed off ammunition, salaries and guns. But the two are related: risking your life on a low salary to fight on behalf of an uninspiring autocracy is one thing, but to do it while your commanders steal the very equipment you need to survive? That’s another.
Rebel movements are extremely difficult to defeat. Even after suffering severe casualties, they can survive, zombie-like, for a very long time. And as the wars drag on, the costs mount – not just for the people doing the fighting, but for countries as a whole.
On the morning of 21 March 2018, I was in the Beqaa Valley, a stunningly beautiful part of Lebanon wedged between Mount Lebanon and the anti-Lebanon mountains. Beyond the range to the east lay Assad’s Syria. I was sitting on the floor in a large tent, listening to a woman talk about her truly desperate situation. The woman and her immediate family had left their hometown in Syria because of the devastating civil war that Bashar al-Assad was waging after he decided that he would rather burn the country to the ground than leave office. Now she was in an informal refugee camp with her young children. The tents had carpets, electricity, and people could sleep on mattresses. But outside the white United Nations tarpaulin that kept families dry, the ground wasn’t paved. I dreaded to think what life was like there when it rained.
The woman and her children were safe in a sense, but they also had no security. Basic healthcare was available, but little beyond this. There was barely enough money to make ends meet. And while her husband had made it to Europe, there was no guarantee that she and the children would be able to follow in the immediate future. Returning to Syria wasn’t an option either because all that awaited them would be ruins, repression and yet more violence. So they were stuck in a place where they didn’t want to be, because of a war they had no part in waging.
On the flight home, I contemplated the fact that the small Syrian family I had met that day were just three of millions of Syrians who had paid the price for Assad’s civil war. Turkey alone hosts more than three million Syrians; Lebanon, almost eight hundred thousand. With over three hundred thousand civilians killed and fourteen million displaced, the Syrian civil war is one of the biggest tragedies of a generation.49
Some of these conflicts are so traumatic that they continue to play an outsized role in the public imagination for hundreds or even thousands of years after they end. In Chinese politics today, for example, the Warring States Period that happened some two thousand years ago continues to be a symbol for chaos.
But as devastating as these conflicts can be, they don’t necessarily lead to the fall of tyrants. Henry Kissinger had it wrong when he said ‘the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.’50 In fact, there are plenty of insurgents who have waged guerrilla war for decades without ever coming close to winning. Using drug money, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have engaged in a relentless struggle against the central government in Bogotá for decades. They have carried out surprise attacks, fought battles, bombed civilians and taken politicians hostage. In total, the war has perhaps cost more than two hundred thousand lives.51 FARC didn’t lose, yet they eventually signed a ceasefire accord with Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos. It was highly controversial at the time and in a way a major achievement for FARC – but was it victory? No, it was not and it’s not an isolated case.
Evidently, it’s not sufficient for rebels simply to keep fighting to kill off governments. They need to be able to do more than that: win on the battlefield or beat the regime some other way. Only then does the tyrant fall. The despot’s vulnerability off the battlefield largely depends on his susceptibility to outside pressure, and some countries are more vulnerable to outside influence than others. Does the regime have access to an indigenous arms industry that can keep pumping out weapons when foreign suppliers stop their deliveries? Can the dictatorship sell something at high prices even while it stands accused of committing crimes against humanity? Can the economy survive without foreign aid? If the answer to all three questions is yes, it will probably be extremely difficult to beat the regime. As depressing as it is, it will probably keep on fighting – either because it can sustain the fight itself or because others find it valuable and so protect it.
One example of the latter is Chad’s Déby. When he came to power in 1982, it was partly because Paris ordered French troops in the country to stand by as Déby’s rebel army marched on the capital. At the time, the French foreign minister said: ‘The times have passed when France would pick governments or change governments and would maintain others when it so wished.’52 That was a blatant lie. The French had previously protected Habré, but he had become a little too close to the United States for Paris’s liking, and was therefore not worthy of French protection anymore.53 Things were vastly different when Déby was in power. As late as 2019, French pilots flying French jets took to the air to bomb rebels on Déby’s behalf.54 When the French foreign minister was asked what was going on, he explicitly said France was intervening to protect the regime from a potential coup d’état.55 If that isn’t picking and choosing governments, what is?
