4 Rebels, Guns and Money

 4

Rebels, Guns and Money

The mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.1

Leon Trotsky

At 1.30 a.m. on 23 December 1972, residents of Managua were woken from their sleep when the ground below them shook.2 ‘At first theearth seemed to go up and down, then it seemed to go from side to side and everything came down,’ a resident recalled.3 Although theearthquake itself was relatively mild, at 6.25 on the Richter scale, the effect on Nicaragua’s capital was devastating.4

When the sun came up the following morning, the sky above Managua was concealed by smoke and red dust. On the ground, fires wereburning where thousands of buildings had collapsed. Firemen, with their fire engines buried and the water mains burst, were often forcedto look on in despair as the flames consumed the structures still standing.5 Many of the survivors fled the city.6 And they, their homes andneighbourhoods destroyed, were the lucky ones. So many people died that an official declared an entire section of the city would becovered in lime after being levelled to create a mass grave.7 When the first foreign journalist arrived in Managua, he said: ‘Those of uswho knew Managua will never see it again. Managua has disappeared. All is desolation, death and tragedy.’8

For Nicaragua, the earthquake was a catastrophe.

When General Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Nicaragua’s ruler, looked at the devastation from the presidential palace, he sawopportunity. In a first step, the government declared martial law, thereby expanding the powers of the National Guard, which Somozacontrolled. Then, as money for reconstruction poured in from countries around the world, Somoza made sure that he, rather than hiscountry, would be the primary beneficiary. With his brother and father having ruled Nicaragua before him, Somoza had a vast businessempire that made him rich in a country in which many had nothing. Now that Managua was in ruins, Somoza made sure it would be‘rebuilt on Somoza land, by Somoza construction companies, with international aid funnelled through Somoza banks’.9

For the dictator and his thugs, things could have been perfect. But he went too far. Although Nicaragua’s wealthy elites might haveaccepted that the dictator should get the largest slice of the pie, but not enough was left for them. Many of Managua’s rich businessmen,previously supportive of the dictatorship, began to turn against him.10

And outside the capital, an insurgency was brewing. The Sandinist National Liberation Front (FSLN), a leftist rebel group founded in 1961on the back of widespread popular discontent, foresaw that guerrilla war would bring them victory over the regime.11 They also usedsome more unusual tactics, when, in 1974, they kidnapped multiple well-known politicians and business figures during a Christmas party.The regime paid a ransom to free the hostages, but then it unleashed a wave of violence on the rebels – as well as on entirely innocentcivilians. Much of the repression targeted the population outside Managua. At the time, priests reported that Somoza’s National Guardhad ‘instituted a reign of terror . . . routinely killing and torturing peasant men, raping women, burning homes and stealing crops andproperty’.12

Somoza was sitting on a powder keg.13 Then, on 10 January 1978, the fuse was lit when three men shot Pedro Joaquín ChamorroCardenal, a popular journalist-turned-opposition leader, eighteen times.14 With Chamorro’s family and much of the public blaming theSomoza regime for the death, the flame of rebellion was lit. In the capital, Somoza businesses were burned. In other cities, young men andwomen attacked members of the National Guard with whatever weapons they could muster. In Masaya, not even infantry could put downthe unrest. Instead, the regime had to send in tanks and helicopters.15

By 1979, Somoza had three problems. First, the different factions of the FSLN managed to bridge their differences to become ahomogenous group.16 Second, the Carter administration withdrew its support for the Nicaraguan dictatorship after the United Stateshad supported the Somozas for decades. Third, many of Nicaragua’s neighbours had become convinced that Somoza had to go, andthey acted accordingly.

Fidel Castro provided rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and artillery for the rebels.17 Venezuela provided financing and Costa Rica wasused to smuggle weapons into the country. In May 1979, Mexico broke off diplomatic relations with Nicaragua. With Somozaincreasingly isolated and the rebels better armed than ever, the Sandinistas announced their final offensive. By July, the Sandinistas hadtaken control of most of Nicaragua and Somoza realised he had to go.

