Living by the Gun in Chad: Combatants, Impunity and State Formation

224 Pages·2016·2.69 MB·English

by  Marielle Debos

More Praise for Living by the Gun in Chad
‘A welcome contribution, providing a wealth of data and rare detail,
resulting in new scholarly insights whose significance goes far beyond
Chad’s borders.’
Mats Utas, Uppsala University
‘A compelling and deeply-informed account of the militarisation of politics
and society in Chad. Rather than leading to chaos, it convincingly shows
how armed violence produces political order and is a crucial part of daily
practices of dominance.’
Koen Vlassenroot, Conflict Research Group, University of Ghent
About the author
Marielle Debos is an associate professor in political science at the
University Paris Ouest Nanterre and a researcher at the Institute for Social
Sciences of Politics (ISP).
LIVING BY THE GUN IN CHAD
COMBATANTS, IMPUNITY AND STATE FORMATION
MARIELLE DEBOS
Translated by
ANDREW BROWN
Living by the Gun in Chad: Combatants, Impunity and State Formation was originally published in
French under the title Le métier des armes au Tchad: le gouvernement de l’entre-guerres in 2013 by
Editions Karthala, 22–24 Boulevard Arago, 75013 Paris, France.
www.karthala.com
This edition published in 2016 by Zed Books Ltd, The Foundry, 17 Oval Way, London SE11 5RR,
UK.
www.zedbooks.net
Marielle Debos, Le metier des armes au Tchad: le gouvernement de l’entre-guerres © Editions
Karthala, Paris, 2013
English language translation © Andrew Brown, 2016, with the collaboration of Benn Williams The
right of Marielle Debos to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset in Sabon by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon Index by Ed Emery Cover design by
www.stevenmarsden.com
Cover photo © Espen Rasmussen/Panos All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of Zed Books Ltd.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78360-533-0 hb ISBN 978-1-78360-532-3 pb ISBN 978-1-78360-534-7 pdf ISBN 978-
1-78360-535-4 epub ISBN 978-1-78360-536-1 mobi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
Part I Armed violence: a (post)colonial history
1 Colonial wars and inter-wars
2 The professionalisation of armed violence
Part II From one war to the next: rebellion, reintegration,
defection
3 Fluid loyalties
4 Benefiting from war: the unequal share of war dividends
Part III Governing with arms: the ‘unnumbered decree’
5 A ‘militianised’ army
6 Governing the inter-war
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The translation of this book was supported by the Centre National du
Livre, the Institute for Social Sciences of Politics (ISP-CNRS), and the
Marie Curie Alumni Association.
Fieldwork was supported by the ISP as well as by the research programme
‘No war, no peace: the interweaving of violence and law in the formation
and transformation of political orders’, coordinated by Dominique
Linhardt and Cédric Moreau de Bellaing and funded by the French
National Agency for Research (ANR).
This book is a testimony to the innumerable debts that I have
accumulated over the years, starting with my debt to all the people in Chad
who honoured me with their trust and shared their insights and stories. For
their own safety, they have to remain anonymous. Over the course of
fieldwork, three of my informants were victims of forced disappearances:
Khamis Doukoun, Abakar Gawi and Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh. They
should not be forgotten.
Since the publication of Le Métier des armes in 2013, a large number of
colleagues have provided me with valuable comments and have helped me
write a better book. Thanks to their contributions, this book is much more
than just an updated version of the first one. I particularly wish to thank
Richard Banégas, Gilles Bataillon, Jean-François Bayart, Morten Bøås,
Magali Chelpi-Den Hamer, Mirjam de Bruijn, Guillaume Devin, Mariane
Ferme, Vincent Foucher, Laurent Gayer, Remadji Hoinaty, Milena Jakšić,
Louisa Lombard, Kelma Manatouma, Roland Marchal and Johanna
Siméant.
A special note of thanks to Andrew Brown, who translated the
manuscript from French and did a wonderful job with some particularly
puzzling translation issues. Justine Brabant was finally an inspiring reader
and a wonderful support throughout the many rewritings of the text.
FOREWORD
This book is an extensively revised and updated version of a book
published in 2013 by Editions Karthala in Paris. It covers the ‘inter-war’ of
Chad: namely, those spaces and times on the margins of war and where
war seems emergent. Much has changed since my first fieldwork in Chad,
twelve years ago. The combatants I mention in this book have mostly
abandoned armed struggle. Some have joined the regular forces, others live
by the gun in a militarised economy. Most, however, have returned to
civilian life and resumed their lives as farmers or pastoralists.
By contrast, Idriss Déby and his allies now ‘live by the gun’ on the
regional and international scenes. Déby has acquired a new status thanks
to Chad’s military activism in the region, and the war waged by the army
against the rebels is now mostly aimed at elements outside the country.
