Formas de rehabilitar [59]

It is difficult to articulate an order of hybridity that is forced upon you. It is a challenge to capture the logic in what appears to be a fundamentally disorganized justice and security field, when habits and dispositions to act in certain ways and schemes of perception are ordered according to and articulated in languages of stateness. Mike Dent, a retired UK Colonel, who arrived in Freetown in June 1999 as a member of a two-man advisory team to the Sierra Leone government’s newly-established Ministry of Defense, did not see any order in the failure of the state, only illegitimate, makeshift expressions of authority. Dent vividly described what he observed upon entering Sierra Leone. “You will appreciate,” he once wrote in an email, “that the situation when we arrived in Freetown in June 1999 was ‘fluid’ and close to anarchic, with little or no effective police force, a

myriad of different armed groups ‘policing’ the city, [and] with ECOMOG63 providing

security” (Mike Dent, email, 2008). He described the reality he had entered:

We found Freetown in complete disarray and still in a state of virtual war. The functions of state had practically collapsed with ministries in confusion and officials lacking clear aims and direction. Most businesses and government offices had been looted and vandalized during the January 1999 AFRC/RUF [rebel] attack and had not been repaired and much of the city’s infrastructure had been destroyed

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It was the civil war in neighboring Liberia that prompted the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a 16-nation group formed in 1975, to set up an armed Monitoring Group – ECOMOG – in 1990. A non-standing military force, ECOMOG was composed of soldiers from the national armies of member states. In practice, Nigeria contributed most troops, material and financial backing. ECOMOG was deployed to Sierra Leone after President Kabbah was overthrown in the second military coup in 1997; it re- instated him in 1998.

or badly damaged. We were taken by car to the Ministry of Defence in Freetown to meet the Deputy Minister of Defence. On the journey from our accommodation, we passed through seven checkpoints manned by various groups of armed persons. From their dress it was difficult to ascertain if they were military, civilian, police or all three! The rule of law and order appeared to have broken down completely (Mike Dent, notes, 2008).

An order articulated by any standards other than stateness was not available to Dent. The symbolic appellation of stateness through law and legal discourse had vanished, and permanent signs and symbols such as buildings and uniformed personnel did not clearly express the stateness of the state. In the midst of conflict, the core language of governance, centering around territorial sovereignty and security forces, had morphed into indistinct assemblages. Dent continued:

There was no water, electricity or other public services operating in the city. There were also large numbers of armed military, SLA [Sierra Leone Army] and ECOMOG, paramilitary Special Security Division (SSD) Police, civilians and CDF

[Civil Defence Force],64 roaming the city, occupying buildings, manning

checkpoints throughout the town using threats of violence to extort money from the populace to permit free-passage. The SLP force was totally ineffective, untrusted (sic) and seemingly corrupt at every level. The SLA was commanded and controlled by Nigerian officers, who, it was alleged, were misappropriating cash, supplies and equipment for their own personal gain. There were no communication links to towns outside Freetown other than via radio and satellite telephone and no safe road access to other parts of the country beyond Masiaka (Mike Dent, notes, 2008).

From Dent’s perspective, from the perspective of someone who had come to lead a state- building process, this was what failure looked like.

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The CDF was a group of local militias comprised of Kamajors, Donsos, Gbethis, Kapras, Tamaboros and from the Freetown peninsula, the Organized Body of Hunting Societies that used methods similar to the RUF to fight fire with fire.

5.4.1 The order of hybrid chaos

In the context of the war, a fundamental overhaul of the distribution of power within the justice and security field had occurred. This did not mean that an order did not exist, but the order that Dent observed was the rule of anarchy. In Freetown, civilians organized neighborhood security organizations street-by-street, so-called Civil Defense Units (CDU), as explained by Papa Ali, who lived in Freetown during the war, and had come to mine in Peyima in the 2000s where I met him. Having been a CDU commander, Ali explained that this system of self-protection had been organized out of sheer necessity: “Just to defend our area and properties because the rebels, when they drove the rebels out of the city [in 1999], they come and do some game, thief, and other things” (Papa Ali, interview, February 2009).

While Dent saw hybridity as chaos represented by consecutive checkpoints manned by unidentifiable security actors, Papa Ali was engaged in establishing localized spaces of order. This order however, was not articulated in languages of stateness, but in a kind of public authority in which Dent was dyslexic. “So the soldier joined the rebels,” Papa Ali explained, “so we stole the security. You are a civilian; the army is there to secure the civilians, to secure the state. But if the army turns against the state, who is to be security?” To Papa Ali, security – and insecurity – was something tangible to be produced, and if he did not produce it himself, somebody else would, and perhaps use it against him.

Keith Biddle, who in 1999 was head of UK-funded police programs in Sierra Leone and who would go on to become a central figure in re-establishing institutions to articulate an order of stateness as Inspector General of Police, regarded the CDUs as “extortion checkpoints.” The absence of what Biddle considered functioning state institutions led civilians to take the law into their own hands. Physical brutality was indeed reported at the checkpoints, as it was across the country, where forces wearing uniforms tying them to the state system and idea were in charge (Biddle, interview, June 2009).

People – and guns – could and did move freely into Freetown; in fact, the checkpoints were so porous that they were said to facilitate the particularly brutal attacks on the city that occurred in 1999-2000. Kellie Conteh, who became National Security Coordinator after the

war had ended, explained this from his perspective as a young Colonel in the army in the mid-1990s:

It came out clearly that we should begin to try and protect our towns by having task forces. They should be paying attention to attacks coming in and the size of the attack, the approach it is taking, and the kind of weapons they’re having. I prepared something like that for Freetown. I wrote a memo to the force commander to say through all my visitations upcountry I am concerned that Freetown, especially with the perennial darkness in Freetown [due to lack of electricity], we don’t seem to have any unit in place to counter attacks. I was even thinking of rebel attack in Freetown. You saw it everywhere they’ll just spring up and boom! You would hear they’ve attacked Bo, boom! You’ll hear they’ve attacked Kenema, boom! They’ve attacked another place.

When I come back from the provinces in the night you find these big trucks coming into the Freetown dark. The police at the checkpoints are playing the same old game. They’ll just take from the driver whatever they can get and let him go (Kellie Conteh, interview, 2008).

Conteh, a man whose authority was generated by his being an army officer, articulated what Dent observed: namely the inability of those individuals claiming to represent ‘the state’ to act accordingly. The order established in the dis-articulation of the ‘languages of stateness’ was recognized by external advisors as chaos, rather than as the articulation of the type of public authority that emerged in the absence of permanent and visible military and police forces.

Biddle, Dent and Conteh all expressed what Andersen (2011:39) generally refers to as the “policy logic” of state failure: the state system within the internationally-defined territory of Sierra Leone had ceased to fulfill its functions, its institutions had collapsed. Sierra Leone had descended into chaos and anarchy. The aim of the external actors that came to Sierra Leone in support of President Kabbah and his government became one of detecting, isolating and working upon the armed forces, the police and intelligence services – all state organizations operating in the justice and security field.

However, re-composing the justice and security field was not only a matter of instituting a number of programs under the label of SSR. It also became a process of marginalizing, ignoring or eliminating the variety of hybrid organizational forms that were either criminalized or did not fit easily in the category of ‘state institutions and actors’.