After losing against the rebels and fleeing to Miami, the former Nicaraguan dictator found a friendly dictator who would take him in:Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner. In Paraguay, Somoza had a chauffeur, a white Mercedes-Benz and a swimming pool at his suburbanhome. And although he complained about having lost some $80 million, that still left him with $20 million in the bank. He wasn’t exactlydestitute. But one day, just a few blocks from his house in Paraguay’s capital Asunción, Somoza’s previous life caught up with him whenhis convoy was met with a hail of bullets and a bazooka.18

Tyrants can’t keep everyone happy. To maintain their grip on power, they usually need to steal from the masses and distribute the gainsto insiders of the regime such as the generals, oligarchs and rival politicians. If they don’t, they can easily be toppled by palace elites ortheir own troops. But if they do, the neglected, overlooked masses of the hinterland might rise up. And when that happens, despots whodon’t pay enough attention to threats outside their capital can be taken by surprise.

Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle managed to upset a great many people. Parts of Managua’s elites were upset becauseSomoza stole from the masses without giving them sufficient opportunity for enrichment. Many Nicaraguans outside the capital wereupset because they barely had enough income to survive on. The country’s Catholic bishops were appalled at the brutal repression theregime used against civilians. Somoza also managed to alienate his most important protector, the United States, while energising hisenemies in Latin America.

What happened in Nicaragua was unusual. In the modern world, it is extremely difficult for rebels to topple tyrants. Around five thousandyears ago, there were no regular armies. People fought each other, but it was effectively a fight of guerrillas against guerrillas.19 Big statesin ancient Greece had only a few hundred thousand inhabitants. A few hundred years ago, Germany was so fragmented that someonetravelling from Brunswick to the French border would cross six duchies, four bishoprics and one free imperial city. That may sound like alot, but the Holy Roman Empire at the time consisted of 812 more or less sovereign political entities.20 To a large extent, these were weak,fractured states prone to being defeated by small groups of soldiers, attacking on a whim.

The modern nation-state is a different animal altogether. It’s extremely effective at organising a large group of people in the pursuit of asingle aim such as waging war. If rebels are going to go to war against one such state, it’s going to be much more difficult to beat thanancient Greek city-states or German duchies. This is partly a result of the size and effectiveness of modern states, but it’s also the result ofadvances in technology.

Such advances have made it increasingly difficult to hide. Now that states can mass-manufacture surveillance drones or simply buy themfrom one of dozens of manufacturers, hiding has become more challenging. Rebels can’t just camp on a ridge or make a fire in a forestclearing if they want to remain out of the eyes of the government. The world has become much smaller.

And that’s merely the effect of drones. In addition, there are now easily available satellite images, biometric tracking and a multitude ofother tools that despots can use to track their enemies. Perhaps the biggest overall difference is due to modern infrastructure. Theexistence of roads and railways completely changes the balance of power between the state and its people because they allow regulartroops to operate in territory that was previously inaccessible.

Obviously, insurgents can benefit from modern technology as well: mobile phones can be used to coordinate, Google Maps can be usedto plan attacks, social media networks can be used to find new recruits. But ultimately, at the scale that is required to win rather than justkeep fighting, it is difficult to outdo modern nation-states. They are, in comparison to anything humans have seen in the past, incrediblypowerful.

That doesn’t mean it’s impossible for rebels to win, but the bar is now higher. To fight an enemy as powerful as this, rebellions need tobe more sophisticated, better funded and better armed. Fighting a rebellion is not an easy thing to do, especially because it requiressignificantly more time and coordination than a ‘simple’ military coup. Rebellions are in some ways the opposite of a coup: they requirehuge numbers of people to succeed, they tend to be extremely bloody, and battlefield strength matters more than perception. When theyhappen despite the difficulties, it’s usually because someone, somewhere has been excluded.

