Intencionalidad: experiencias endógenas – exógenas [65]

5.5.1 The power of the state idea

Dent expressed in the languages of stateness what the breakdown of the patrimonially networked governed space of Sierra Leone had become. Sets of institutions that demonstrated stateness in the justice and security field – articulated in visible forms of clearly identifiable enforcement – had fragmented. Accordingly, the messy distribution of capital within the justice and security field had generated a plethora of security-enforcing organizations with a multiplicity of effects. Each of them constituted separately-organized assemblages, drawing authority from numerous sources and spaces, including individual streets in Freetown (CDUs) and global political arenas (UN). From de-centered positions of power, a number of actors were thus seeking to lay claim to the legitimate use of force, but were not in in a position to monopolize it.

Even as the ‘functions of state’, i.e., the state system, had apparently collapsed, however, as Dent observed, these were the institutions that continued to be a core stake at stake and a vital source of symbolic and economic capital to be fought over. For instance, actors who built armies of local militias and hunters organized around secret society membership and village safety outside Freetown were simultaneously laying claim to ministerial positions within Government. As an all-important political idea to be fought over, the centrally- governed state thus continued to manifest itself ideationally. However, a collapse in its systemic functions did not mean that the hybrid political formations that had come into existence were, or could be, under consideration as appropriate alternatives.

On the contrary, drawing upon the authority of an explicitly hybrid order was considered incompatible with the concept of a centrally-governed political entity. It expressed an intolerable breakdown of order. Thus, purging the justice and security field through the

criminalization and elimination of hybridity became an important element of the state- building effort. A state was to be built upon the rubble of the collapsed state; the languages of stateness were to mute the plurality of languages of authority that were being articulated. As an important part of detecting, isolating and working upon the state system, a number of hybrid actors considered criminals by external actors needed to be purged from the justice and security field.

5.5.2 Hybridity personified: Norman, Sankoh and Koroma

During the conflict of the 1990s, figures of power derived authority from sitting in government while also heading personalized security apparatuses. One of the central figures embodying that order was Samuel Hinga Norman, who led the mobilization and organization of the Civil Defence Force (CDF) on the national level. The CDF was widely perceived, most notably by the Sierra Leone Army, to be the SLPP government’s de facto security force. The CDF, “Norman’s militia” as Biddle called them, consisted of kamajors, a Mende term for traditional hunters (Keen 2005:90).

Keen (2005:90) notes that the “failings of government troops meant that civilians increasingly looked to their own devices for protection – and specifically to civil defence units.”65 The term kamajors was soon applied to civil defense groups across the country, a collective term for the Kapras and Gbetes among the Temne, the Donsos of Kono District and the Tamaboras of Koinadugu District and so forth (Keen 2005:90; Hoffman 2007:642). Norman constituted the hybrid order brought to perfection, explicitly articulating stateness and public authority simultaneously. As the Regent Chief of Jiama-Bongor Chiefdom, he had built his power base as a key figure in the kamajor movement and was appointed SLPP’s Deputy Minister of Defence from 1998-2002, and subsequently Minister of Interior from 2002-2004 (Fanthorpe 2001:365; Hoffman 2007:642). Many stories

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Keen (2005:90) further explains: “As hunters, Sierra Leone’s kamajors were licensed to carry guns and knew the terrain near their home villages. Traditionally, kamajors had to be at least 30 years old, but as the war progressed, the term ‘kamajor’ was soon being used to describe more broadly-based civil defence organisations which included many younger people and relatively few professional hunters.” The original kamajors were recognized for their ability to enter the forest and confront natural and supernatural beings, including dangerous animals like elephants, leopards and chimpanzees (Leach 1992:40-42). Kamajor rituals have tended to emphasize discipline, loyalty and self-sacrifice – qualities seen as lacking in the rebels and the army (Fithen 1999:196).

circulated about the infighting between the kamajors (and other irregular forces) and the army, incited by events such as the military overthrow of the SLPP in May 1997. Norman, however, was appointed to manage both the kamajors and the armed forces.

RUF leader Foday Sankoh, who was backed by Liberian President Charles Taylor, was not only pardoned of a treason conviction under the 1999 Lomé Peace Agreement, he was granted the status of Vice-President and given the coveted chairmanship of a Commission of Strategic Resources. At the same time, also after Lomé had been signed, the RUF behaved and considered themselves as the only legitimate governing body in the areas under their military control. (The particular way that the RUF was organized behind the frontline has been analyzed in great detail by Peters (2006)).

In collaboration with Sankoh and the RUF, Johnny Paul Koroma led the AFRC coup against the democratically elected SLPP government in 1997. While the AFRC was ‘kicked out’ of Freetown in 1998, as Peter Penfold noted (interview, March 2008), they, together with the RUF, invaded Freetown for the first time during the civil war in January 1999. After Lomé, Koroma was still at large, and eventually fled the country.

This list of actors is not exhaustive – it does not describe all the central actors in the war and their subsequent positions in the security and justice field. But these men, who were all indicted in 2003 by the Special Court, set up to try war criminals in Sierra Leone, are central to my discussion of hybrid orders. As Biddle noted, all three “were around. Don’t forget they were legitimate after Lomé” (Keith Biddle, interview, 2009, France).

