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Opinions expressed in this column are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of SW.
The Nature of Warlordism:Insights and Analysis. By:Abdirizak Adam Hassan (Durqun) Ottawa, Ontario. Canada Email:ceaser24@hotmail.com
Warlordism as a paradigm is not a recent
phenomenon to the field of factional rivalry and power politics. Many
political philosophers wrote extensively on this condition of state
absence and lawlessness. Thomas Hobbes, an English political
philosopher of 17th-century described such a scenario as "hell on
earth", and life becomes " nasty, brutish and short".
Others Thought such a condition of life as "unthinkable, natural
and barbaric" (John Locke), as "the day of the
cannibal, Zero Hour, revealing the real man" ( Fredrick Hegel),
and as "the day of the coward and the dread of the brave,
cultural suicide and undoing civilization" (Jacques Rousseau). What
this means is that the old world has witnessed and grabbled with what
can become of the human existence in the absence of overarching
conventions of a commonwealth that would indiscriminately uphold
and exercise the enforcement of the law for the common survival of the
society. To most of us, warlordism appears as a relatively new
innovation by Somali warlords just because we are conditioned by, and
accustomed to, an orderly peaceful existence provided by the state
through the enforcement of law and order. Thus, we didn't know
what to think of a situation where there is no state to foster us and
provide basic security guarantees for us. The reality of life in
southern Somalia can be best understood in shifting our thinking away
from the lulling view of warlordism as a brief, circumstantial
and interim situation that could be easily overcome once law and
order returns. We should rather think of warlordism as a
self-contained phenomena, and a full fledged known paradigm that
has a substantive existence of its own right. It is a state
of existence that draws its validation by default due to the absence
of enforceable legal order. It has a de-facto underpinning
of a legitimate operational practicality by the
sole virtue of the absence of any credible challenge. And, it is a
self-perpetuating bstinate state of power politics that is
here to stay, unless proven otherwise. The only thing political
about warlordism is the fact it acts and plans for its survival which
can be only achieved through securing the supremacy and the upper hand
for the control of the country, region,city or fiefdom. The rest of
its manifestations are all-out belligerence of personal nature.
Despite that, I argue, worlordism is not all about drunkenness
and mayhem; it has a life (reason), sense of direction (goal) and
adheres unto its own norms (laws) - albeit laws that don't make
sense.
The life of a typical warlord could be
characterized as being paranoid at best, if not schizophrenic. Like
all criminals at lose, his life is plagued with a constant and
impeding insecurity and suspicion. He secretly harbors the unsettling
realization that he has inflicted gross inhumanities to many people
and looted many public and private wealth; and he would logically want
to get away with it. Trying to get away with it, however, requires
a towering vigil and expediency from his part to identify, predict and
eliminate what he regards as a potential source of danger to
himself. As a result, the worst kind of fear ( the bodily one) is the
hallmark of the life of a warlord and it is what makes him tick.
Warlordism as a profession, thus, thrives on the dynamics of sheer
survival and that is what gives life and reason for the justification
of its core operational norms (laws) of shrewd plotting and cold
brutality. Consequently, you can expect everything from a warlord but
to willingly undo himself by dismantling his power-base for the sake
of the nation, his own family or anything in-between.
The goal of a warlord is to deny justice
as we know it and replace it with a justice of his own making and
taste. It is a justice that would polish him as a benevolent moral
statesman and as a hero who has struggled and dearly sacrificed for
the common good of the nation as a whole. It is a justice that must
erase his shameful past and purge all traces of his criminality
by compelling the nation to submit to his wanton desires of
survival, wealth, fame and power. A warlord can never conceive of any
other way out of this predicament of his own making, except
through the choice between two evils: (a) the inevitable
continuation of the mayhem, and (b) the eventual wise decision of the
people to let him realize his goal of reaching the apex of power by
becoming the head of the state. His will to power is intimately
connected with his will to live. Hypothetically, even
if the nascent state promises a grant of a retroactive blanket
amnesty for the warlords, it would not be a sufficient guarantee
for their insatiable security needs. This underlines how
entrenched is the resolve of a warlord and as far as he is concerned,
he is here to stay.
The operational norms (laws) of
Warlordism are simple, unwritten and tactical in nature. They are not
"laws" per se, but laws nevertheless, in as much as they
make sense and can be explained by the rational mind. They are akin to
the raw tenets of balance of power and the logic of maximizing gains.
Sometimes securing any scant of a relative gain over other warlords
might be about enough for a given warlord. Often times, however, a
warlord of good standing may raise the stakes and aim for an absolute
gain. When such a warlord emerges, the rest of the warlords would
suddenly cease all active hostilities between them and form
a tactical alliance for the purpose of confronting him. Curiously
though, even if the alliance succeeds in defeating their common enemy,
it would not go the extra mile and form a government. What may
explain this unwitting loss of opportunity is primarily the simple
fact that forming a government and thereby ending warlordism
would involve the emergence of one of them as the leader, and
that spells as horrific a scenario as the one they just collectively defeated.
Their need (use) for each other stops there and they would invariably resume
their perpetual enmity of each other. A warlord for a warlord is both a
sworn enemy and an occasional tactical ally (savior). This neurosis
that trips between [H]ate-love dichotomy stems from the dictates of
being realistic and not letting lofty ideals of any kind undermine
ones sacred desire for survival and perseverance. It is what
gives credence to the old classical theories of balance of power
and Real-Politick which are the passionate breechings of
realism.
Interestingly, this is where the
meaning of anarchy gets its philosophical depth of understanding.