A military officer by training, Idriss Déby spent part of the 1970s in France, where he trained to become a pilot. When he returned to hisnative Chad in February 1979, the country was at war, with multiple warlords fighting one another. After considering his options, Débyjoined Hissène Habré’s Armed Forces of the North (FAN). In return for successfully fighting on Habré’s side during the insurgency thatbrought him to power, President Habré made Déby the deputy commander of his military forces.21

But the alliance didn’t last long and, by 1989, the former allies were close to open conflict. Habré feared that an ethnic group called theZaghawa presented a threat to his rule and as a result, he used his secret services to target ordinary Zaghawa people as Zaghawa membersof the government were killed.22 Born into a poor herding family that belonged to the Zaghawa, Déby had to wonder whether he mightbe next. On 1 April 1989, Habré gave a speech in which he accused Déby and his co-conspirators of treachery following an attemptedcoup. ‘They took great advantage of the benefits of our struggle, of the sweat and the blood of our armed forces and our people toenrich themselves, [only] to stab Chad in the back,’ he said.23

After fleeing to Libya via Sudan, Déby set out to raise an army that could march on Chad’s capital. And march (or rather drive) it did, allthe way to N’Djamena. As his troops approached, Habré fled to Cameroon and many of his soldiers simply threw away their guns.24

Fearing exclusion, Déby used force to topple the man he had brought to power through force less than a decade earlier.

But as president, Déby made many of the same moves as Habré and soon enough, he too faced an insurgency of disgruntled military menfrom across the border in southern Libya. Faced with the threat of being toppled by rebels just as Habré had been, Déby decided to staredanger in the face. In April 2021, he joined his troops on the frontline against the rebels. Shortly thereafter, a general appeared on Chadianstate television. Déby, he said, ‘breathed his last defending the sovereign nation on the battlefield’.25

Both Habré and Déby lost power because they moved to exclude insiders they perceived to be unreliable. Those insiders fled, only toreturn with fighters, Kalashnikovs and grenades. That isn’t unusual, it often happens. So why do so many tyrants do it anyway? Thepolitical scientist Philip Roessler argues it’s about moving the conflict from within the regime to society at large, ‘where the ruler and hisallies calculate it poses less of a threat to their political supremacy’.26

Every tyrant faces the threat of civil war. But not every tyrant faces the same level of threat. Some of the worst tyrants on earth are relativelypopular despite their cruelty. For example, oil-rich dictators are often guilty of obscene corruption and grotesque inequality, but they canpay out enough to the masses to stave off a violent uprising. In a country with massive natural resource reserves and only a few millioninhabitants, the population can live in prosperity even if the royal family steals billions. At the other end of the spectrum, there arecountries where everyone is extremely poor except for those in the dictator’s inner circle. The contrast is so extreme that most of thepopulation have good reason to be dissatisfied with the ruler.

When anger burns hottest, the risk to the tyrant is determined by whether there is the opportunity to rebel.

Rebels fight for all kinds of reasons. Some are motivated by injustice; others are motivated by greed. And, as paradoxical as it may sound,some people decide to join up and fight because they seek safety.27 If you’re reading this book, chances are there are some thingsyou’ve always taken for granted in your life. First, that there’s a state which retains something close to a monopoly on violence within itsborders, producing law, order and stability. Then, even though buying property might be more difficult for you than it was for yourgrandparents, there’s work. In an emergency, there’s the police and, if a really serious dispute arises, a working court system. But inmany of the world’s poorest countries, none of that exists. There’s little infrastructure, no work, the police extort money fromlaw-abiding citizens and the court system is painfully slow, the bench populated by corrupt judges. If under those circumstances asituation arises in which someone feels threatened, holding a Kalashnikov and joining a rebel organisation might actually be the best wayto look after themselves and their families.

And if the ranks of the rebel organisation can’t be filled fast enough with voluntary recruits, people can be forced to fight. To provide justone example from the Cold War: according to one estimate, some 80 per cent of the fighters involved in the anti-communist armedgroup, the National Resistance of Mozambique (RENAMO), didn’t choose to fight, they were forced to enlist.28 A particularly gruesometactic involves kidnapping ‘recruits’ and then forcing them to commit atrocities near their home so that they became trapped withinthe insurgency, never able to return to their families.29 Not even children are safe. During the Burundian Civil War, rebels bought streetchildren from Kenya and turned them into fighters.30

But no tyrant is threatened by unarmed fighters. And if the declared aim of the group is to fight the government, they can’t simply walkinto a gun shop and pick up the rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns they need. But if the nascent rebel movement hasenough money, they can source the weaponry they need on the black market – or from a willing sponsor.