Thus, a peace agreement signed by Sankoh of the RUF and Sierra Leone President Kabbah in the capital of Togo on 7 July 1999 was inadvertently constitutive of an attempt to re- establish the state-society split and to articulate figures such as Sankoh of the RUF in ‘languages of stateness’. Through the authority that a peace agreement constitutes, the rebel leader was transformed into a legitimate, governing actor that projected stateness. Sankoh’s access to the state, however, rather than constituting ‘statification’ of the RUF, led to a process of consolidation and the deepening of the very hybridization that Lomé had sought to eradicate.

While Sankoh was now Vice-President of post-Lomé Sierra Leone and in control of the ministry running the diamond industry, he did not speak or act according to expectations. Eventually, the hybrid construction that Lomé had realized and consolidated fell apart and led to the UK military intervention in 2000. Only by military means did a purge of the justice and security field of hybridity seem possible to outside observers. Indeed, only after the UK intervened militarily was the stateness of the state buttressed to the degree where it appeared to gain ground, both in legitimacy and certainly in the capacity to fight a war against the RUF.

In the late 1990s, however, the explicit (and to outsiders, intolerable) hybrid order articulated by actors such as Norman/CDF, Sankoh/RUF and Koroma/AFRC remained. Constitutive of the justice and security field, these three figures did not stand alone. ECOMOG was an active security organization at the time and intended to be a regional peacekeeping force. Primarily Nigerian in its composition, ECOMOG was seen as serving both the self-interest of its individual soldiers (who were allegedly involved in trading diamonds) and the wishes and policies of the Nigerian Government.

All of the armed groups “were running checkpoints and taking money off people”, Biddle recalls, “including the ECOMOG soldiers” (Keith Biddle, interview June 2009). In short, as one internal UK assessment noted in the late 1990s: “The armed forces have virtually ceased to exist.” Indeed, it was suggested that “the power held by the CDF extends in effect to a virtual monopoly of force in rural areas, which would be unchallenged if the ECOMOG force were to withdraw” (UK Government 1999). Norman, Sankoh and Koroma all claimed a significant share of the monopoly over the use of force, drawing on numerous sources of authority to make this claim. Indeed, the ‘war state’ that Sierra Leone had effectively become by the end of the 1990s was very much defined by these figures, certainly not by Kabbah, the democratically elected leader of the state, who was in exile in Conakry, Guinea, until 1998. With the support of the UK, however, this was about to change.

By this time, re-composing the justice and security field through state-building became about purging it of the kind of hybridity represented by these men. State-building standards required that no hybrid authority would be included in the centrally-governed set of

institutions that would constitute the justice and security field. The UK would only act in the name of such a state.

When Biddle became the Inspector-General of Police in Sierra Leone in November 1999, he was personally involved in coordinating the arrests of Norman, Sankoh and Koroma (the latter of whom escaped and was never found). In essence, these arrests continued the process of re-composing the hybrid order and re-establishing symbolic and physical space as the monopoly of state institutions. Thus, a state system was to be put in place that could determine the enforcement of security through the legitimate and capable use of ‘languages of stateness’.

Clare Short articulated the sentiment that hybridity was equal to collapse, anarchy and chaos: “We could not – we, being the British – could not let this fragile, but democratically-elected Government collapse. Now, I don’t think there was much theory behind that” (Clare Short, interview, June 2008). There was, of course, nothing but theory of stateness inherent in how UK actors perceived and acted upon what they experienced in Sierra Leone. For Short and other external actors, state-building was their conceptual articulation of relatively stable orientations and ways of acting. State-building might have appeared ‘un-theoretical’, but it carried with it a strong epistemological outlook on the world, what order looks like and by whom and what it is constituted.

And so, it is doubtful if the UK and other external actors, arriving in Sierra Leone where conflict determined the distribution of capital in the justice and security field, could have articulated what they observed as anything but chaotic, a state of emergency, illegitimate. Indeed, these actors coming in would have had to wage a war with their own epistemologies to accept the hybrid order as legitimate and work with it. Moreover, such an approach would preclude the possibility of establishing a coherent system of regulation, accountability and democratic governance articulated through ‘languages of stateness’. In early 2000, the opportunity for a military intervention arose for the UK. While the Lomé Peace Agreement might have been a milestone in the attempt to make peace in Sierra Leone, the fundamentally hybrid nature of the governing structures, encompassing RUF and AFRC on the one hand and the Kabbah Government on the other, was evident.

Attempts to re-articulate the RUF and the AFRC in languages of stateness had failed. The turning point, and one of the terminal blows to stability, came in early 2000, when people marched to Sankoh’s house to protest RUF activities and approximately 20 demonstrators were shot by RUF supporters. The SLP, led by Biddle at the time, captured Sankoh; he was subsequently handed over to Government Forces and together with several senior RUF commanders taken into custody. The RUF were expelled from Government, which led to a stalemate. It was in this context that the UK intervened militarily.