Action Makes Belief
Many rationalists expected the spread of science and technology at the time of the industrial revolution in Europe to sweep away religious superstition. Among pioneers of sociology Emile Durkheim was distinctive in arguing that while science and technology were important forces of modernisation religion would never disappear. Religion, Durkheim taught, was the bulwark of social cohesion. Societies might change, but while people remained organised in groups religion would thrive; the sacred was a defence of collectivity. It is thus no surprise to a Durkheimian to find that religion figures centrally in profound social changes and interactive social enlargements at the beginning of the 21st century. But Durkheim was a realist not an idealist. Religion is effect, not cause. If religious difference is a factor in modern conflicts it is because people with different basic collective interests come into contention over those interests while expressing differences of organisation as differences of belief. War is not a product of clash of civilisations but clash of civilisations is a product of war.1
This realist proposition requires specification of a basic mechanism of belief, without reverting to categories invoked by belief. Durkheim began by challenging the arguments of nineteenth century German theology (and German idealism more generally) in which a foundational notion of a high god had devolved into a myriad of creeds as peoples diffused (much as it was imagined the languages of the Germanic tribes had devolved from a single foundational Indo-Aryan stock). He concluded that the idea of god was a relatively late development in the history of religion. Godless religion was no contradiction in terms. In searching for evidence of religion without gods and spirits he turned to the ethnographic literature on Australia. Native Australians had abundant notions of sacredness, and invested much time and effort in rites of worship, but often with little or no need for spirit forces as a focus. One of the most brilliant sections of Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) elucidates the category of the piacular rite, defined by Durkheim's translator, Karen Fields, as ‘rites conducted on the occasion of death, misfortune or collective crisis that are not expressions of individual feeling’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912], p. 392 fn).
Durkheim explains the piacular rite in the following terms. Some positive rites produce a sense of joyful anticipation. Others involve sadness, anger, and harm. Mourning the death of a community member can occasion extreme violence, including cutting the body to the point where the mourner dies. These rites of anger also address other kinds of disaster – drought, or the loss of cult objects. The connecting element is threat to community life requiring ceremonies of expiation. Mourners explain funerary rituals as necessary to ward off the vengeance of the souls of the dead. But why, Durkheim asks, would a person committed to the community become vengeful after death? Beliefs concerning the pacification of souls are secondary accretions. The rite – as performance – precedes the belief in souls. The priority of practice over belief in the piacular rite is clearly seen in ceremonies to stop famine or sickness. These operate without anthropomorphic entanglements (not even the spirit of the departed, as in a funeral rite). Durkheim concludes that for native Australians ‘abstinences and blood-letting stop famines and cure sicknesses, acting on their own’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]: 410, my emphasis).
For Durkheim the foundation of religion – its elementary form – is to be found in a type of collective action he terms the rite. It is useful to keep to Durkheim's term ‘rite’, and to differentiate it from ritual. Anthropologists have taken over the term ritual to mean some kind of signalling system whereby memories of earlier collective action are recovered, which lands us back in idealism (the ‘clash of civilisations’ from which we wish to escape). For example, Rappaport claims that ‘at the heart of ritual … is the relationship of performers to performances of invariant sequences of acts and utterances which they did not encode’ (Rappaport, 1999:405). Of course, religious ceremonies can serve recapitulative purposes. But this obscures Durkheim's basic point, that rites, as collective actions without practical purpose, generate social solidarity through emotional entrainment. The piacular rite at times is pure collective action; it invokes no god, nor does it allude to sequences of ‘acts and utterances’ encoded by others. ‘It is always the cult that is efficacious… we must act, and we… must repeat the necessary acts as often as is necessary to renew their effects’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]:420).
Thus at the heart of the Durkheimian account of religion is a notion of group improvisatory performance – the group believes because it acts together. Bodies and minds are co-ordinated and emotional commitments focused, through dancing, chanting and prayer – even through mutual acts of self-harm or harm to others. Durkheim is offering us a model of the initiatory experience. Collective representations are generated only through the stirring of group excitement. The Durkheimian term is ‘effervescence’. A central example – surprising in a book apparently mainly about Australian religion – is the National Assembly of 4 August 1789 voting to abolish the French feudal system, which Durkheim sees as a decisive constitutional step in the forging of modern France undertaken in a moment of effervescence. The Assembly ‘was suddenly carried away in an act of sacrifice and abnegation that each of its members had refused to make the night before and by which all were surprised the morning after’ (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]):212).