Rebels need money – for guns, certainly, but that’s just a down payment. Fighters also need to be fed and equipped over the course ofmonths, or more likely years. They need salaries to justify the risk. That’s a dilemma for rebel groups because their activities do notdirectly generate any revenue.31 It’s not like a business that perpetuates itself through its operations. So, how do rebels generate thecash they need to bring down the tyrant?

The one advantage that insurgents have is the capacity for violence. And violence, in turn, can be turned into cash. If you’re involved inorganised crime in London or New York or Hong Kong, you can use violence to extort money from people. You’re an insurancesalesman, of sorts. If people don’t pay your insurance, their windows might get smashed because they don’t receive your‘protection’. In many of the poor rural areas in which rebel groups tend to operate, that’s not really an option because you can’t takethings away from people who don’t have anything.32 Or you could, because everybody has something, but whatever it is you can stealmight not be enough to keep going. That said, there are other options. One of them is natural resources.

For someone looking to fund an insurgency, diamonds are perfect. They are often easy to extract, easy to smuggle and extremelyexpensive once they make their way out of the war zone. We all know the term ‘blood diamond’ – diamonds that fuel wars. They’vebeen discussed in newspapers, books and on the screen in Edward Zwick’s 2007 Blood Diamond. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the film isset in Sierra Leone during the country’s brutal civil war. During that war, the rebels financed their fighting thanks to gems dug straight outof the ground. The gruelling mining work was often done by young men and women with nothing more than a shovel and a sieve. Afterdigging to a depth of up to twenty metres, the excavated gravel was passed in buckets from person to person in a long chain. At the end ofthat chain, the earth was checked for signs of precious stones. The diggers were poor and easily intimidated. If they managed to find astone, the rebels could ‘tax’ them. If they wanted to take a break, the rebels could beat them until they started working again. And if theystopped turning up in the morning, someone else could be forced to do the job. From West Africa, the stones went to London, Paris orMoscow, where they were sold for thousands of dollars in fancy jewellery shops. It is big business. According to some estimates,diamonds from African war zones made up as much as 15 per cent of the world supply during the mid-1990s.33

Rebels who sell diamonds can earn eye-watering sums. According to one estimate, UNITA, a rebel faction during the Angolan Civil War,made more than a billion dollars this way. (Some estimates put the figure much higher).34 For the tyrant, the threat posed by rebelsfunded by diamonds can be vicious. The rebels make money by extracting diamonds; they then use that money to buy weapons andattract fighters. As they go from strength to strength, they capture more territory and extract more diamonds. The snowball keepsgrowing.

Using commodities other than diamonds (or drugs) is more difficult because rebels don’t usually have access to advanced machinery,large-scale outside investment or sophisticated technology. Extracting oil, for example, is significantly more challenging. But, as difficultas it might be to drill for oil, there are ways to profit from those who do the drilling or some other task related to it. The easiest way to dothis is to threaten or kidnap the employees of the multinational companies that often do the work.35 These companies don’t just havedeep pockets, they are willing to work in the poor, rural areas where rebels are often strongest. When their engineers or managers are heldat gunpoint and then hidden away in a jungle or cave, many of these firms are willing to pay large sums to get them back.

Sometimes, even a single corporate ‘benefactor’ can make a huge difference. In the early 1980s, the champagne corks must havepopped at Mannesmann HQ. The German conglomerate had just won a $160-million contract to build 278 kilometres of pipeline fromColombia’s oilfields to the Caribbean coast. There were only three small problems: first, the pipeline had to be built through the Andesmountains. Okay, that’s an engineering problem the Germans could solve. Second, the Marxist-Leninist National Liberation Army (ELN)was active in the area. Trickier. Lastly, Mannesmann was supposed to finish the project in a year.36 It was quite a task.

Then one of the German engineers and two of his Colombian colleagues were kidnapped and the company’s managers had a decisionto make: would they strike a deal with the rebels to get their employees back and stand a chance of finishing the project on time, or wouldthey try their best to do the work they were hired to do without such an arrangement? Neither was a great option. Making a deal with therebels would mean paying a lot of money to criminals who had just abducted colleagues; not paying it could lead to their colleagues’deaths and endanger the entire pipeline.

