INTRODUCTION
In Chad, people use the vocabulary of disguise and cross-dressing to talk about men in arms. Regular soldiers are said to ‘dress up as’ or to ‘transform into’ road bandits. Civilians who are enrolled in the army are said to ‘dress up as enlisted men’ for payday – they live as farmers, herders or merchants, and only go to the garrison when they expect to be paid. Moreover, the verb ‘to go out’ has become synonymous with ‘to take up arms’. ‘Going out’ refers to leaving the town, the village or the ferig (nomadic herders’ camp), and entering the bush for a few months or years. In a country where combatants often take up arms more than once, ‘going out’ alludes to the possibility of ‘coming back’ to the government fold and the regular army. The terms ‘to dress up’ and ‘to go out’ denote the porous borders between the status of rebel or army volunteer, army volunteer or road bandit, civilian or man in arms.Footnote 1 What does war mean for these highly mobile men in arms, who live by the gun in a country prone to a violent cycle of rebellion and repression?
To answer this question, we must start by rejecting standardised perspectives that reify war and oppose the categories of ‘war’ and ‘peace’. First, war is not an ahistorical and universal phenomenon (Hoffman Reference Hoffman2007). It can only be understood in its context, and in relation to violent patterns already embedded within society (see among others Bøås & Dunn Reference Bøås and Dunn2007; Clapham Reference Clapham1998; Geffray Reference Geffray1990; Richards Reference Richards2005). Second, contrary to a narrative (Kaplan Reference Kaplan1994) that despite criticisms (Richards Reference Richards1996) is still influential, war does not imply aimless and mindless violence, chaos and anomie. The outbreak of conflict does not automatically lead to a hobbesian war of all against all. While war displaces boundaries (crimes become political acts, discourses and practices that are otherwise illicit become licit), social codes and forms of regulation do not vanish overnight. Third, as ethnographic approaches to so-called ‘new’ conflicts have underlined, war is not an exceptional phenomenon that interrupts ‘normal’ social and political life. To understand the meanings of war, it is crucial to conceive the exercise of violence as part of the ‘normality’ of political and social life. War is not a pathology. Even spectacular manifestations of violence can be related to ordinary conflicts that may erupt in times of peace (Ferme Reference Ferme2001). Besides, scholars writing on ‘peacetime’ have led us to radically reconsider the presumed exceptionality of violence. Nancy Scheper-Hughes (Reference Scheper-Hughes1997) points out how violence may be pervasive in ordinary social spaces, and how ‘genocidal-like’ practices may be daily enacted as normative behaviour by ordinary citizens. Peacetime does not equate with non-violence, and war cannot be defined as the mere opposite of peace.
This paper draws from the literature on ‘no peace no war’ situations (Richards Reference Richards2005). It deals with a separate but related problem by analysing the porous temporal, geographical and theoretical borders of war from the point of view of combatants who circulate between different forms of armed and non-armed violence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with men in arms, it explores the trajectories of those who make a career from bearing arms, whether as soldiers in the state armed forces, as rebels, or as illegal customs officials. During eleven months spent in Chad between 2004 and 2010, I talked with my informants about their current and previous occupations. I was interested in all kind of practices related to arms as well as in non-violent activities. Beyond the assessment of the blurred boundaries between the statuses of combatants and army recruits, men in arms and civilians, I seek to understand how individuals ‘navigate’ in and through their society (Vigh Reference Vigh2006; see also Utas Reference Utas2005). I analyse their life trajectories to understand their career as social process.
Contrary to studies that focus on rebel groups as organisations (Weinstein Reference Weinstein2006), my research encompasses both rebel and regular forces (the army, the police, customs agents, etc.), as well as the wider political and social context. I situate conflicts within broader temporalities to understand what is at stake beyond times and spaces of war. There is a lot to gain by understanding what combatants do when they are not at war. Furthermore, analysing combatants’ life trajectories rather than rebellions makes it possible to understand the logics of the recourse to arms without reifying wars. I do not assume a radical difference between war and peacetime: conceptions of war and of its boundaries are on the contrary the question under examination.
As Daniel Hoffman (Reference Hoffman2011) pointed out in a recent article, violence in West Africa's Mano River War can be thought of as ‘literal work’. He shows that warriors are a workforce in a war economy characterised by flexible post-Fordist patterns of accumulation. For my part, I explore the trajectories of combatants who pursue long careers both in the rebel and regular forces. My focus moves beyond armed combat towards an analysis of the most mundane patterns of activities conducted by men in arms. I theorise armed violence as a practical occupation or métier, a French word that indicates a non-institutionalised profession and a craft. A métier does not imply a homogeneous and coherent group. It refers to the activities conducted by those who live by the gun for years, being alternatively or simultaneously army volunteers, rebels or road bandits. It also refers to a process: how individuals with diverse backgrounds and motives develop specific sets of knowledge and practical expertise, as well as modes of justification regarding war and violent extortion.