Elsewhere (Richards, 2006) it has been suggested that the Durkheimian notion of effervescence can be aligned with recent ideas about the evolutionary origins of musicality. Cross (2003, 2006) argues that in human evolutionary terms music and dance is coordinative activity with implications for the emergence of social intelligence.2 Musical capacity is viewed as a sphere of ‘unassigned intentionality’ within which moves of potential social significance can be rehearsed as sonically integrated bodily movement. Cross offers a convincing argument for why such a capacity might be selected during human evolution, and thus gives new life to a basic Durkheimian notion, that the rite is, at root, performance through which emotional excitement is entrained upon collective representations. This is the mechanism of belief, in Durkheimian terms. The actual content of belief – its cognitive patterning as morals or shared notions of spiritual entities (Boyer, 2000) – is secondary to the actions through which group excitement stirs the possibility of collective commitment.
Subsequent interpreters have muddied the picture by claiming that Durkheim began as a realist (somewhere in the terrain of Marx) and latterly became an idealist. To such interpreters, Durkheim's interest in religion connotes a shift from the material practicalities of the division of labour to the world of ideas. This accurately maps ‘the cultural turn’ followed by a number of American social scientists (Geertz and Sahlins among the anthropologists, for example [cf. Kuper, 1999]) but makes nonsense of the Durkheimian corpus. Durkheim's view of labour relations was always ‘sacrificial’.3 It is basic to his first book – Division of Labour in Society [1893] – that social solidarity emerges through the commitments members of a group make via the work they offer (Durkheim, 1964 [1893]). The family makes itself through individual members sacrificing time and effort. The wider cohesion of modern society – organic solidarity – emerges from sacrifices individuals make in order to acquire craft or professional skills. The medieval and Roman guilds and their cults (the sodales) are Durkheim's basic model for linking work and religion.4 A division of labour based on difference and complementarity requires skills to be both formed and socially recognised. This requires the tyro to be initiated into a specialism with due emphasis on rites.
Emphasis on the sodality as a basic social form makes Durkheim especially appropriate to understanding processes of trans-family social formation found in many parts of the West African coastal zone – initiation into a so-called ‘secret society’.5 The sodality forms social knowledge. But to seek to acquire this knowledge without passing through initiation is to misunderstand the kind of social solidarity formed within sodalities. Local terminology is a good guide. The Mende people of southern and eastern Sierra Leone talk about initiation as ‘dying on knowledge’ [lit. ‘medicine’] (ha hale ma).6 The content is perhaps unimportant. What matters is to be aligned with others in knowing what actions bonded the individual to the group and make the group recognisable to others. This alignment is generated through initiation; it is expressed in dance (foremost, in the dancing of the society masquerade).
Aspects of individuality are lost – often painfully – in forging a group capable of acts of solidarity in gruelling conditions. There is no success without sacrifice. You cannot know unless you are prepared to join. To join means to submit to the rites of initiation. On this reckoning, the broader society is product of accommodation among sodalities structured along mutually recognisable lines. It is probably important to add that this Durkheimian argument does not imply emergence of an ordered society along functionalist lines (as often alleged). The process of engagement through rites of initiation produces embattled mafia-life organisations as readily as it produces craft guilds and citizen-based organisations devoted to charitable purposes. But what Durkheim claims is that the process is inescapable. If the initiatory mechanism is neglected than other initiators will take it over. If the mechanism is not triggered for good it will be triggered for evil.7
Durkheim was, in particular, worried about the implications for French society of the kind of social exclusion implicit in the Dreyfus case. Young people in France were initiated into a world of increasing occupational specialisation through secondary and university education strongly oriented around a traditional literary canon (Richman, 2002). Reform was needed to secure a more open opportunity structure, capable of incorporating groups marginalised by a narrow literary culture (young Jews in Durkheim's day, young Muslims of North African origin today). His Australian excursion was intended to show that the ideals of the French Revolution could only be achieved through approaching the mechanism of social commitment as action (rite) rather than transfer of dogma (ritual). Without chances to sacrifice to the wider society through acquiring skill the marginalised would become antisocial, and liable to violence. Civil war would be the product of a forced division of labour. The forced division of labour was the first of the social pathologies addressed in Book III of Division of Labour in Society.