In the end, the company reportedly struck a deal. According to a former manager working on the project, they paid millions in ransom.37According to the rebel leader, even those millions were only one part of a series of payments the ELN received from Mannesmann. Therelationship became so close that the company was issued with stickers for their cars and lorries. When a Mannesmann lorry drovethrough a remote settlement, these stickers alerted villagers to the fact that the vehicle was ‘protected’ by the ELN. This benefited theELN, in that the stickers also made known to the villagers that the ELN was bringing money into the region.38 Mannesmann managed tocomplete the contract, but the ELN, fuelled by German money, went from strength to strength. The rebels would later say that it allowedthe group to grow by 500 per cent.39

Those are the ‘usual’ ways of financing a rebellion. More unorthodox ways exist, such as those that political scientist Michael L. Rosscalls ‘booty futures’. When they are not funding insurgencies, futures are contracts in which one party agrees to buy an asset at aspecified time in the future. One of the advantages of these types of contracts is that they can reduce volatility. Imagine an airline companythat is worried by fluctuating kerosene prices, for example. The company’s managers know that they need to buy a certain amount offuel in June next year because they know how many flights the company usually does when people go on holiday. If the airline’smanagers think the price of fuel might go up a lot by then, they can lock in the price now and be sure of what they are going to pay.

Obviously, this type of instrument can be used not only to safeguard against risk but also to speculate. This is where the rebels come in. Butinstead of entering into a legal agreement through the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to sell a fixed amount of kerosene by next summer,rebels can try to sell a future for the ‘booty’ they have yet to capture. Through that, they can make the capture more likely. This mightsound like something from the Golden Age of Piracy, but it’s a little more recent.

Congo’s president Pascal Lissouba feared that his predecessor, Denis Sassou-Nguesso, wanted to become president again. Worryinglyfor Lissouba, Sassou had a private militia. When Lissouba sent government forces to surround Sassou’s private compound, his militiafought back and the civil war began.40 The funding for Sassou’s militia reportedly came in part from the sale of future exploitation ofCongo’s oil to the French company Elf-Aquitaine. Sassou supposedly received $150 million and the firm might have helped him buyarms.41

Hard to believe as it is, this episode occurred in 1997.

Whether it be voluntary fighters, forced recruits, diamonds or even booty futures, the rebels now have fighters, arms and enough moneyto keep the insurgents marching. What they still need in order to topple the tyrant is a place to hide. This is where geography plays a role. Ifyou’re near a map, take a look at continental Europe, specifically the Netherlands. Obviously, the Netherlands has been a liberaldemocracy for decades – the Dutch are among the freest people in the world. But let’s say a sizeable number of Dutch people decide towage an insurgency on account of some grievance or other. How would that work? It wouldn’t. Fighting an insurgency in Holland (or inFriesland or in Limburg) would be all but impossible.

Much of the reason this is because hiding is impossible. Driving from Groningen to Eindhoven takes less than three hours and thecountry’s widest point is perhaps two hundred kilometres at most. While there is a mountain of some nine hundred metres within theKingdom of the Netherlands, it’s in the country’s overseas territory in the Caribbean. On the mainland, there are no jungles and noremote areas beyond the control of the central government. You could of course try to hide in a neighbouring country. But as it stands, theNetherlands borders on Germany and Belgium, and neither Berlin nor Brussels is likely to be particularly supportive once told that you’replanning to march on the Binnenhof. As a result, a Dutch insurgency wouldn’t last a day against the Royal Netherlands Army.

It’s not true to say that all small, flat and easily accessible countries are governed by democrats, but it’s a fact that many autocratsoperate in countries that look nothing like the Netherlands. When the Tajik government faced a civil war in 1992 after the Soviet Unionimploded, one of its big problems was that the opposition was difficult to pursue because large tracts of the country were covered insnow-capped mountains. The Ismoil Somoni Peak (Stalin Peak until 1962, then Communism Peak until the late 1990s) in Tajikistan has anelevation of 7,495 metres, making it more than twenty-three times higher than the highest ‘mountain’ in the European Netherlands.And obviously, Ismoil Somoni Peak doesn’t stand in isolation – Tajikistan is full of mountains which are difficult to access for outsiders (oreven the central government). They were the perfect hiding place not just for fighters but also for their Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelledgrenades. Insurgencies work best when the rebels are likely to win a game of hide-and-seek with the government.