The words ‘men in arms’ do not refer to all bearers of arms, but specifically to those who make a living from war and war-like activities. I refer to ‘men’ in arms since women seldom bear arms,Footnote 2 even if rebellions rely on women's invisible work (they can play a crucial role in intelligence, for example). Armed struggle is characterised by a sexual division of labour and combatants consider their occupation as a men-only activity.
This article is about their conceptions of war and armed violence. I argue that, in Chad, armed violence is not only an ordinary way of expressing contestation but also a practical occupation. The first section explains how the exercise of violence has been routinised in Chad. The following section deals with the development of an economy of war as well as an economy of peacemaking. The last two sections are based on two combatants’ spatial, social and political trajectories. By analysing their tumultuous paths in an unstable political environment and a militarised economy, I explore the continuities and discontinuities between war and peace, or rather between war and inter-war.
THE MILITARISATION OF POLITICS: WAR AND THE INTER-WAR
Writing about new forms of sovereignty in Africa, Achille Mbembe (Reference Mbembe, Hansen and Stepputat2005: 148) notes that ‘war has become just the means whereby one creates a world, as well as the life-world that is itself created’. Where new ‘forms of politics-as-war’ (ibid.: 149) have come to be central, ‘peace’ is not a pertinent notion. In Chad, overt violence is rarely witnessed and rebel attacks are the exception rather than the rule. Violence appears in the ordinariness of experiences of war, when ex-combatants talk about rebellion as they talk about their current occupation as peasants or masons.
War is entrenched in ‘normal’ life. It has been inscribed in the urban landscape of N'Djamena, the capital city, even if the damage caused by the fighting between the rebel coalition and the governmental forces in February 2008 was quickly repaired. A three-metre deep trench was dug around the city. The area around the presidency was cleared for battle: the neighbourhood was emptied of inhabitants; trees were cut down to increase visibility for combat helicopters. The history of conflicts is embedded in the juxtaposition of highly protected houses owned by the ruling elite and former rebel leaders, and small brick and mud houses where most of the population live.
In Chad, civilians do not think in terms of the alternative, war or peace. Rather, they talk about ‘violence’ and ‘insecurity’ to account for the situation of their country. ‘Peace’ is a political project. When people talk about peace, they do not only have in mind the end of fighting. Peace implies a less violent mode of governing, a more selective use of violence on the part of regular forces and pro-governmental militias, as well as a better distribution of resources. It also implies a less violent social environment. In countries like Chad, there is no such thing as the ‘normalcy’ of the pre-conflict. For this reason, I do not use the categories of ‘war’ and ‘peace’. Instead I refer to war and ‘inter-war’. ‘War’ refers to the situation of actual combat. The ‘inter-war’ refers to the spaces and times which are affected by violence even if there is no direct fighting between rebel and governmental forces. In my use of the term ‘inter-war’, I do not mean that each war is mechanically and automatically followed by another one, nor that Chad is condemned to be affected by a succession of conflicts. I refer to ‘inter-war’ rather than the binary opposition of war and peace in order to portray a situation where war is always emergent, and where people are waiting for the next war while hoping that it will not break out.
How has the exercise of violence become ordinary? In the Lake Chad basin, violence has been pervasive since the razzias and ‘wars without end’ of the pre-colonial empires that ‘warred to trade and traded to war’ (Reyna Reference Reyna1990: 39). This bloody period was followed by another: the military conquest by the French (1900–17). The coloniser used violent modes of governing combined with intensive economic exploitation in the south (Debos Reference Debos and Sémelin2009). The violent political economy of the region is moreover linked to the long history of road banditry in the sub-region (Saïbou Reference Saïbou2010). As Janet Roitman (Reference Roitman2005) has shown in her research on the historical construction of the legitimate foundations of wealth in the Lake Chad basin, violent modes of accumulation, which open up a space of social mobility and belong to forms of economic redistribution, come to be deemed acceptable practice. The economy has been militarised, in the sense that the exercise of violence has come to be ordinary and conceived as such.