Durkheim's contemporaries understood what they were dealing with. Right-wing students agitated to have Durkheim removed from his chair in the Sorbonne, after the publication of Elementary Forms. Professor Durkheim, they charged, was undermining French culture by introducing ‘savages into the Sorbonne’ (Richman, 2002:66-109). In the 1930s, Georges Bataille and others artists of the Left tried to forge from the theories of the Durkheimian School an initiatory artistic practice capable of counteracting the sinister effects of effervescence apparent in the rise of Nazism (Richman, 2002). It is only latterly that the Durkheimian message has been lost, particularly in the post-modern carnival of idealism accompanying American victory in the Cold War. The present paper argues that the idealist doctrine of clash of civilisations needs to be countered through a reassertion of the realist position on religion. This requires taking seriously Durkheim's self-assessment that he was among the few intellectuals seriously to defend religion against the religious.
What tests are on offer of the validity of the central Durkheimian proposition – that belief derives from collective action? Durkheim went (mentally) to Australia, to show group rites precede collective representation. We believe because we pray, not the other way round. But the Australian example has always seemed, to some, a step too far. ‘Elementary’ is mis-read as meaning primitive (not foundational, in the sense Durkheim intended). We can dismiss the evidence of the Australians because they are deemed survivors from an earlier age. Durkheim tried to alert his readers to his true purpose by placing a discussion of the French Revolution at the heart of his book. Many (Anglophone) readers, however, are brought up on a history stressing the horror and barbarity of the guillotine rather than the constitutional significance of the National Assembly's vote to abolish feudalism.
Might it help to take a modern example – one where events can be read as fulfilling the Durkheimian prophecy that civil war is the result of extreme social exclusion? This will be attempted in the rest of this paper, via a case study of the civil war in Sierra Leone. Even here, however, we will have to struggle against the notion that geographically remote contemporary events are somehow to be dismissed as ‘beyond the pale’. In a world of globalisation nothing is any longer isolated in the back-of-beyond. The Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda or the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone are as much manifestations of global modernity as Osama bin Laden's jihadi attacks on the United States.
The Emergence of an Accidental Sect
The Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone (henceforth RUF) began as a small group of Libyan-trained dissidents attacking the forested border districts of Sierra Leone (Kailahun and Pujehun Districts) from across the Liberian border in March 1991. The movement was formed to topple the All Peoples Congress, entrenched in power under the presidencies of Siaka Stevens and General Joseph Saidu Momoh. Sierra Leone possesses considerable wealth from diamonds and other minerals, but under the APC poverty and marginalisation had become widespread. Initially, the RUF attracted considerable support from communities along the border – especially in areas with a long history of incomplete emancipation from domestic slavery and divided by colonial borders.8
A three-man leadership of the RUF was an offshoot of student-led radical activism centred on the Libyan Green Book (a populist text of youth empowerment). The only older figure in this leadership group was Alfred Foday Sankoh, a corporal in the Sierra Leone army dismissed and jailed for involvement in a coup plot against the APC in the late 1960s. He became a photographer, and plying his trade along the Liberian border, acquired considerable knowledge of local grievances to be exploited to the movement's advantage. The RUF expanded by forcibly recruiting young people from diamond camps and isolated village schools. At first it tried to implement Green Book inspired reforms in the districts it controlled, but suffered reverse when government forces, strengthened by Liberian irregulars, counter attacked. Sankoh eliminated the two other members of the RUF's collective leadership and assumed a position of charismatic authority over a movement increasingly made up of young captives.
Sankoh, and a loyal group of five young fighters,9 took refuge in the Kissi village of Sandeyalu, in the extreme northern tip of Kailahun District, where they were subjected to intense bombardment from Nigerian Alpha Jets (Richards, 2005a).10 The group decided the RUF should retreat into the forest (Peters, 2006). Their aim was to reorganise the movement as a guerrilla insurgency using only light weapons. Thereafter, the war was projected through pinprick raids mounted via a dense network of hunters' tracks criss-crossing the country.
Sankoh's small praetorian guard, loyal to the leader personally rather than to the movement's Green Book ideology, was ordered to found armed camps in secure forested areas closer to the main mining areas – the motor of the economy (Peters, 2006). Sankoh himself went south through the border Gola Forest complex, and established a camp in the Kambui West forest reserve, a few miles from the village of Sendumei (half way between Potoru and Blama). His retreat – the Zogoda – became the movement HQ.
