Netters:
Our troubles at home appear, somewhat unusually, in a rather extended Commentary in the December 29, 1995 issue of *The Times Literary Supplement* (TLS), pp. 13-14. Titled, "When War Itself Is Privatized," it carries as subtitle, "The Twisted Logic that Makes Violence Worthwhile in Sierra Leone." The writer is David Keen.
Graphic: Small Boy with what looks to be an AK47; caption: "A child soldier on the Sierra Leone, Liberian border, May 1995."
Two premises:
i. Contemporary civil wars in Africa deviate from the traditional model of two competing professional teams with civilians as bystanders. Too often the response of journalists and other commentators has been to take refuge in notions of "mindless violence" and "chaos". Like illness and madness, war comes to represent a kind of breakdown from which there can be few if any benefits. It may be noted, however, that advances in the study and treatment of infectious disease came with a recognition that disease was not simply the breakdown of a particular system, but a struggle between competing organisms. In other words, disease could have functions as well as causes; what was bad for the body might be good for the germ...
ii. Consider the case of Sierra Leone, from where I have recently returned. War broken out in 1991 in the south and east of the country. The initial threat appeared a weak one--rather a small number of rebels, with support from the Charles Taylor faction in Liberia and from mercenaries in Burkina Faso. Nearly all the Sierra Leoneans I talked with said that the threat could have been nipped in the bud if it had been opposed systematically and in a measured way by the government. Most feel it still could be... However, what the rebels encountered was a society containing significant elements that were ready to make use of violence for a variety of ends, most of them economic....
Note: The two premises are never quite effectively meshed; the commentary is a reasonable enough rehearsal of the (un)productive (con)fusions of rebel & soldier. The economic violence premise receives perhaps its most extravagant formulation with:
"However, many Sierra Leoneans see [forced displacement] and other evacuations as a kind of joint (rebel/rogue-govt-soldier) venture designed to depopulate resource-rich areas."
2. The TLS issues also has Alex DeWaal's review essay of Nine Books on the Somali situation. Essay title: "Hope Not Restored"--by Alex de Waal; pp. 11-12.
An intriguing opening premise:
"Joseph Heller prefaced early editions of *Catch-22* with the remark that all the events in the boo were based on reality but had been changed to make them more believable. Life in Somalia in the 1980s and 90s had had a similar character of being incredible in the literal sense, a through the looking world in which illusion and reality have touched."
Note: It's a bit too clever--for it makes too much metaphor out of the pragmatic machinations and bruta facta geopolitics within which Waal actually grounds his observations. As in:
"What passed for `normality' in modern Somalia was a monstrous aberration [disease metaphor, again?] born of strategic and historical accident. In the 1980s, the United States and Italy created an aid-supported state, in which their client prevented any form of popular accountability."
NOTE: Seems to be rather facile to embed all this in a looking-glass/Alice-in-Wonderland world. Mythology and joke tend to be just around the corner when this happens, I suspect. And then, it just might make "accountability" and resolution in historical time and space a bit less easy to conceive of? "Once upon a time" is rather a tricky place to actually get to.....
Stay well; stay in touch. Eljay.