However, in Chad, violence is not only an inherent part of the economy: it is also a structural pattern of politics. Post-colonial Chad has become the regional textbook example of factional fighting. Conflicts started under the authoritarian rule of François Tombalbaye with the creation of the Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad (Frolinat) in 1966. The rebellion rapidly spread to the entire north of the country. Power struggles among leaders, the involvement of the movement in local rivalries, and competition for foreign support, led to the division of Frolinat into factions. At the end of the 1970s, rebel resources increased with Libyan support, and many young men were recruited. The term ‘politico-military’ was then coined to refer to rebel leaders and their followers. The ‘politico-military’ became a new social figure, as the first peasant and herder insurgents who fought with home-made weapons were replaced by fighters who lived from the gun. The 1979–82 civil war and subsequent insurgencies in the south threw the whole country into violence. The cycle of rebellion and repression continued under Hissène Habré's brutal rule. The ousting of Habré by Idriss Déby in 1990 raised hopes that were soon disappointed. Since 1990, almost all regions have at one time or another been affected by insurgency. The crisis reached a climax between 2005 and 2009: Sudan supported Chadian rebels based in Darfur as Chad backed Darfurian combatants (Marchal Reference Marchal2008; Tubiana Reference Tubiana2008).Footnote 3
Chad has never yet experienced non-violent regime change, and violence has remained the key to political success. ‘Warlords’ (Charlton & May Reference Charlton and May.1989) are not merely opportunistic and greedy leaders who favour armed struggle over other ways of life: they are political entrepreneurs who resort to the usual means of politics. They follow the track of their predecessors: from their rear bases in Darfur to the presidential palace in N'Djamena (western Sudan has been a rear base for Chadian rebellions since the 1960s). As a former Chadian journalist told me, ‘in Senegal, politicians have to experience jail; in Chad, they have to experience armed struggle’.Footnote 4 Most current political leaders have indeed at one time or another joined an armed insurrection.
Violence has become a defining mode of political sociability, linked to the praise of masculinity and braveness. It is essential, too, for the construction of a ‘politico-military’ identity. My informants do not justify the use of violence when they talk about their life experiences – even when they talk to a female foreign researcher – for the very reason that the recourse to violence is anything but exceptional. By contrast, those who belong to a rebel group without themselves having experienced armed combat tend to justify the fact that they have never gone to the ‘field’. Rebels have a peculiar relationship to the ‘field’: it is at the core of their métier and to a large extent determines their career in the ‘politico-military’ sphere. Those who have not fought with arms (political leaders who stay at a safe distance from combat or spokesmen who live in exile) are said to ‘eat cold’. In the context of ‘the politics of the belly’ (Bayart Reference Bayart1993), ‘eating’ refers to the political and economic benefits gained by – and in – war.
Before turning to combatants’ trajectories, let me stress three features of Chadian conflicts. First, the militarisation of politics does not imply that the whole country is constantly under fire or that men in arms are permanently mobilised. Rebellions are incessant but localised and limited in time. Experiences of warfare are intermittent. Between 2005 and 2009, there were only about twenty major rebel attacks. Rebels, who have been based in Darfur since 2005, cross the border to launch an attack and then retreat to their camps. Warfare is also seasonally determined: it is only waged during the dry season. The daily life of both army volunteers and combatants implies long periods of waiting.
Second, combatants’ loyalties are fluid and alliances never last long (Debos Reference Debos2008b). The relationships between opposed forces are unstable, and brothers in arms may soon be opponents. The government and the main rebel coalition signed a peace agreement in October 2007, but only one of the four rebel leaders, Hassan Al-Djineidi, actually joined the government fold. In May 2009, he was appointed chief of staff of the army, organising the war against his former allies. Some of the movement's middle-level commanders and combatants rejected the deal: they retreated to Darfur and later faced their former brothers in arms, who had in the meantime been (re)integrated into the governmental forces. Sudden shifts in alliances, which are puzzling for observers with a Western perspective on conflict, are often associated with disorder and chaos. Yet, in a factional system (Lemarchand Reference Lemarchand1986; Nolutshungu Reference Nolutshungu1996), warfare is not unregulated: border-crossing and fluid loyalties are the result of constant bargaining among politico-military social actors.
Third, war is not fought in a context of hatred or ideological polarization.Footnote 5 It is thought of as a ‘situation’. This ‘situation’ implies and justifies the recourse to arms and the (tragic but unavoidable) possibility of a violent encounter with a friend or a relative who was recruited to a competing faction. Dialogue and negotiation between warring parties are only interrupted during actual fighting. Faction leaders have friendly relations when they meet at the negotiating table (Buijtenhuijs Reference Buijtenhuijs1987: 427). A rebel leader explained the pattern thus: ‘The social and affective sides of things, the alliances among tribes are crucial. But when the war is on, you have to be ready to fight. When there is no fighting, we are brothers. That's the way it is.’Footnote 6 Chadian conflicts, like the conflict in Guinea-Bissau analysed by Henrik Vigh, are characterised by a co-existence of enmity and amity. As Vigh (2009: 153) argues, wars are ‘brotherly’ when combatants fight an enemy who is not a radical Other: ‘aggression becomes, as such, related to the situation that demanded it, rather than to the other that enacted it. It is seen as specific to periods of actual combat during the war, rather than as a characteristic of the relationship between the two parties in general.’ In Chad likewise, there are no ideological disagreements between those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’. Soldiers and rebels feel that they are divided by circumstances and divergent tactical choices rather than by irreconcilable identities or political stances. My informants are as proud of their ability to reconcile when they are not ‘in situation’ as they are of their braveness in combat. Chadian wars are ‘brotherly’ for another reason: they often oppose brothers and cousins. Combatants may have close ties with more than one faction. Kin-based social networks are not destroyed overnight with the beginning of the war, and men in arms may help relatives who happen to be on a different side of the war. Thus, war belongs to politics, and violence derives from the situation rather than from radical enmity. War is not waged because there are enemies; there are enemies because a war is waged.