The RUF maintained considerable influence in some of the farming districts bordering the forest where the insurgency was first established. Prominent among settlements it controlled in southern Kailahun District, was Bunumbu, a village not far from one of Sankoh's earlier photographic haunts in Segbwema. Pre-war, Bunumbu was the location of an important teacher's college, where training emphasised radical self-help approaches to the rural primary curriculum, influenced by (for example) Freire's ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’. Some Bunumbu students and staff rallied to, or were inducted into the RUF, and helped reshape the movement's ideology to fit enclave conditions (Richards, 2001).
The Green Book agitation against Stevens had been student led and largely based in urban areas (especially Freetown). Government crack-downs resulted in some activists being driven into exile (in both 1977 and 1984). Re-located in the diaspora, the exiles began to publish commentary on the RUF from the mid 1990s (cf. Abdullah, 1997). To them, the movement was an incoherent break-away group with no valid ideological pretensions. Apparently unaware of the Bunumbu connection the exile intellectuals aligned with the dominant international perception of the RUF as a group of desperadoes and bandits. The Bunumbu group gave the forest-bound RUF a new ideological slant, based on a mish-mash of sources, including information about the Grameen Bank in Bangla Desh, Sandanista manuals from Nicaragua and the passages on forest survivalism from Kim Il Sung's memoirs of fighting the Japanese in the Korean mountains. The Pan-Africanism of Nkrumah and Gaddafi was sidelined if not forgotten (Richards et al. 2003, Peters, 2006).
Bombed into the forests in 1993 the RUF was now an enclave in both physical and sociological terms.11 Most of its recruits were young abductees. Postwar studies by Humphreys and Weinstein (2004) show that the great majority of fighters came from impoverished rural backgrounds, and that as many as 87 per cent of the RUF intake claimed to have been abducted. Army atrocities against rebels and rebel suspects from the earliest days of the war, including summary executions of surrendered RUF captives, made it too dangerous for young people, once taken by the movement, to try to escape (Peters & Richards, 1998). Most settled to make what they could of ideological and military training on offer. The movement's message focused on the hiding of diamond wealth by the elite as the source of their own lack of education and self-worth (RUF/SL 1995). To many abductees the teaching made good sense (Richards, 2005b). They progressed from timid captives to willing stalwarts.
As analysed by Mary Douglas (1993), the enclave is one of the basic organisational forms of sectarianism in which internal equality is overruled only by charismatic leadership. The sectarian enclave is held together not by administration but by high costs of entry and exit. Entry ordeals serve as a kind of initiatory experience. Christian sectarians in the Anabaptist12 tradition use adult immersion as a symbolic ordeal. The convert dies to a former life and is henceforth eternally bonded into the group. It is not hard to see that for RUF ‘converts’ the ordeal of being seized from school or family, marched through dangerous terrain and camped in the forest, to be showered with basic necessities from a caring movement, served a similar function. They ‘died’ to their former existence and the movement was henceforth their life.
For many rural young people already initiated into the two main (gender-specific) sodalities of forest communities along the Liberian border – Poro and Sande – being seized by the RUF must have recapitulated earlier experiences. But the RUF contrasted its own ‘rational’ political analysis to the mystical notions of the traditional sodalities. Today, stalwarts report having tested and rejected the magic bullet proof ‘jackets’ used by opposing village civil defence units armed by South African mercenaries. They told Peters (2006) that the name Zogoda was Krio for ‘the sorcerer will die’. The beliefs of the new sect included a concern for agrarian reform and an enthusiasm for modern communications (RUF/SL 1995, Richards, 1996; Peters, 2006). Extensive use was made of looted solar-powered radio sets. Radio chatter was the means by which, eventually, most of the camps were located by private security forces (Hooper, 2003).
The APC government had been pushed aside by a military regime in 1992, but the new regime was unable to deal with the resurgent sectarian RUF. By 1995 attacks had approached the capital, panicking the international community. The government was pointed (by the British) in the direction of private security options. It soon hired Executive Outcomes, a company using former black and white operatives from a special operations unit of the apartheid-era South African Defence Forces.13 EO had been successful in helping the regime in Angola gain the upper hand over the Savimbi rebels.