The Chadian army is mobilised on several fronts in Mali and in the Lake
Chad Basin. Chad, which hosts the base of the French anti-terrorist
operation Barkhane, has become a key partner of France and the United
States in the ‘war on terror’. The need to preserve the supposed ‘stability’
of Chad encourages its allies to ignore the violence and undemocratic
practices there, including the re-election of Idriss Déby in a contested
1
election. Déby knows that his survival depends as much on external
support as on internal legitimacy.
As this book goes to press, ‘peace’ has become a much debated issue.
During the campaign for the April 2016 presidential election, President
Idriss Déby, standing for a fifth term, promised on the large posters visible
on every street corner in the capital a ‘guaranteed social peace’. In
response, opposition supporters and civil society activists denounced the
way in which ‘peace’ was being used as a form of ‘blackmail’. In an
attempt to delegitimise the protests, the ruling party said that these protests
constituted threats to the peace and stability of the country. A few months
earlier, when civil society organisations created their platform of demands
with the slogan ‘enough is enough’ (‘trop c’est trop’), pro-government civil
society responded by creating its own version, ‘hands off my achievements’
(‘touche pas à mes acquis’). In the spirit of the creators of this latter
platform, the ‘achievements’ in question were peace and stability. Activists
of the former platform did not fail to point out the ambiguity of the
formula: the ‘achievements’ could just as well be understood as profits
from the oil industry, profits monopolised by a small class of political and
economic entrepreneurs close to the presidency.
If the main rebel movements have now surrendered, war remains close at
hand. Since NATO’s intervention in 2011, the south of Libya is a grey area
conducive to all sorts of political and military adventures and every kind of
trafficking. Veterans of the Chadian rebellion have congregated there. If
we take their statements at face value, they are preparing for the next
uprising – but the initial combats have been between the different factions
claiming to represent the Chadian opposition. The other borders of Chad
are also crisis areas. The jihadist armed group Boko Haram has expanded
its area of operations to western Chad, northern Cameroon and south-east
Niger. While relations between Chad and Sudan are now good, this
rapprochement has come at the cost of N’Djamena abandoning its former
allies in Darfur. As for relations with the Central African Republic (CAR),
they have improved since the election of Faustin-Archange Touadéra in
February 2016, but the question of Chadian influence on some elements of
the former Séléka in the CAR is undecided.
For civilians, the end of war does not mean the end of violence. The
problem is not (or not only) the number of troops or weapons in
circulation. The problem lies in the mode of government. If the state
resorts less and less often to physical violence, the government by arms
referred to in this book has not been fundamentally challenged. The war
continues in the positions of power and the impunity granted to those close
to the presidency and the ruling party.
Women have to cope with both a militarised and a male-dominated
political and social order. In February 2016, for the first time in the history
of the country, women spoke out and denounced the impunity of the ‘big
men’ and its gendered cost. The rape of a teenage girl by the sons of some
of the President’s closest associates (sons of army officers and one of the
sons of the Foreign Minister) triggered an unprecedented wave of protest,
in a country where the discussion of sexual violence has long remained
taboo. Demonstrations were organised in all regions of Chad and involved
a new generation of young men and women.
In the silences of the inter-war, when combatants have abandoned their
arms, insidious forms of violence become visible. They assume the form of
naked violence less and less often, and increasingly appear as a threat to
those who would dare collectively to claim their rights and criticise the
routine way in which injustice operates. It is difficult to say whether Chad
has moved from an inter-war situation to a situation of peace: the
government itself cannot make up its mind, since it continues to recruit for
its security apparatus, far in excess of what is required by a response to the
threat posed by Boko Haram and the uncertainty in southern Libya. What
is certain, however, is that the country is still marked by the practices of a
state built on violence, an economy that leaves a large part of the
population in poverty, and a society dominated by ‘untouchables’ who are
all connected to this history of war. These forms of violence also have a
high human cost. In addition to documenting a little-known country, this
book will be an invitation to reflect on the forms of domination rooted in
violence that become a permanent feature of political and social orders, as
well as on the forms of resistance that oppose these unjust orders.

Marielle Debos May 2016