AN ECONOMY OF PEACEMAKING
I have shown that war is a recurrent ‘situation’ that belongs to political and social routine. Now I want to refocus the emphasis on the practices of those who live by the gun. Rebel groups recruit combatants with divergent backgrounds and motives. Some take up arms to defend themselves or to avenge relatives killed by men in arms assimilated to the ruling clan. Ethnic Tamas who were massively recruited into the Front Uni pour le Changement Démocratique (FUC) were victims of widespread violence and cattle theft. However, in a context of routinised violence, the bush is also a viable option for young men who face socio-economic marginalisation, as well as regular soldiers who do not get the salary or the promotion they expect. Writing about road banditry in the Lake Chad basin, Janet Roitman (2005: 13) underlines that ‘many of those who partake in economic activities based in these unregulated spaces subvert extant patterns of redistribution; they exercise claims to wealth through violent means, such as seizure and razzia, thus insisting upon the right to wealth through conquest and asserting that spoils are licit forms of wealth’. Chadian combatants too think of the bush as a site to exercise claims to social mobility: they speak of their ‘rights’ (hagg in Arabic, droits in French) to refer to what they think they are entitled to.
Taking to the bush to make a living or to achieve social mobility is neither heroic nor socially accepted. Yet this practice belongs to men in arms’ tactical repertoire. Ex-combatants speak casually about rebellion, as they would talk about another kind of occupation. They talk more about harsh living conditions in the bush, unfair treatment among combatants, and unequal share of war dividends, than about arms and violence.
Joining an armed group implies the threat but not always the use of violence. A section of the declared ‘politico-military’ groups do not fight. This is the case of the micro-armed groups based in the south of Chad. Because they are not backed by neighbouring countries, southern rebel groups have few weapons and no cars. For these unarmed combatants, rebellion is a long struggle to survive in a hostile environment. They more often use their few weapons to hunt than to fight. Marcel Belmian was one of these rebels who spent years fighting in rebellions with no resources. He started to fight in the 1980s in one of the self-defence groups known as ‘codos’Footnote 7 that were created in the south during the civil war (1979–82). His faction signed a peace agreement with Hissène Habré a few years later. In the early 1990s, he rallied former brothers in arms who initiated another rebel group (the CSNPD).Footnote 8 In 1996, he joined the government fold with the small group of combatants he was leading. Three years later, he was still waiting for his reintegration into the regular forces. Together with a dozen combatants he took his Kalashnikov, hid in the bush and declared that a new rebellion was born. He gave up armed struggle only a few months later under pressure from his relatives. He realised much later that one of his former friends (not a government official) had blocked his reintegration into the army.Footnote 9 Decades of factional fighting have produced an economy of war as well as an economy of peacemaking.
Halime,Footnote 10 a divorced woman with a single child, who is the head of her household, used this tactic of the male repertoire in her ‘social navigation’. When I met her in May 2010, less than a year after she had left the rebel coalition based in Sudan, she showed me proudly her brand new car with air conditioning, a ‘gift from the president’. Grateful, she fixed an Idriss Déby bumper sticker on her car. In addition to the car, Halime received cash as a reward for joining the government fold. She is, however, far from rich. She lives in a modest house with her mother, her daughter, one of her sisters, and several of her relatives’ children. There is no tap water. She has no generator even though she lives in a neighbourhood of N'Djamena that seldom gets electricity. Her story is representative of the use of rebellion as a means to claim ‘rights’. Before opting for the politico-military sphere, she was a local party official of the ruling party, the Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS), which she had joined at the beginning of the 1990s. As she explained: ‘I have worked for years, darling, but never received my due (droit).’Footnote 11 She talked about her decision to join the rebellion as a legitimate and ordinary means to let MPS officials know that she was upset and disappointed by the meagre benefits of her activism. She remained only a year in rebellion, between 2008 and 2009. During this year, she stayed in Khartoum: she belonged to the political leadership and did not go to the ‘field’. Since her return to the government fold, she has organised another kind of rebellion. Halime is the leader of a group composed of disgruntled ex-combatants (all male) who accuse their former leader, Ahmat Hassaballah Soubiane, of ‘eating’ and ‘swallowing’ their ‘rights’.Footnote 12 Halime and her followers claim that they were deceived by Soubiane. They also hope that their new anti-Soubiane and pro-Déby stance may help improve their personal situation. Despite the multiple signs of loyalty she has given to the regime, Halime has not (yet) been reappointed as an official of the ruling party.
