Is Darfur the First Thuraya War?
The advent of the Thuraya phone has radically changed warfare in across the Sahara desert, as illustrated in the case of Darfur. Twenty five years ago, I remember travelling across Darfur with no phone lines, with telecommunication possible only through ageing two-way radios in the police stations. The mail was slow and unreliable. The only way of communicating anything other than the tersest instruction or question was to meet face to face, or send a messenger. On top of the cellphone, which has transformed communication in urban areas, the Thuraya phone has made it possible for people in the remotest locations to communicate instantly. In other places, this has transformed long-distance trade. In Darfur, it has transformed warfare.
Desert warfare, as practiced by the Chadians and Darfurians, is based on mobility and surprise. The Landcruiser is the basic unit of military force. The possession of a Thuraya elevates a commander into a potential leader.
Tactical coordination is key to a successful operation. Before the Thuraya phone, guerrilla operations needed tight discipline and extremely careful planning. More often, the commanders gambled on surprise and the momentum of battle, relying on their prowess in combat to carry the day. Today, with the Thuraya phone, commanders in distant theatres can coordinate their actions. Or they can assemble forces from different places at very short order. They only need to agree on that day’s operation””tomorrow’s can be planned tomorrow.
A commander with a handful of Landcruisers and a Thuraya is essentially autonomous at a tactical level. It is possible for commanders who formally belong to different factions to coordinate a joint operation at very short notice. Their superiors can do little about it. And it happens.
Airtime is a precious commodity and can be transmitted from one Thuraya to another. Money can be sent too. Instant communication can be backed up by instant resources. Hierarchical command and control over a dispersed force becomes difficult.
Warfare in these places is also a livelihood and a means for political bargaining. Before telecommunications, political bargains had to be negotiated face to face. And once a bargain was made, say between a tribal leader and a provincial governor, it was difficult for the chief to renegotiate or to seek out another patron. The pace of political renegotiation was slow. The Thuraya has revolutionalized the bargaining process, and allowed the chief, or rebel commander, to conduct several negotiations in parallel. He can monitor the marketplace, weigh up his options, and renegotiate his deals rapidly.
The Thuraya war is a facet of globalization and the information technology revolution. It is a deregulation of violence, and developed much more rapidly than the mechanisms for managing and resolving conflicts.
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Dear Alex,
A brilliant insight, pointing to how things on the ground have drastically changed and in a pace that makes it difficult for the theories of Conflict, violence and peace to cope with. How such new behavior of conflict , accommodated by information technology, could render conventional analytical tools, irrelevant, when it sets to study the organizational nature of the insurgency, its leadership and ideology or objectives in order to come with an understanding that will help in getting to the best approaches to resolve it.
This is only one aspect, but there are many others still undiscovered, which is strong proof of and evidence to the failure of different approaches to succeed in resolving the conflict or even offer accurate and proper diagnoses, especially among our western friends, who are usually the only ones with the resources and immunity to do so.
Ironically and as you mentioned, elsewhere, most of the policies are made on conclusions based on secondary data.
It is the culture and others have to live with it. It is the order of the world today. The hope remains in those voices, which shout now and then ” You got it wrong.”
I remember hearing that Jean Pierre Bemba was a very early adopter of the Thuraya (in the 90s?).
Back then I think the first satellite’s footprint only just covered the areas he was operating in around northern DRC.
Thuraya encryption is also not secure – Iridium is the security-conscious choice…
I wonder if we’ll ever see transcripts of Thuraya calls at the Hague?
The process you describe is a corollary of commodification and globalization, one of the ways in which a global capitalist system systemically reproduces violence on its periphery. This is frontier capitalism at its extreme, a combination of the latest industrial technologies in the hands of predator capitalists set on accelerated primary accumulation, without the restraints provided by the institutions of state. Once again, Africa gets only the dark side of the dominant global production system.
Dear Hamdan,
Many thanks for your kind words. I think that we are far from being able to craft appropriate means for responding to these kinds of conflicts. Standard political approaches simply won’t do the job. Witness, for example, the recurrent failed efforts to reunify the rebels in Darfur. As we feared in Abuja in 2006, as soon as the rebels left the Chida Hotel without having signed an agreement, there would be nothing to hold them together.