EO was at the same time retained to protect the Sierra Leonean mine site of a British/ Canadian mining company, Branch Energy. Branch Energy (today Koidu Holdings) levered a highly advantageous kimberlite mining concession from the military regime in 1995. It was assumed in many quarters that the EO contract was funded in part by mining concessions. Branch Energy was managed in Sierra Leone by a retired officer of British overseas military intelligence.14 Again, it was assumed by many (not least members of the Sierra Leonean government) that the CEO's background implied some informal overlap between UK foreign policy in Sierra Leone and the development of the kimberlite mining option. A recent public call for recruits into MI6 states that the organisation's purpose is to safeguard British security and prosperity overseas (my emphasis).
The military regime granted elections after a palace coup in late 1995, and handed over to a new civilian president representing the Sierra Leone Peoples Party (SLPP) in early 1996. A peace process begun by the outgoing regime was continued by the newly elected president, Ahmad Tejan-Kabbah, a lawyer with many years service to the UN system. Indefinite ceasefire agreements were signed between Kabbah and Sankoh in April 1996 to foster the negotiation of a peace agreement in Abidjan. Diplomats in Freetown were doubtful, however, whether the RUF was anything more than an unstable bandit organisation. The RUF War Council, including some of the Bunumbu ideologues, were airlifted to Abidjan, but Sankoh's evident difficulties in representing his movement in the bush provoked diplomatic impatience.
The British, in particular, viewed Sankoh and the RUF as little more than a nuisance. EO had worked out an alternative military option. (Wrongly) estimating RUF fighting strength in 1996 as being about 500 (Hooper, 2003) EO proposed to attack the camps during the cease-fire negotiations in Abidjan. Hooper (2003), a journalist close to EO, reports that the president came under considerable pressure from the private security company to authorise the attacks. A member of the cabinet at the time made clear that the government had been advised to wipe out the movement rather than go for a peace agreement (Richards, 2005a). A clear risk of legitimating the RUF through a peace agreement was that a movement obsessed with transparency in mining deals might have wanted to ‘expose’ the kimberlite mining concession.
During the middle months of 1996 EO was heavily involved in training and arming recruits to a greatly enlarged civil defence militia, a movement formed through use of local initiation techniques, but trained in counter-insurgency methods by the South Africans. Asked why he had formed a large civil defence unit, a Paramount Chief (once a mining engineer) from a chiefdom adjacent to the diamond districts answered that he had been advised to do so ‘by Branch Energy, the mining company’ (Richards, 2005a). Hooper (2003:8) asserts the comparative advantage of the (white) South Africans staffing EO in Sierra Leone was that they ‘understood [black] Africa, [and] had been the architects and practitioners of an immensely successful military doctrine throughout their [South African Defence Force] careers’. This (presumably) alludes to the doctrine through which (for example) Renamo was shaped and launched as a ‘spoiler’ uprising against the government of Mozambique.
EO may have understood how to train and deploy a proxy force such as the quasi-traditional ‘hunter’ civil defence in Sierra Leone. Unfortunately, it failed to understand (or dangerously underestimated) the RUF and its sectarian dynamic. The rebel force was much larger than could be handled by a few thousand recently initiated hunters and small group of about 50 South African operatives, with use of one rented Mi24 helicopter gunship and a Nigerian Howitzer battery (see Hooper, 2003 for details). The attack on the Zogoda (probably in September or October 1996) succeeded in breaking up the camp, but not in rounding up the many in-mates, who escaped along bush tracks through the forest to re-group in northern Kailahun and the centre of the country. The attack undermined the Abidjan peace process, since it convinced Sankoh's praetorian guard that any paper signed in Abidjan would be no more than an expedient to round up and eliminate them. It also meant that key civilian figures in the movement – such as Bunumbu lecturer Ibrahim Deen-Jalloh, in charge of ideological training in the RUF (Peters, 2006) – were cut off from the movement in the bush. Henceforth, the armed cadres lapsed into a deranged fatalism and apocalyptic violence of a kind associated with the dying days of sectarian sieges.15
Testimony from a former child soldier interviewed in Abdullah & Rashid (2004) implies the army was an early user of amputation as a tool of torture and punishment against RUF fighters.16 If so, the atrocity was returned many times over by the RUF, and inflicted mainly on unarmed villagers, presumed to be supporting the civil defence fighters armed by the South Africans. Amnesty International (1992) was prompt in accusing the army of summarily executing suspected rebels in the early days of the war. Richards (1996) reports abducted children attempting to flee the movement being executed by the army, sometimes apparently at the request of villagers. Local reasoning was that the RUF was a new kind of sodality. Once children had been initiated they could never be recovered by their natal communities. They were ‘witch children’, to be dealt with only by elimination. Local paranoia about the potential dissidence of children reflected many years of post-emancipation social exclusion and forced division of labour in the districts over which the RUF operated (Richards, 2005b). Durkheim's first social pathology was fast taking deadly shape in rural Sierra Leone; implacably opposed sodalities, fed by a forced division of labour, were squaring up to a battle to the death.