Halime's trajectory shows that war is a means of contestation that is sometimes used by politicians who pursue a career in the civilian opposition or the ruling party. The recourse to violence (or the mise en scène of violence) is ordinary; combatants and rebel leaders speak openly about the personal cause they defended and the benefits they expected from war. I do not mean that war is only a means to achieve personal ends and claim ‘rights’. Rather I want to underline that this tactical repertoire is a dimension of war.
The phrase ‘to live by the gun’ is misleading, since it homogenises divergent situations and careers. While a section of the male population can make a living in and through war, only a few of those who engage in armed violence actually benefit from it (Debos Reference Debos2008a). War is profitable for influential rebel leaders and military commanders who are in a position to negotiate with the government. Indeed, rebel leaders and military commanders who left the rebel coalition based in Darfur were paid handsomely and offered lucrative positions. After the signing of a peace agreement between the government and the FUC in 2006, the leader, Mahamat Nour, was named Minister of Defence, while other officials were appointed to political and military positions. The movement's spokesperson pursued his career as a government senior executive, after joining the ruling party. Even though he had no experience in the military, he was appointed general. He enjoys the privileges associated with his rank: an expensive car, a driver and a bodyguard.Footnote 13 Few FUC officials were, however, able to maintain their status after relations between Nour and Déby cooled (Nour was dismissed and went into exile in 2007).Footnote 14 The benefits of war do not last long.
Politico-military leaders who have a very weak (or no) military base and little value on the ‘political marketplace’ (de Waal Reference de Waal2009) do not benefit from war. I was struck by the unequal treatment of ex-leaders during a research stint in Chad in 2010, when I spent time with Mammouth Nahor N'gawara, the leader of the last southern rebel group. Nahor was living in a small and modest house in N'Djamena with about ten of his militants. They had been waiting for six months for their reintegration into the military or the civil service, and were losing hope.Footnote 15 The national mediator and the government seemed determined to let them know that they were not in a strong bargaining position. Nahor and his militants faced intimidation and humiliation: they had lost not only the war but also the post-war.
As far as rank and file combatants are concerned, war is rewarded in the best case scenario with integration or advancement in the army. Ex-combatants receive temporary ranks and are said to be ‘assimilated non-commissioned officers’ and ‘assimilated officers’ (they are almost never integrated as rank and file soldiers). Others are integrated into the police or the gendarmerie (military police, a colonial legacy). The luckiest are integrated into the customs service: one can have good economic opportunities at the borders. Under dire economic conditions, being in the regular forces is a valuable position. It is a source of more or less regular income as well as the chance of making money out of extortion and other illegal practices.
Since the failed rebel attack in 2008 and the subsequent weakening of the coalition, ex-combatants’ integration is not as systematic as it used to be. The discrepancy between the treatment of leaders and rank and file combatants, compounded by N'Djamena's ‘divide and rule’ strategies, fuels the divisions that invariably affect unstable factions. As mentioned above, Ahmat Hassaballah Soubiane, who split from the rebel coalition and negotiated with the government in 2009, is said to have received a lot of money, which he did not share. Combatants accuse him of ‘eating’ the fruits of the armed struggle alone: they expected more than the 400,000 francs CFA (about US$821) they received from the government as discharge payment.Footnote 16 Moreover, Soubiane was appointed special adviser to the president, when combatants were still waiting for their integration in the Moussoro military camp.Footnote 17 They lost patience. Some of them left the camp, went to the capital city or their home region, and resumed civilian life. A large section crossed the Sudanese border again to join another rebel faction. They were back on the politico-military job market.
MAKING A LIVING IN WAR AND BETWEEN WARS
Recurring cycles of rebellion and repression as well as the (unequal) benefits of violence associated with war have fuelled the development of the métier des armes. Men in arms transit between different forms of armed and non-armed labour, between war and the inter-war. This circulation between different occupations in an unstable context is a common way of life among savvy (débrouillard in French, a word widely used in Chad and francophone African countries) youth and men. The logics of the métier des armes are not disconnected from the wider socio-economic context.