Sometimes, not only is a country remote, it borders on other countries which are remote as well. Going back to the Netherlands: Belgiumis densely populated, and so are at least some of Germany’s regions on the Dutch border. In the case of a hypothetical Dutch rebellion,that would make it extremely difficult to traffic weapons or fighters. But in a country such as the Central African Republic, the governmenthas to contend with a doubly difficult situation. The eastern part of the Central African Republic is underdeveloped and difficult for thecentral government to reach because of the geography and lack of infrastructure. On top of that, it is surrounded by regions of theDemocratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Sudan and Chad which are themselves difficult to access. Given the porous borders andextent of the problems in neighbouring areas, that part of the country is almost impossible to control from the capital Bangui. Even thesmallest armed opposition group can carve out a little fiefdom for itself and gradually that slice of land can serve as a springboard to aserious challenge.

In large part, civil wars are a contest between the rebels and the government as to who can win over the populace. Civilians are a resourcethat provides labour, opportunities for ‘taxation’ and intelligence to friendly troops – or the enemy. Because they are so important,both government and insurgents want to prevent them ‘defecting’ to the other side. That’s a particular concern in contestedterritories in which civilians regularly come into contact with both sides.42 And when dealing with that problem, insurgents often have anumber of advantages. Government troops tend to be drawn from around the country. When their mission is up or the governmentchanges, they leave. Rebels may well be local in the first place and may never leave. That permanence is an advantage when trying toprevent civilians from defecting. Another disadvantage for governments, both democratic and non-democratic, is that they tend to bemore constrained when it comes to violence than rebels.43 There’s a story from the Algerian Civil War about an old man, who, whenarrested by the French army for having sawn off some telegraph poles, explains why he has done such a thing:

Sir, the French come and tell me: you mustn’t saw off poles; if you do, you go to prison. I say to myself: I don’t want to go to prison, Iwon’t do it. The French leave. At night, the rebel comes and says: saw off the poles from here to there. I answer: no, the French would putme into prison. The rebel tells me: you cut the poles or I cut your throat. I calculate: if I don’t cut the poles, he’ll surely cut my throat; hehas done it to others, in the next village. I prefer going to prison. So, Sir, I cut the poles; you caught me; put me in prison.44

This was a war in which French soldiers were exceptionally brutal. They razed villages, tortured, killed. But in the end, the rebel threat to thatold man was simply more credible so he did what any rational person would do: he cut the poles.

But violence, even when it is brutal, is most effective when it is discriminate.45 If those who cut the poles receive no more punishment thanthose who do not, the locals might as well start cutting poles. To prevent that, the tyrant’s soldiers and the rebel army have to work outwho is a ‘traitor’ and who serves the cause. Because of their permanence, connection to the local community and capacity for violence,this is easier for insurgents than it is for the government troops who might not even speak the local language.

As we can see, insurgents have a number of advantages against the tyrant on the battlefield. But importantly, rebels can topple tyrantseven if they don’t succeed in beating the regime’s military. Just like rebels, tyrants need people, money and guns to keep fighting.46People are relatively easy to come by if you already have an established fighting force – but rebels can sever the flow of money andweapons to the regime.

Both tend to depend, at least in some respects, on the tyrant’s ‘good’ standing. When rebels force the tyrant to fight a bloody civil warin which thousands of innocent civilians get killed, they can turn the incumbent into an international pariah.

No sanction will make it impossible to acquire weapons because someone will always sell them, but sanctions can ensure that weaponscome at a premium, and that further reduces the effectiveness of a military that’s probably already proving ineffective. Sanctions canalso cause hardship for the population, although that’s usually of little concern to autocrats. From their perspective, the main issue is thatthey risk running into a redistribution problem when foreign aid gets cut or trade routes are frozen due to civil war. Given that tyrants stayin power by dividing up a cake among the hungry elites that surround them, they generally don’t want that cake to be reduced.