Paradoxical to some, the RUF sodality was rich in worship. Every day camp life for the RUF began at 6 a.m. with compulsory prayers. A captured middle-aged woman (Richards, 2005) who served the movement as a clerk reports that those who did not go were:
‘in jail for three days … [in the] … guard room’. The prayers were both Muslim and Christian. ‘They will appoint one person to pray. After you have prayed then you will say the Lord's Prayer, and then you will say the Alfatiyah’. Her interviewer asks, ‘how did you… [long pause]… reconcile the fact that these people were forcing you … were making you pray everyday, and at the same time were carrying out such terrible things, both to the people within the RUF, and to their enemy?’ She is at a loss for an answer. ‘Yes, when they … when they will… after the prayers, they have to pick… these boys from the strike force… to go at the front there, after the prayer… but when they go, really they are out of control, now, you see.’
R, perhaps trained as a fighter, describes this focus on rites as a preoccupation:
‘They worshipped a lot … during fast month the rebels kept fast, or … went to church to pray if they were Christians’ … An unanswered question about her own involvement in the fighting switches her thoughts to some troubling scenes of violence. She talks about the role of more man dem (Krio, pl., from Arabic murid, pupil of the Koran, i.e. Muslim diviners) who prepared RUF fighters by making offerings (pul saraa [Krio: to give charity, from Arabic sadaga, alms]). Speaking without animation, she tells the story of a massacre perpetrated by XX (one of the movement's praetorian guard, and commander of the group in which she lived). Fresh from battle, and disturbed by ‘heat’ (i.e. anger), XX seeks the advice of his ‘more’ man. He is told to make an offering of civilian captives. A pit is dug and the victims are gunned down. Under the instruction of the ‘more’ man, XX climbs among the dead and dying, collecting five gallons of blood in a plastic container – the requisite ‘sacrifice’.
To press upon the reader further details of the strange beliefs manifested by the RUF in its dying days would be gratuitous. It is more important to consider how the war in Sierra Leone was ended. Eventually it was realised that the advice to seek a military solution had been flawed all along.17 There was no ‘military solution’, since the more the armed sect is attacked the more determined it is to fight to the bitter end. Action creates belief. All the attacker achieves is to convince the cadres that indeed the end of the world is nigh. A new approach was needed.
The solution adopted was pure Durkheim. The forced division of labour was reversed by the promise of a job. A large group of RUF fighters was flown to Abuja in November 2000, and questions of ideology and belief were kept off the agenda. What was put in its place was a series of proposals about training in return for handing over a gun. DDR18 promised initiation into skill. Much of the training then offered proved a false hope, but this is another story (Richards et al. 2003). What clinched the peace was the very idea of making a sacrifice to society through being able to provide socially-useful work. The combatants could see a way back to social acceptability by acquiring a valued trade. Sadly, too few have since acquired lasting skills, and many have drifted back into diamond pit labouring, though this time under much closer government control (Peters, 2006). But some of those who succeeded to ‘go it alone’ have done so by developing entirely new activities sometimes incorporating lessons learned as combatants. Motorcycle taxi services, dominated by ex-combatants – a post-war development in Sierra Leone's main interior towns – is one such success story, leading to reintegration and acceptance (Fithen & Richards, 2005; Peters, 2006).
In a recent memoir of a brief time administering Maysan Province in Iraq in 2003-4 the young British diplomat Rory Stewart reports a revealing exchange of views between Paul Bremer, the US administrator, and a general of the coalition forces. The general is reported to have said, regarding the incipient Iraqi insurgency,
this is not just a security problem; at heart it is an economic problem … hundreds of thousands of young men do not have jobs and that is why they are joining the insurgency.
Bremer snapped back:
‘we do not have an economic problem with a security dimension; we have a security problem and it is your job to solve it.’ He then reminded his audience its true work was to create ‘a democratic Iraq where the government, elected on the basis of the constitution, respected human rights’. 19