Ethnic Cleansing as Military Strategy: a Study of Restraint Nils H¨agerdal August, 2016 Abstract Although many armed groups understand that ethnic cleansing is a powerful mili- tary strategy, they also face strong incentives to moderate its use. Militias can resolve this problem by discriminating between neutral and disloyal non-coethnics and leav- ing the former in place. They are better able to do so in intermixed areas than in homogenous, non-coethnic enclaves, because loyal coethnics can provide combatants with intelligence about their local environs. I elaborate and test this argument using extensive interviews and an original data set on the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990, which shows that displacement was less comprehensive than commonly imagined. 1 Table Of Contents Introduction: Ethnic Cleansing in Lebanon Chapter 1 { From Conventional Wisdom to Empirical Puzzle Chapter 2 { Ethnic Cleansing as Military Strategy Chapter 3 { Demographics, Migration and Violence Chapter 4 { Militias in Lebanon Chapter 5 { Ethnicity and Other Information Conclusion: Lessons from Lebanon Appendix: Technical Supplement to Chapter 3 Bibliography 2 Chapter Outline Chapter 1 challenges the established literature which casts ethnic cleansing as a maximiza- tion problem where perpetrators with finite military capabilities seek to maximize displace- ment for either ideological or strategic reasons. Why do militants perpetrate ethnic cleansing and how do they implement the policy at the strategic and tactical level? I introduce the case study and show how variation in wartime violence and displacement in Lebanon repre- sents an empirical puzzle which forces us to rethink the maximization framework. Chapter 2 develops my central argument: even when ethnic cleansing is a powerful mil- itary strategy, many militants still face both ideological and strategic incentives to exercise restraint. To moderate violence and displacement { by discriminating between neutral and hostile individuals { an armed organization needs detailed information about non-coethnics. I show how militias which mobilize extensive pre-war civilian organizations, such as political parties, can tap into local sources of intelligence about non-coethnics in intermixed areas and employ violence selectively. Conversely, homogenous non-coethnic enclaves provide fewer op- portunities to gather intelligence and are more likely targets for ethnic cleansing. Chapter 3 addresses data and quantitative methods and explains how I construct a nationwide data set covering over 1,400 rural villages or urban neighborhoods. The data shows that selective violence was more common in demographically intermixed villages or neighborhoods while ethnic cleansing predominantly occurred in homogenous ones. Robust- ness checks confirm that the results do not stem merely from the presence of particular sub-groups, such as Maronite Catholics or Palestinians, or from spatial autocorrelation. Chapter 4 provides an analytic narrative of how militias emerged, which explains how they gained impressive intelligence capabilities in areas where local civilians contributed to the war effort across a range of military and logistical functions. Most communities relied heavily on civilians; in 1975 only the PLO maintained a professional military fighting force, and it still often benefited from local intelligence from allied Lebanese political parties. Chapter 5 contains a structured comparison of select locations to establish mechanisms connecting demographics to violence. I argue that the role of ethnicity in civil wars can vary even within the same conflict. In areas where militants have poor access to local intelligence they might treat ethnicity as a proxy for political loyalties in ways that they do not need to do in other areas where they better information about local non-coethnics. Future research should study militia intelligence capabilities in more detail. 3 Chapter 2 - Ethnic Cleansing as Military Strategy What do we mean by the defeat of the enemy? Simply the destruction of his forces, whether by death, injury, or any other means | either completely or enough to make him stop fighting. Carl von Clausewitz, On War Introduction In January 1976 Christian forces attacked the Karantina slum area in Beirut and razed it to the ground.1 Most residents { who were primarily Sunni { survived the attack but were not allowed to stay. Instead, they were placed on trucks and buses and transported to the front- lines. Christian leaders telephoned Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat and at a pre-arranged time the combatants observed a brief cease-fire so that civilians could cross on foot into permanent exile in PLO-controlled territory. Yet Sunni residents in the nearby Ashrafiyeh neighborhood somehow escaped this treatment even though the area was controlled by the same Christian militia groups and just as close to the frontlines. Records indicate that a small number of Sunnis chose to leave but that a large majority remained. The local mosque was open for Friday prayers every single week throughout fifteen years of civil war. We observe similar patterns in PLO-controlled areas. Within days of the Karantina attack Palestinian and left-wing forces overran the mostly Christian coastal town of Damour where the civilians \were lined up against the walls of their homes and sprayed with machine-gun fire” before the perpetrators went on to demolish the local church and desecrate its ceme- tery.2 Yet the nearby town of Deir el-Qamar had a similar number of Christian residents and was entirely spared from violence. In addition, both Christian militias and the PLO controlled neighborhoods where certain individual members of the other community were 1The best accounts of the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon are Kamal Salibi, Crossroads to Civil War: Lebanon, 1958-1976 (Delmar: Caravan Books, 1976) and Farid el Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 1967-1975 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 2Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (New York: Atheneum, 1990), p. 99 4 assassinated while the majority was not and typically remained in place throughout the war. How can we understand this variation in outcomes?3 Existing work mostly studies ethnic cleansing as a maximization problem where an armed organization tries to maximize displacement of non-coethnics but faces constraints on its military capabilities.4 The desire to maximize displacement can stem from ideological claims to territory, but can also be a powerful military strategy to 'catch the fish by draining the sea'. However, I show that both ideology and strategy can also provide powerful incentives to exercise restraint. While some ethnic militants have an ideological preference for communal self-determination, other ethnic militants seek primarily to alter the social contract in a plural society and still view their non-coethnics as fellow citizens. Likewise, some militants face compelling strategic reasons to ethnically cleanse their territory but others find that excessive violence in fact undermines their military and political prospects. The key to moderating violence and displacement is to acquire more detailed information about your opponents, but most existing work studies armed organizations who are very poorly informed about local conditions in their theater of operations. The brutality of Russian counterinsurgency stems precisely from its inability to distinguish civilians from militants; the image of American farm boys navigating Iraqi tribal politics would be comical, if not for the gravity of the situation. Conversely, I find that the Lebanese militias were particularly well-informed about their surroundings. Most militias emerged when political leaders mobilized existing civilian organizations, such as political parties, and primarily operated in areas where they could count on local residents to participate in its operations. 3There is little in the way of an established explanation in the literature. Stathis Kalyvas and Matthew Kocher, \Ethnic Cleavages and Irregular War: Iraq and Vietnam", Politics & Society, 35(2), 2007 argue that “full-fledged ethnic war of the Lebanese or Bosnian type" of \massive proportions and comprehensive extent" are rare exceptional cases where entrepreneurs of violence rally and mobilize entire ethnic communities and spark \communal civil war" that split a country into homogenous enclaves. This explanation appears influenced by an outdated historiography of the conflict and fails not only to explain, but even to acknowledge, geographic variation in outcomes. 4The United Nations defines ethnic cleansing as \a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic territory": see Final Report of the Commission of Experts established pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (United Nations, 1994), paragraph 130. In these pages I use the terms \ethnic" and \sectarian" interchangeably as the former is more common in the literature on conflict and violence while the latter is more common in discussions about the Arab world in general and Lebanon in particular. Both terms refer to social identities that are perceived as ascriptive and descent-based categories that individuals cannot easily manipulate or change. See Kanchan Chandra, \What is Ethnic Identity and Does It Matter?", Annual Review of Political Science, 9, 2006 and Melani Cammett, Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism