Michel Djotodia: Where He Comes From, Where He -- and CAR -- Might be Going

I have a piece up at African Arguments reflecting on Michel Djotodia's biography and what it might mean for politics in the CAR in the years to come.

It's tempting to see Djotodia's coup as history repeating itself. And many of the coup dynamics this time around are indeed similar to those in 2003. But one of the responsibilities of anthropology is to remind and educate people about the fact that social life is always full of endless possibilities, that deterministic accounts miss more contingent reasons for why things are the way they are. CAR's recent history is dispiriting, and the damages of the coup (looting not just for goods but also for looting's sake, violence, not to mention the psychic toll of the upheaval) are profound. However, events of recent months also bring with them some new opportunities, such as the (imminent) return to Bangui of some of the technocrats who fled while Patassé and Bozizé were in power. 

President Michel Djotodia?

When the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement (UFDR) announced its presence by capturing CAR's northeasternmost town, Birao, at the end of October 2006, a few people starting working their sat phones, each declaring himself to be the leader. There was Abakar Sabone, formerly best known as a Chadian recruiter of men-in-arms who'd helped Bozize take power in 2003 but became disgruntled with his former ally over a perceived lack of proper payment for his services. There was Damane Zakaria, a counselor in Tiringoulou who was with the men on the ground. And there was Michel Djotodia, who few people knew much about at all.

Sabone and Djotodia were in Cotonou, Benin at the time, and they were locked up at Bozize's request. Though they were eventually released, they were both somewhat sidelined during the peace process, and for the next few years whenever anyone asked who was the leader of the UFDR, it was General Damane's name that was put forward.

It was Damane who I got to know while doing research among the UFDR in Tiringoulou in 2009-2010. Nevertheless, I was curious about this Djotodia fellow, so I frequently asked about him as well. Overall, the impression I got was of a polyglot, intelligent guy with outsize political ambitions. He made it into my dissertation, but only in the form of a long footnote:


"People in Vakaga [prefecture] remember [Djotodia] as a prolific practitioner of extraversion. He went to the USSR to study and ended up living there ten years, marrying, and fathering two daughters, and
then finally returning to CAR with “ten diplomas” and fluency in a number of languages, which made him useful when it came to representing the UFDR to foreigners and media. People in Tiringoulou tell of one day, long before the rebellion, when a plane of Russian hunters unexpectedly arrived. Upon hearing Djotodia’s rendition of their language, declared him not Central African but Russian and brought him along for their tour of the country. He had political aspirations, and he pursued them fervently. Twice he tried to become a deputy, and twice he failed. The highest post he attained was Tax Director. He also worked to become close to the Sheikh Tidjani, spiritual leader for many in the buffer zone, who lives in South Darfur. At the time of the UFDR’s first attack, he, like Sabone, was in Benin, where he had friends from his Russia days. Like Sabone, he was jailed in Cotonou for his role in the insurgency. But then he becomes harder to track. He had a falling out with the Sheikh when he tried to convince the president’s son to name him consul to Sudan in the Sheikh’s place (though technically Sudanese himself, the Sheikh occupies this post as a result of the respect and legitimacy he enjoys throughout the region). The break in this relationship has made it harder for him to claim to represent people in the area. Damane said that he had pushed him out when Djotodia had attempted to make an alliance with Charles Massi, another sidelined politician aiming for power through the form of insurgency. Whatever the specifics of his fall, people described it as a function of his failure to properly negotiate alliances. This diplomatic capability is central to maintaining power in a place of plural authorities. People surmised that this “intellectual” is now trying his luck somewhere far away."

Well, now we know a bit more about what Djotodia was up to. He has been in Nyala, in South Darfur, cultivating working alliances with the remnants of Chadian rebel groups that have been hanging out in the area. It was these fighters from the Chad/Sudan/CAR borderlands who became the military backbone of the Seleka rebel coalition that first threatened the CAR capital, Bangui, in December. (The UFDR fighters I knew -- tough guys, but a bit ragtag, especially compared to their counterparts in places like Chad or Sudan -- could have put up a decent fight against the CAR armed forces on their own, but the "Chadians" were what made them so unstoppable.)

And through these alliances, Djotodia has come out on top. Hearing the stories of his ambition during my research, I almost felt embarrassed on his behalf -- he seemed like a Jamaican bobsledder convinced he'd win gold. And yet here he is, ten years after Bozize took power, getting ready to move into the presidential palace. Here's hoping he lives up to his intellectual reputation and does a better job than his predecessor. Goodness knows Central Africans have suffered far too much already.

Post-Gadaffi Repercussions in the Sahel

The report of the "Post-Gadaffi Repercussions in the Sahel" workshop I participated in at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra in June last year is available for download here.

One of the most stimulating presentations was by Prof Morten Bøås, who discussed "escape routes" between West Africa, the Sahel, and into the Sahara. Similarly to the ideas of non-centralized modes of power that I have developed, Morten talked about how governance in the region is in large part a question of "organisation without organisations". In other words, it is a matter of hubs (primarily geographic) and nodes (primarily people -- big men), which become the orienting points in dynamic, loose networks. Also fascinating was Christian Vium's research with nomads in Mauritania. The report blurb doesn't do justice to his project; Christian's stunning photos here at least make it come alive a bit more. 

Missing Pieces

I revisited the penis-snatching incident that happened during my fieldwork for a short piece in Pacific Standard magazine.

There is always a risk of exoticizing when talking about these kinds of phenomena, a risk that I think anthropologists of Africa like me feel particularly acutely. However, in this case I think I'm in the clear: the article has engendered some correspondence with people in the US who argue the problem of missing members is in need of (rigorous) study here as well. 

Making War, Not Peace

I had an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune this weekend arguing that peacebuilding initiatives in the Central African Republic, and specifically disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programs, have contributed to fanned the country's conflicts, rather than diminishing them.

The piece focuses on the most recent attempt at DDR in CAR, which never even got off the ground. But the argument becomes even stronger if one looks at preceding DDR efforts. Consider the PRAC, which ran from 2004 -- 2007. Seven thousand people who had allegedly fought during the conflicts that crescendoed with Bozize's successful coup in 2003 participated in the PRAC. Even if one accepted that they were indeed ex-combatants (and many were not -- the lists of DDR beneficiaries are notoriously difficult to police given the markets that inevitably spring up around them), these were entirely inactive armed groups. I met DDR participants in 2004 who had not held a gun since 1997. And despite having "disarmed" all these 7,000 people, the program collected only a few hundred guns, only a fraction of which were in working condition.

Failures like the PRAC have effects. When UN officials and others eager to fund the next round of DDR and peacebuilding drum up support, they can seem to be talking as if the new efforts will be carried out on a proverbial clean slate. But what the PRAC's non-disarming disarmament shows is that on the ground programs like it give rise to new definitions, new understandings of what DDR means and entails. I wrote the op-ed in part in hopes of injecting that historical memory into the discussions as to the character of the peacebuilding efforts that will soon be carried out.

I could go on -- the ways in which DDR in theory is mismatched with DDR in practice are copious -- but I'll leave that for another post, and another article. 

Ivory Wars

I have an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune today arguing against militarized anti-poaching as a response to the increasing slaughter of African elephants.

Among other things, the op-ed was inspired by Bryan Christy's excellent article in this month's National Geographic about ivory consumption in Asia and beyond. Christy shows how easily ivory can be procured in markets in the Vatican, the Philippines, China, Thailand, and elsewhere and how easy it is to circumvent the international legal architecture that in theory bans the trade. Given such burgeoning demand for ivory and such innovation on all levels of its sale, going after the hunters, already a fraught enterprise, is doomed to fail.

Christy opens his article with a description of a recent elephant massacre in Cameroon. He stops short of labeling the hunters, but more credulous sources -- such as Jeffrey Gettleman in the NYTimes -- have repeated the accusation that they were "janjaweed," which has a flimsy foundation in fact. It's convenient for governments and conservationists to demonize ivory hunters as "LRA" or "janjaweed," but we really need more study of who the hunters are and the networks involved in the ivory trade. Ammunition tracing like that done by the Small Arms Survey would be a good place to start.

One final note: the Paris-based editors changed some things while I slept here on the West Coast, including deleting the name of the fellowship I hold. I'd like to acknowledge the generous support of the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship and my colleagues in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.

Raiding Sovereignty in Central African Borderlands

My dissertation, titled Raiding Sovereignty in Central African Borderlands, is now available for public download.

Rather than swaddle it in caveats, I'll let anyone with the stamina to plow through nearly 450 pages on CAR take a look for themselves -- pdf here -- and I'll be happy to discuss more with anyone who is interested. In the coming months I plan to post more on how my thinking is changing.

And for those who prefer the digested version, here is the abstract:

This dissertation focuses on raiding and sovereignty in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) northeastern borderlands, on the margins of Darfur. A vast literature on social evolution has assumed the inevitability of political centralization. But these borderlands show centralization does not always occur. Never claimed by any centralizing forces, the area has instead long been used as a reservoir of resources by neighboring areas’ militarized entrepreneurs, who seek the savanna’s goods. The raiders seize resources but also govern. The dynamics of this zone, much of it a place anthropologists used to refer to as “stateless,” suggest a re-thinking of the modalities of sovereignty. The dissertation proposes conceptualizing sovereignty not as a totalizing, territorialized political order, but through its constituent governing capabilities, which may centralize or not and can combine to create hybrid political systems.

The dissertation develops this framework through analysis of three categories of men-in-arms—road blockers, anti-poaching militiamen, and members of rebel groups—and their relationships with international peacebuilding initiatives. It compares roadblocks and “road cutting” (robbery) to show how these men stop traffic and create flexible, personalized entitlements to profit for those who operate them. The dissertation also probes the politics of militarized conservation: in a low-level war that has lasted for 25 years, European Union-funded militiamen fight deadly battles against herders and hunters. Though ostensibly fought to protect CAR’s “national patrimony” (its animals and plants), this war bolsters the sovereign capabilities of non-state actors and has resulted in hundreds of deaths in the last few years alone, many of them hidden in the bush. The dissertation then shows how CAR’s recent cycle of rebellion has changed governance in rural areas. Though mobile armed groups have long operated in CAR, they used to work as road cutters and local defense forces and only recently started calling themselves “rebels”—a move that has landed in them in new roles as “governors” of populations. Throughout these various raiders’ projects, the idea of the all-powerful state serves as a reference they use to qualify themselves with sovereign authorities. But their actions as rulers undermine the creation of the unitary political authority they desire and invoke. Failure to appreciate these non-centralized micropolitical processes is a main reason peacebuilding efforts (such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) have failed.