Dear Ben,
It would be fascinating to trace the earliest usages of satellite phones, and how different systems are spreading. There is a technology race underway to control these systems, but any regulation is always one step or more behind their actual use. It would also be interesting to know how Bemba allocated his Thurayas among his commanders, who paid for the airtime, and how they were used. I suspect that it did not generate the kind of free market in bargaining that we see in Darfur and Chad.
Dear Abdel Wahab,
Your comments are always appreciated. The idea that this is the systemic (I notice your careful use of the word) product of a wider global phenomenon, driven by deregulated capital and technology, warrants greater examination.
Alex
Osama bin Laden was also a satphone early adopter; quite a number of journalists had the number until he adopted radio silence for obvious reasons.
This is also something I recall from the leaked accounts of a South African company Viktor Bout muscled in on in the late 90s. A huge line item was GSM and satphone bills for various post-soviet and Lebanese-sounding people with only one name.
Actually, the original adoption pattern for mobile telephony in the UK was bankers, tradesmen, and gangsters, and then much later teenage girls. People who *really* need to chat.
Alex, Ben,
What is (perhaps) distinctive about Darfur and Chad is the distributed ownership of satellite phones, leading to a deregulated, fragmented structure of command, with an emphasis on tactical coordination at the expense of strategic organization. On the other hand, if the only one with a satphone is the C-in-C (possibly the case for Bemba and Usama) and he uses it to communicate with journalists, but uses other centralized or hierarchical means of communication to order his subordinates, then the transformative potential of the satphone has not been realised.
I don’t know the answer: I am just posing the question…
Alex
The satellite phone has many interesting uses for rebels and their movements.
They can be dangerous to the owner however, as Russia showed when they located Dudayev, the Chechnyan leader, by his phone signal and killed him.
Satellite phones seemed very useful for contacting the LRA, after many years of silence, for negotiations. Once there was a three week silence between Betty Bigombe, the chief Ugandan government negotiator, according to Kony as a result of a broken phone. A new one was duly delivered. Airtime was an important issue to the LRA leaders during the peace negotiations. Kony’s second man, Otti, often phoned in to popular radio shows in Northern Uganda. The LRA’s field commanders however seemed not to have had them, so the LRA example confirms Alex description of Osama and Bemba, where the transformative potential of the satphone was not realised. Without satellite phones any negotiations with the LRA would have been (and will be?) be much harder. But perhaps locating Kony by his phone signal and sending in the troops will truly transform the life of many.
The Thuraya is another example of the democratization of killing technology in the past fifty years.
Abdel Wahab hit on a new development both fascinating and terrifying: a prospective warlord no longer requires the organizational apparatus of a state to acquire and mobilize the accoutrements of war. If a warlord was once the man who would have to “make the state” in order to make war — to borrow Charles Tilly’s now-classic formulation — he can now behave only as “predator capitalist,” and not as inadvertant state-builder because he no longer needs to produce his own materials, feed artisans, or delegate complex tasks.
Alex’s observations about the Thuraya’s impact on the speed and scope of possible negotiations in remote areas remind us that we will not be able to neatly “turn back the clock” and easily shuffle aside many of the fighting men who have replaced traditional leaders since 2003.
That said, I think the Thuraya may be a useful source of assurance during a future phase of disarmament, much as the satellite made possible significant reductions in U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals by allowing both sides to “trust, but verify.”
Another interesting example of the democratizing, fissipating influence of mobile phones is with the PCC in Brazil, the prison gang who successfully took on the Brazilian Government in 2006.
The social blueprint they initiated spread quickly through other prisons and the favelas. They communicated through conference calls with other “leaders” around the country, who in turn communicated through conference calls with those below them.
Progress could only be achieved, agreement reached, through politeness, bargaining, well-thought out arguing. Nothing could be enforced from the top, so its structure came to be cell-like, the “leadership” leading through influence and intelligence.
An amusing sidelight of it that reflects on the role of modern global capitalism – and its contradictions – was that the police could not take down the masts outside the prisons through which the PCC communicated because the Brazilian elite fervently believed in the sacred tenets of globalism and taking down the masts would result in lower profits for them. Their likewise sacred refusal to pay taxes resulted in underpaid government employees being willing to sell sensitive information to the PCC, including the secret telephone numbers of the elite and their families. One of the PCC’s most lucrative sidelines is kidnapping.
William Langwische chronicles all this in his excellent article:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/04/langewiesche200704