To get beyond utilitarian understanding of opportunities, an analysis of men in arms’ life trajectories is required. How do they live and interpret the opportunities associated with war and extortion? Ahmat'sFootnote 18 life trajectory is representative of my informants’ complex careers in the métier des armes. He is an intermittent combatant who has relied both on violent and non-violent activities to secure an acceptable life for himself and his relatives. He has successively been a volunteer in the national army, civilian, rebel, again army volunteer before being demobilised, unofficial customs official, and smuggler. When we met in 2004, he lived in N'Djamena with his wife and their child. He smuggled bicycles and motorcycles at the Chad–Cameroon border. Though technically illegal, smuggling is an ordinary occupation. Ahmat relied both on his kin-based relationships and on solidarity networks forged in rebellions to negotiate with customs officials (who themselves are often illegal customs officials). To let them know that he was a demobilised soldier, he used to wear a camouflage turban along with his civilian clothes.
Ahmat was born and grew up in N'Djamena. The son of an army recruit, he was fifteen in 1987 when he was recruited into the army. He was attending primary schoolFootnote 19 when a man explained to the schoolboys that recruits in the army got a Toyota car and a gun. Ahmat and a small group of his friends joined the army. He explained to me: ‘When you're young, you're in danger. Wherever you put your head, you get stuck there’.Footnote 20
Ahmat was appointed to the Presidential Guard, which under Hissène Habré's rule recruited mainly among Habré's kinsmen the Gorane, to whom Ahmat belongs. Ahmat did not experience war during his first years in the army; he stayed in the capital city and helped older army recruits on the military base. Two years later, he followed his father when he decided to go back to their village near Fada, in the north-east of Chad.
He had a difficult time in the village, where work is hard and tiresome: ‘I was not used to taking care of herds [of camels]. This is very difficult. Watering the camels … You have to walk 15 or 20 kilometres to find water. Up there [in the north], wells may be 30 metres deep. You have to lift the bucket to pour the water into the trough …’ Ahmat came back to N'Djamena in 1990. He was looking for a job and did not find any. When Habré was toppled by Déby, Ahmat ‘went out’ and joined the Mouvement pour la Démocratie et le Développement (MDD), which gathered mainly Goranes who remained loyal to Habré.
Remembering how he joined the rebellion, he told me: ‘I joined the rebellion because of advancement opportunities, this is true. But I also cared about peace and security. I did it for my benefit as well as for the benefit of other people. People's benefit is peace and security. And my benefit is advancement’. With these words, he referred to a much debated issue in Chad. Do combatants take up arms to have advancement? Or do they fight to seize power and improve people's life? Ahmat acknowledged the ambivalence of his motivations. However, he made clear later in our conversation that to ‘to eat’, in the sense of making a living, it is not necessary to embark on an adventure as risky as fighting: ‘To eat, you steal. Or you sow millet. Nobody takes up arms only to eat’.
In the MDD, Ahmat was a ‘customs official’. He levied taxes on merchants and herders who crossed the zone controlled by the rebels. He conceived of his work within the rebellion as just like that of regular customs officials. When the government and the MDD signed a peace agreement, he was reintegrated into the army. In a context of poor economic conditions, integration into the army is seen as a major opportunity. While army recruits are irregularly paid, they have access to bribes and extortion. Ahmat had requested a position in customs, considering his reintegration into the customs service as a fair reward. However, his request was refused and he was instead reintegrated into the army with the rank of ‘assimilated’ non-commissioned officer.
He chose to participate in a demobilisation programme in 1993. In a couple of months, he spent his discharge payment: 270,000 francs CFA (US$500). He lived with relatives in N'Djamena. His situation was uncomfortable, as he explained:
After [the demobilisation], I didn't do anything. Here, relatives are humanitarian: if you have a relative, he's going to take care of you. You eat with him, you drink with him. He takes care of your clothing. But with all that, you don't feel good. You have no work, you're idle. And for a man [sigh]! He [your relative] takes from you what you're accountable for. He does everything for you. … This is degrading.
Ahmat was then recruited by one of his uncles into the customs agency. He was part of a mobile squad in the Lake Chad Region. He was not a legal customs official but a bogobogo – an illegal but still quasi-official individual who is not officially integrated into the customs but works with regular customs officials. These get no salary and live off the population. Yet, as Ahmat explained, ‘our work was normal’.
Interestingly, his work as a bogobogo was very similar to his work as an irregular customs official in the MDD rebellion. Ahmat and the bogobogos used to patrol the region with horses and weapons. They lived from the taxes imposed on ‘smugglers' – any person crossing their path being a ‘smuggler’: ‘if we find you, you're a smuggler’, as he put it.
We take the sugar, the cattle. We report our activities to the bosses. We take everything, even the small change. We arrest the cattle or the car. We seize what we find and we say to the people that they have to leave. We take with no worries!