There’s another problem that tyrants can run into even if the cake isn’t reduced. In some conflicts, dictators are able to buy off rebelgroups with cash or patronage in the event that suppressing them is either too costly or simply impossible.47 If it’s just the rebels and thedictatorship involved, the considerations for either party aren’t too difficult. Is it better to settle (for a price) – the path of least resistance?Or is it preferable to fight? With these being the only options, the price to be paid for the rebels’ ‘allegiance’ is comparatively low.Unfortunately for modern tyrants, twenty-first-century civil wars tend to be incredibly messy and outsiders are almost always involved.Perhaps a neighbouring country has an economic interest in the conflict or they think a rebellion against the next-door neighbour is agood chance to get rid of a hostile leader they’ve long disliked. Now that this outside power is involved, a two-way negotiation betweenthe dictator and the rebel commander turns into an auction. With the rebel commander able to choose to fight for the dictator, or theforeign power, or neither of them, the price the dictatorship has to pay automatically goes up. In some cases, this has led to truly bizarreoutcomes.

These mechanisms were at work during the Darfur conflict of 2003 in western Sudan. When the level of unrest grew during 2002, theSudanese regime made a miscalculation when they thought that they could buy off armed groups on the cheap. The result was a war forwhich neither the insurgents nor the government were prepared. Then, because of the violence, other powers became interested. Butonce peace negotiations began, they didn’t succeed in resolving the conflict. Instead, explains Alex de Waal, they ‘served perversely toincrease political competition, lower the barriers for new entrepreneurs to enter the market, and (in the paradox of security markets)further inflate the price of loyalty’.48 This obviously doesn’t apply to every civil war and every rebel group but it does demonstrate thattyrants can run into trouble even if the size of the ‘cake’ never gets smaller. It’s already problematic enough for them if they have tocut bigger pieces.

All these problems are accentuated by corruption. Most authoritarian systems of government evolve around corruption, and the militaryis no different – it’s an institution where money is to be skimmed off ammunition, salaries and guns. But the two are related: risking yourlife on a low salary to fight on behalf of an uninspiring autocracy is one thing, but to do it while your commanders steal the very equipmentyou need to survive? That’s another.

Rebel movements are extremely difficult to defeat. Even after suffering severe casualties, they can survive, zombie-like, for a very longtime. And as the wars drag on, the costs mount – not just for the people doing the fighting, but for countries as a whole.

On the morning of 21 March 2018, I was in the Beqaa Valley, a stunningly beautiful part of Lebanon wedged between Mount Lebanon andthe anti-Lebanon mountains. Beyond the range to the east lay Assad’s Syria. I was sitting on the floor in a large tent, listening to a womantalk about her truly desperate situation. The woman and her immediate family had left their hometown in Syria because of the devastatingcivil war that Bashar al-Assad was waging after he decided that he would rather burn the country to the ground than leave office. Now shewas in an informal refugee camp with her young children. The tents had carpets, electricity, and people could sleep on mattresses. Butoutside the white United Nations tarpaulin that kept families dry, the ground wasn’t paved. I dreaded to think what life was like therewhen it rained.

The woman and her children were safe in a sense, but they also had no security. Basic healthcare was available, but little beyond this. Therewas barely enough money to make ends meet. And while her husband had made it to Europe, there was no guarantee that she and thechildren would be able to follow in the immediate future. Returning to Syria wasn’t an option either because all that awaited them wouldbe ruins, repression and yet more violence. So they were stuck in a place where they didn’t want to be, because of a war they had no partin waging.

On the flight home, I contemplated the fact that the small Syrian family I had met that day were just three of millions of Syrians who hadpaid the price for Assad’s civil war. Turkey alone hosts more than three million Syrians; Lebanon, almost eight hundred thousand. Withover three hundred thousand civilians killed and fourteen million displaced, the Syrian civil war is one of the biggest tragedies of ageneration.49

Some of these conflicts are so traumatic that they continue to play an outsized role in the public imagination for hundreds or eventhousands of years after they end. In Chinese politics today, for example, the Warring States Period that happened some two thousandyears ago continues to be a symbol for chaos.

