Forced Migration and Armed Conflict
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Forced Migration and Armed Conflict An Analytical Framework and a Case Study of Refugee-Warriors in Guinea Felix Gerdes Arbeitspapier Nr. 1 / 2006 Universität Hamburg - IPW Forschungsstelle Kriege, Research Unit of Wars, Rüstung und Entwicklung Armament and Development i Anschrift und Bezugsadresse Universität Hamburg - IPW Forschungsstelle Kriege, Rüstung und Entwicklung Allende-Platz 1 D - 20146 Hamburg Telefon: 040/42838-3689 Fax: 040/42838-2460 http://www.akuf.de ISSN 1432 - 8283 ii About the Author Felix Gerdes is a staff member of the Research Unit of Wars, Armament and Development. He is a graduate political scientist and currently prepares a PhD thesis on the political economy of peace-building and democratisation. His areas of interest are Africa and South-East Asia. Contact Details Tel.: (+49 179) 772 17 62 Email: [email protected] Abstract This paper deals with the phenomenon of militarised refugee camps and settlements. Firstly an analytical framework drawing on Norbert Elias’ sociological theory is estab- lished. Society is understood as the interplay of political, economic and symbolic reproduc- tion. Contradictions in these three dimensions form the background of organised armed conflict. Using the formula of “self-perpetuation of warfare”, the author shows that mas- sive violence and consequent flight sharpen existing contradictions. Flight represents the exclusion of certain groups from political, economic and symbolic systems of reproduction in the home country. Processes of marginalisation are frequently repeated in the host coun- try. Exclusion and marginalisation produce motivations to engage in armed conflict. Yet motivations need to be complemented by organisational capacities of armed actors in order to translate into actual fighting. The author argues that certain characteristics of refugee situations support the organisational capacities of rebel groups. The framework is applied in a case study of the refugee crisis in Guinea. Secondly, it is shown that the problem of militarised refugee populations is concentrated in a few countries in Africa and the Middle East. Then the author examines the impact of humanitarian aid and the host state in the cases of Israel/Palestine and the Great Lakes Re- gion of Central Africa. Humanitarian aid may significantly increase capacities of rebel groups but tends to be a minor factor. The decisive variable is the host state. The analysis links the phenomenon of refugee-warriors to a common characteristic of the host states: instability and heavy informalisation of politics. In the quest for power, host state actors try to increase their power resources by establishing alliances with armed refugee actors. Countries in which refugee-warriors can become active are typically those where the ruling regime faces strong opposition, where political structures are authoritarian and competition for power is hardly institutionalised, and where informal political structures extend into the security sector. iii INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................... 1 1 REFUGEES AND SELF-SUSTAINING WARFARE ..................................... 12 1.1 Refugees and Political Reproduction............................................................................................. 17 1.2 Refugees and Material Reproduction............................................................................................ 23 1.3 Refugees and Symbolic Reproduction........................................................................................... 31 1.4 Implications for the Social Order of Refugee-Warriors .............................................................. 34 2 HOST STATES, HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE, AND REFUGEES IN ARMS................................................................................................................... 37 2.1 Refugees in Arms: Empirical Evidence......................................................................................... 38 2.2 Host States, Refugees and Trans-national Political Networks .................................................... 43 2.2.1 Palestinian Refugees and their Host States................................................................................... 44 2.2.2 Refugees and their Host States in the Great Lakes Region .......................................................... 48 2.3 The International Humanitarian Community and Militarised Refugee Camps ....................... 53 2.3.1 Humanitarian Assistance to Palestinian Refugees........................................................................ 57 2.3.2 Humanitarian Refugee Assistance in Kivu (Zaire/DR Congo)..................................................... 61 3 CASE STUDY: REFUGEE MIGRATION IN WEST AFRICA: LIBERIA, SIERRA LEONE, AND GUINEA.......................................................................... 69 3.1 Country of Origin: Liberia............................................................................................................. 69 3.1.1 Background of the War ................................................................................................................ 69 3.1.2 Refugees, Interests and Strategies in the Liberian Civil War ....................................................... 71 3.1.3 Host Country: Sierra Leone.......................................................................................................... 74 3.2 Country of Origin: Sierra Leone ................................................................................................... 76 3.2.1 Background of the War ................................................................................................................ 76 3.2.2 Strategies, Tactics of Warfare and Re-production of a Social Basis ............................................ 77 3.3 Host Country: Republic of Guinea ................................................................................................ 79 3.3.1 General Background..................................................................................................................... 79 3.3.2 Guinea, Regional Relations, and the Refugees............................................................................. 81 3.3.3 Refugee Camps, the Humanitarian System and the International Community ............................ 86 iv 3.4 Domestic Aspects............................................................................................................................. 92 3.4.1 Violence and Images of Refugees and Guineans ......................................................................... 92 3.4.2 The Impact of the Refugee Influx on the National Political Scene .............................................. 97 3.4.3 The Economic Impact of the Refugee Influx: Winners and Losers............................................ 100 3.5 The Refugee Crisis and Identity Formation ............................................................................... 106 3.5.1 Refugee-Related Violence in Guinea ......................................................................................... 110 3.6 Conclusion: Refugees in Guinea and Political Violence............................................................. 115 4 GENERAL CONCLUSION.......................................................................... 117 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................ 124 ABBREVIATIONS.............................................................................................. 136 v Introduction In 1994, faced with an advancing guerrilla movement made up of second and third genera- tion refugees, the Rwandan regime initiated massacres of the country’s ethnic Tutsi popu- lation that were to go down in history as the third genocide of the 20 th century. Within less than three months, some 800,000 civilians were killed. The government troops were even- tually forced to retreat and took with them some two million civilian refugees. Among the roughly one million refugees who fled to eastern Zaire were numerous government offi- cials as well as between 50,000 and 65,000 remaining members of the Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and the Interahamwe militia, the main perpetrators of the genocide (Emizet 2000:165). 1 They immediately regrouped in the vast refugee camps in the border region and soon started carrying out cross-border attacks on Rwanda. In the camps openly controlled by militia, humanitarian assistance became the main source of revenue within the insurgents’ economy, benefiting them both by ensuring supplies and controlling the civilian refugee population. Due to the unwillingness and incapability of the Zairian gov- ernment and the international community to intervene, the new Rwandan army and an al- lied Zairian rebel group invaded the country’s eastern Kivu provinces in 1996, closing down the refugee camps and triggering a conflict that two years later took on an extended regional dimension, involving at least five states. The events in eastern Zaire triggered severe criticism of humanitarian refugee aid (Luttwak 1999, cf. Macrae 1998), criticism which has to be seen in the context of a parallel shift of scholarly attention to the causes of war. For most of the Cold War period, the concept of proxy wars which explained armed warfare within or among Third World states as results of the international bipolar order had been dominant. When wars on the periphery did not come to an end after the fall