You take everything?
We take everything! If you take pity on the people, you leave them with some cattle or a little bit of sugar. If you have no pity for them, you take everything!Footnote 21
However, Ahmat was not able to make as much money as he expected. ‘There is no profitability’, he said. After seven months in the mobile squad, he returned to N'Djamena where he once again worked as a bogobogo thanks to his kin-based networks. He was appointed to the cattle office where economic opportunities are scarce. He preferred to switch sides to work as a smuggler.
A year later, in 2005, Ahmat had already changed jobs. One of his relatives had recruited him as an accountant at the Chadian National and Nomadic Guard, a branch of the security forces. In 2006, when I returned to Chad, I was unable to reach him. One of his acquaintances disclosed that he had been recruited by the National Security Agency, the Chadian political police, and that he had left for a remote area. Ironically, he and I had had together an unpleasant encounter with officials of this agency two years before.
Ahmat is thus a mobile and intermittent man in arms. He moves from the capital city to his home village as well as to other regions. He has lived from illegal and sometimes violent extortion in war and in the inter-war. In a context where war is ordinary, hopes to achieve social mobility as well as the dishonour associated with unemployment led him to seize opportunities that include warfare and violent extortion. Interestingly, his story underlines the continuity between different occupations in the customs service: as a rebel customs official, as a bogobogo, and then as a smuggler. As a rebel customs official just like a regular one, his job was, as he said, ‘to take everything’. Thanks to his past experience in the métier, he was able to find opportunities in a militarised economy where ex-combatants and demobilised soldiers play a crucial role.
While armed violence is a practical occupation, Ahmat, like my other informants, did not plan his career. He did not engage in the métier with a ‘men in arms textbook’ in hand and a precise plot in mind. Besides the risk of death, men in arms have to deal with sudden alliance shifts that may ruin a career in less time that it takes to assemble and disassemble a Kalashnikov. Considering Michel de Certeau's (Reference de Certeau1984) distinction between ‘tactic’ and ‘strategy’, the resort to violence resembles more an ephemeral tactic elaborated in an unstable environment than a strategy with more durable effects.
MOBILITY AND SURVIVAL
In the last section, I want to underline that men in arms often do not choose to partake in the métier des armes: they resign themselves to it. This métier is ambivalent: it is a practical occupation that is still inherently linked to threat and violence. How much choice do young men have when political violence has remained the order of the day? Colonel Khamis Doukoun's trajectory shows that the recourse to arms is also a survival strategy, even for those who pursue a successful career in the politico-military sphere. When I met Khamis, he was the director of the department of demobilisation at the Ministry of Defence. He took up arms for the first time fifteen years earlier in 1984, when he was a student in N'Djamena. That year, Idriss Miskine, a HadjaraïFootnote 22 leader suspected of disloyalty to the regime, was assassinated. In reaction, the Hadjaraï launched a rebellion, the Mouvement pour le Salut National du Tchad (MOSANAT), under the leadership of Maldom Bada Abbas.
The repression was bloody. Young male Hadjaraï were threatened; many of them were arrested. Khamis, an ethnic Hadjaraï, participated along with his friends in the uprising. They wrote pamphlets, which they clandestinely disseminated. ‘We were young and we weren't aware of danger’, he explained. After a short silence, he added: ‘You can't accept to be threatened and cross your arms. This wouldn't be worthy of a man.’ The phrase ‘to cross one's arms’ is widely used in Chad to describe men who do not defend their relatives and their community, or who are unable to provide their family with food. This behaviour is regarded as passive and shameful. Khamis and other candidates for rebellion crossed the Chad–Nigeria border. Thanks to Libyan support, they were able to join the rebel rear base in Darfur. MOSANAT forged an alliance with two other rebel groups. Together they constituted the MPS, which later became the ruling party.
Khamis entered N'Djamena as a ‘liberator’ in December 1990, when the MPS headed by Idriss Déby toppled Hissène Habré. Along with other ex-rebels, Khamis was integrated into the regular army. However, he did not remain in the government fold for long. In October 1991, ten months after Idriss Déby seized power, Maldom Bada Abbas, who was accused of preparing a coup, was arrested. History repeated itself. Hadjaraï military officers initiated a rebellion, and Hadjaraï were once again threatened. Khamis ‘went out’ for the second time. In his own words, he wanted ‘to save [his] hide’.
The rebels’ objective was to seize power. However, they did not have the means to achieve their ends. In 1992, they agreed to negotiate with the government. Khamis Doukoun and other rebels rejoined the government fold. Khamis explained what the peace agreement meant to him with these words:
We signed. The President received us. We apologised, we said that we regretted. We didn't ask for a lot. Our conditions were to release all political prisoners, to reintegrate all combatants into the army, and to give amnesty to Hadjaraï and their allies who had remained in the bush.