A well-rounded, broad view of how anarchy and fear affect both the
minds of the people and the warlords, would make us understand better
why many seemingly senseless atrocities are taking place. This
narrative hasn't been giving any fair emphasis on the atrocities
of warlords. The purpose of the paper was to shed some light on
warlordism as a paradigm and to provide some insights and analysis in
its attributes and dynamics. As most people would agree the major
conundrum about the culture of warlordism is the anarchy of disorder
that it imposes on the society. Due to its prevalence, randomness and
unpredictability anarchy takes its toll in every aspect of social
living. Inversely, however, a typical warlord may view order
itself as the source of anarchy as a semblance of order may quickly
grow in size and capacity by gaining the allegiance of the
war weary population. That in turn, quickly renders him
powerless and terrified as he then becomes exposed to the due
process of the law. While the anarchy of disorder is
understandable to all people, the anarchy of order is only
understandable to a criminalized soul and a counter-culture warlord.
One should not confuse warlordism with
power hungary dictators. Although they are similar in many ways, they
are inherently different in many other important ways. A dictator is
usually a head of a state and he strives to remain in power as long as
possible. What is significant about this, is the fact that, according
to current international norms, he holds the power legitimately. In
addition, a dictator may sometimes have a measure of the common-good
in mind and excessively seeks to instill law and order in his country.
In contrast a warlord loathes order, the common-good and laws other
than his own. He would want to become the head of the state but he can
realize most of his immediate goals without being one. In
modern history, the world has seen many dictators and some of them
have been - despite varying brutalities - timely saviors of their
respective nations, such as Mao, Stalin, Nasser and others. Most of
them, however, have ruined their nations and their lives beyond
redemption. They lost everything including their souls while
dashing the hopes and aspirations of their people, such as Barre,
Mbuto and others. In today's world warlordism emerged in few places
like Somalia, Afghanistan and others. Warlords could be viewed as
individuals whose lives have been devoid of moral restraints and who
has been leading depraved lives both morally and materially. The
elapse of order gave them a window of opportunity to at least do away
with their material depravity through looting and appropriating. Hence
there is nothing more to warlordism than the desire to reap the
bountifulness of the country, while trying to further the time
lag of the law ideally forever or as much as they can. Many dictators
have been toppled either by way of reforms or organized resistance.
Warlords, on the hand are far more difficult to overcome them. To
overcome the warlords in Afghanistan, it took no less than the massive
attack of the American military. And even then, Afghanistan is still a
hotbed of active warlordism. Similarly, 30 nations spearheaded by the
US tried to pacify Somali warlords and utterly failed.
World recognition and support,
notwithstanding, mediocre dictators often deteriorate into
the level of warlords in their governance and leadership style. When a
dictator realizes that his public hatred is hopelessly stable at its
peak and that the affairs of the nation is in progressive decline, he
becomes wary of his people and starts to undermine the integrity of
state institutions. This simplifies his total control of the nation as
it renders all legal jurisprudence and administrative lingo to boil
down into the flip-flops of his mind. He soon realizes that he can not
control the country through order because the people now regard
him as a mere scheming rascal and a criminal. If keeping the order was
his initial flip, he now takes a flop by creating disorder. He
declares segment(s) of the society as the enemy of the nation and
that they must be eradicated. Pitting groups against groups makes him
the powerful arbitrator. Through the institutionalization of disorder
and fear, he believes, most of the society would want
to ally themselves with the powerful. Institutionalization of
disorder, thus shifts the whole debate of the common-good into a group
survival, in which the dictator sees his survival too. This opens a
rare opportunity for the slum boys and the ruffians of the society to
take the arms and wage the ugly internal war of the dictator.
They quickly pick up the simplicity of his governance and excel in it.
The country falls for them but they do not want to reinstall a state
because they are conscious of the crimes they have done. This is the
birth place of Warlordism.
Neither the failed dictators nor the
warlords after them, are fully cognizant of what their fate and
that of their culture would ultimately be. It is a grim political
reality usually referred to as the "race to the bottom". To
borrow a phrase from aeronautics, it is akin to when an aircraft takes
a "nose-dive"; unrestrained and irreversible. The pilot who
might think that he is making it to a taxiway is either impaired or
possessed by heavenly aliens. If dictators were the harbingers of
warlords by sponsoring controlled violence, warlords are the
harbingers of cultural suicide by sponsoring a diffused violence.
They are taking the entire nation onto a one track trajectory
towards sure doom. Since violence begets even more violence, Somalia
has now more warlords than 1991, because warlordism tends to breed its
kind and mutate every so often, until violence becomes so diffused to
the point of "man against man". The warlord who might
think that he would benefit from the cultural death of his nation and
still survive is either mimicking angels or aping God. In order to
understand what "the race to the bottom" may entail, we only
have to listen what the philosophers had to say.
The foregoing does not do any justice to
the full understanding of all about warlordism. It is more complex
than that. But if the above litany could be considered as a fair
sketch of warlordism, the question that comes to mind is, who
qualifies as a warlord among the competing Somali faction leaders?
Those, I would say, who always whine and wiggle to undermine all
Somali Reconciliation Conferences. Those who would rather keep their
fiefdoms than opt for the rebirth of a Somali state. Those who would
never visit other Somali regions outside their control, for consensus
building and political consultations. A warlord doesn't have the
luxury of being diplomatic. Diplomats juggle many probable option
while a warlord - because of his criminal past - does not have
other alternatives besides remaining a warlord.
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