But as devastating as these conflicts can be, they don’t necessarily lead to the fall of tyrants. Henry Kissinger had it wrong when he said‘the guerrilla wins if he does not lose.’50 In fact, there are plenty of insurgents who have waged guerrilla war for decades without evercoming close to winning. Using drug money, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have engaged in a relentless struggleagainst the central government in Bogotá for decades. They have carried out surprise attacks, fought battles, bombed civilians and takenpoliticians hostage. In total, the war has perhaps cost more than two hundred thousand lives.51 FARC didn’t lose, yet they eventuallysigned a ceasefire accord with Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos. It was highly controversial at the time and in a way a majorachievement for FARC – but was it victory? No, it was not and it’s not an isolated case.

Evidently, it’s not sufficient for rebels simply to keep fighting to kill off governments. They need to be able to do more than that: win onthe battlefield or beat the regime some other way. Only then does the tyrant fall. The despot’s vulnerability off the battlefield largelydepends on his susceptibility to outside pressure, and some countries are more vulnerable to outside influence than others. Does theregime have access to an indigenous arms industry that can keep pumping out weapons when foreign suppliers stop their deliveries? Canthe dictatorship sell something at high prices even while it stands accused of committing crimes against humanity? Can the economysurvive without foreign aid? If the answer to all three questions is yes, it will probably be extremely difficult to beat the regime. Asdepressing as it is, it will probably keep on fighting – either because it can sustain the fight itself or because others find it valuable and soprotect it.

One example of the latter is Chad’s Déby. When he came to power in 1982, it was partly because Paris ordered French troops in thecountry to stand by as Déby’s rebel army marched on the capital. At the time, the French foreign minister said: ‘The times have passedwhen France would pick governments or change governments and would maintain others when it so wished.’52 That was a blatant lie.The French had previously protected Habré, but he had become a little too close to the United States for Paris’s liking, and was thereforenot worthy of French protection anymore.53 Things were vastly different when Déby was in power. As late as 2019, French pilots flyingFrench jets took to the air to bomb rebels on Déby’s behalf.54 When the French foreign minister was asked what was going on, heexplicitly said France was intervening to protect the regime from a potential coup d’état.55 If that isn’t picking and choosinggovernments, what is?

At the beginning of the fight, rebels have the advantage. Provided they have the right terrain, they can take on their opponents with simplemeans even if they are vastly outgunned.

When the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the party in government in Afghanistan, started fighting its own people in the late1970s, the tribesmen of Nuristan, a region remote even by Afghan standards, had next to nothing with which to defend themselves. Insome instances, they had to resort to slingshots and axes. But what they did have was the terrain, which they knew better than anyone elseand could use to their advantage. The government went on the offensive and sent armoured vehicles to put down the rebellion. But themountain roads were so narrow that the vehicles couldn’t even turn their gun turrets. And engaging targets above them along thosesteep ravines? Forget it.56 And even if the armoured battalions did come close, the Nuristani tribal militias triggered mudslides to halttheir advance.57

But eventually, neither slingshots nor mudslides will do the trick anymore because taking harder targets requires different tactics anddifferent weapons. Rebels have to fight more like a conventional army. As Mao believed, they need to control territory, to mobilise peopleand resources like the state. When they control those resources, they can defend any newfound territories from the state’scounter-attacks before going on the offensive.58 But when this happens, the rebels become more vulnerable because they need toconcentrate their forces, thereby becoming a bigger target for the tyrant’s firepower.59 That vulnerability has allowed many tyrants tostay in power.

On the battlefield, civil wars and insurgencies are particularly challenging because the flame of rebellion is difficult to extinguish for good.Nevertheless, clever tyrants can manage rebellion. As many armed opposition groups have found out to their cost, winning a civil war ismuch more difficult than not losing. Even if the government’s forces are corrupt and not designed primarily to go to war, they are oftenenough to overcome any opposition.

If they succeed and the tyrant manages to hold the rebels at bay, there are much bigger monsters across the horizon. For if these cruelleaders make a single wrong move at the wrong time and in the wrong neighbourhood, they will come face to face not with peasantswielding Kalashnikovs, but with other states. And when that happens, all bets are off.

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