Could you ask for more?
The MPS [the MPS is the name both of the rebel coalition that ousted Déby and of the ruling party] is our power. There was a misunderstanding, but the MPS is our power: we participated in the 1990 victory.Footnote 23
In a country where alliances are unstable, arrests, assassinations and rebellions are part of political life. They may be conceived as ‘misunderstandings’. This does not mean that violent events do not matter or that they are quickly forgotten. Rebels accept the signature of a peace agreement as a tactical move. Negotiations have become part of the strategy of both power-holders and rebel factions for continuing the war. They have become part of war. A peace agreement is usually not treated as a major event. It is an event among others in a process of factional fighting that started decades ago.
Khamis Doukoun never thought that the war was over. The fighting between Hadjaraï rebels and the government forces was over, but not the war. Khamis remained in the government fold. However, he clearly stated that he was ready to ‘go out’ if Hadjaraï were once again threatened. He thought that he was more likely to protect himself and his relatives as a colonel in the army than as a civilian. In 2004, he explained to me: ‘For the time being, there is no peace. As long as there is no peace, as long as there is no security guarantee, I can't go [leave the army]. Because I won't be saved the day there are troubles. It is better to be inside than outside and a victim’.Footnote 24
In 2005, Khamis was appointed the third deputy to the chief of staff of the Chadian national army. As more and more people joined the rebellion, incentives were given to influential military officers; they were induced to stay loyal. His new office was as empty as the previous one. However, the extensive use of air conditioning let his visitors think that he was appointed to a relatively important position.
In April 2006, Khamis was arrested along with fourteen military officers and civilians (AI 2008) when the rebel coalition launched an attack on the capital. According to Khamis’ relatives and friends, he was suspected of disloyalty to the regime. Khamis and those who were arrested on that day are still considered disappeared. He had never had a strong interest in politics or in the military. He had spent most of his life in the politico-military sphere and became a colonel because he had no choice but to take up arms when he and his group were threatened. In 2004, thinking about his tumultuous trajectory, he told me:
Ideas come after circumstances. It is circumstances that create ideas, not ideas that create circumstances. These are two different things. If ideas created circumstances, I could tell you that somehow ideology was first and that I created the situation to achieve my ideals. But things do not happen this way … It is because there is a situation … And it is this situation which leads you to look for …’Footnote 25
Khamis Doukoun's trajectory is very ordinary in Chad, especially within his own ethnic group (Hadjaraï have been targeted under both Habré and Déby). What emerges from his life story which is relevant for all men in arms in Chad is that mobility is a survival strategy. In an unstable and violent context, mobility means ‘going out’, going to the bush, crossing borders to seek refuge in a neighbouring country and to join rebel rear bases. Mobility also means switching sides when necessary and being ready for the next war.
In a country prone to a cycle of rebellion and repression, the bush is as much a site to organise armed struggle as a refuge against state repression. War remains on the horizon. War is an event that is both feared and anticipated. It is feared because of the memory of past violence. It is anticipated because past issues have not been settled, the signing of a peace agreement being conceived of as a mere tactical move. Even for ex-rebels who have stopped fighting and returned to the regular forces, the possibility of war is crucial in their decisions and in their daily life.
What are the meanings of armed violence in a country that has been prone to a cycle of rebellion and repression since the 1960s? In Chad, as in Sudan, Afghanistan or Colombia, war belongs to the routine of politics, and armed violence has become an ordinary means of making a living for part of the male population. Theorising armed violence as a practical occupation or métier is crucial to understanding the ordinariness of recurring wars.
The militarisation of politics and the routinisation of violence are not only men in arms’ affairs. Khamis Doukoun's disappearance is not an isolated event. In February 2008, a key civilian figure, Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh, was arrested by governmental forces; he is still considered ‘disappeared’. While extra-judicial killings and disappearances are not as numerous and systematic as they were under Hissène Habré (HRW 2005), they still occur. As Linda Green (Reference Green1999: 71) pointed out in her work on Guatemala, disappearances are ‘public crimes’ which penetrate the social body. Fear is not solely a personal subjective experience; it is pervasive and insidious. In Chad, the very conception of time is linked to experiences of war and to the permanent reproduction of the conditions that led to war. Political instability and everyday uncertainties shorten time horizons. Why bet on the future and think of long-term projects when the next war may break out soon and when the regime may be overthrown at any time?Footnote 26 ‘Eating’ as much and as quickly as possible and enjoying the legal and illegal, and sometimes violent, benefits of instability is for many Chadians a question of survival, rather than greed.
