Preface.  This is an excerpt from Philippe Le Billon’s (editor) anthology “The Geopolitics of Resource Wars.”

Global peak oil production happened in 2018 (EIA 2020), and the energy crisis will probably hit by 2025.  The coming energy crisis and climate change is likely to trigger resource wars over oil as well as civil wars as nations they sink into starvation and poverty. Indeed, this is already happening, see my book review of Ahmed’s “Failing States, Collapsing Systems BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence” here.

The thing is, this is a unique collapse. Pre-fossil civilizations fell when they’d cut down their forests and eroded their topsoil. Most wars devastated rural areas and survivors streamed to cities. But after the energy crisis, food won’t be able to be transported to cities, so perhaps in an energy crisis people will abandon cities for the country to seek and grow food.  Then again, cities have always been a parasite of rural areas and farmers, perhaps ways will be found to channel remaining energy into food transport. But in the end, 80 to 90% of future generations will need to return to farming.

If you’re thinking of escaping to the country ahead of the energy crisis, consider living in a town for the sake of defense, and if you plan to farm or grow food, buy land within bicycling distance.  Good luck!

War

• S. A. LeBlanc. Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage. 2003
• J. Weatherford. Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World
• J. Weatherford. Secret History of the Mongol Queens
• Lutz Kleveman, The New Great Game:  Blood and Oil in Central Asia. 2003
• Michael Klare. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. 2001
• Chalmers Johnson. 2004. The Sorrows Of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic.  
• J. Matloff. No friends but the mountains: Dispatches from the world’s violent highlands
• Margaret MacMillan. War: How conflict Shaped Us. 2020
• P. Coffee. American arsenal. A century of waging war.
• Robert Baer. 2004. Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.
• Ahmed Rashid. 2000. Taliban. Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia.
• Peter Turchin. War and Peace and War. The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations. 2007
• David Berreby. Us and Them. Understanding Your Tribal Mind. 2005
• Azar Gat. War in Human Civilization. 2008
• Lawrence Keeley. War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. 1997
• James Waller.  Becoming Evil. How ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing. 2007
• Philip Gourevitch. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. 1999
• Daniel Goldhagen. Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans & the Holocaust. 1997
• Wrangham & Peterson. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. 1997
• Michael Ghiglieri. 2000.The Dark Side of Man: Tracing the Origins of Male Violence
• Richard Rhodes. 2000. Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist.  
• Giles MacDonogh. After the Reich.  The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation.
• C. Andrew. Secret world: A history of intelligence.  980 pages
• M. Matthews. Head strong: how psychology is revolutionizing war

Cyber War

• Richard Clarke.2012.  Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security 
• Joel Brenner. 2011. America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix 

What it’s like to be a soldier            

• Guy Sajer. The Forgotten Soldier      
• David Finkel. The Good Soldiers      
• Peter Goldman. Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us          

EIA (2020) International Energy Statistics. Petroleum and other liquids. Data Options. U.S. Energy Information Administration. Select crude oil including lease condensate to see data past 2017.

Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of  “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, 2021, Springer; “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer; Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

Le Billon, Philippe, editor (2007) The Geopolitics of Resource Wars. Routledge.

    A typical insurgency bears a close resemblance to criminal activity. Such conflicts have, in fact, been referred to as ‘crime disguised as war’ and the perpetrators have been termed ‘entrepreneurs or businessmen of war’. It is also true that an insurgency may be battling a state that is also integrated into complex criminal networks and that the state itself may be privatized or criminalized. It is not unusual for both war-lords and state functionaries to be dealing not just with the exploitation of natural resources but also with drugs, money laundering, and other illegal activity. Conflicts between war-lords and criminalized states tend to be particularly devastating for civilians who are caught between warring parties and considered dispensable except as captive workers or soldiers. The brutality and single-mindedness of these confrontations between fighters and civilians also creates a distinctive landscape. Large rural areas may be emptied of population, their roads rendered impassable, and the structures, that once provided human habitation, completely destroyed. Towns and cities, on the other hand, may swell with internally displaced persons (IDPs), often living in overcrowded camps on the outskirts of built up areas.

    Another part of this landscape is the ubiquitous roadblock which appears along the few usable roads that lead to urban centers or mining areas. The roadblocks are typically manned by soldiers or rebels, and always present the traveler with the threat of a shakedown or worse. So widespread is this practice that children caught up in an insurgency frequently make a game of tying a rope across a road and demanding money from anyone who passes for filling (and refilling) pot-holes. These landscapes of conflict have not received much attention, but there have been some descriptions of ‘warscapes’ which show up on maps as areas full of landmines with few safe entry and exit points, or even areas that are ‘forgotten to death’ because their isolation has made it difficult to determine what horrors have gone on there.

    Conflicts that are resource-based can be intractable. Some of the participants in the war may actually benefit from the unsettled conditions that can facilitate access to resources, smuggling and certain kinds of trade. The beneficiaries are understandably reluctant to terminate the conflict, thus militating against a peace settlement. The end result may be a stand-off, a condition that is neither peace nor war but which continues to leave civilians vulnerable, services moribund, and the larger economy stagnant to declining. This phenomena has been termed ‘negative peace’, a condition in which the basic structural imbalances that caused the conflict in the first place remain in place.

    Although the conflict in Sierra Leone has closely followed the scenario described above, there are three factors in particular that are critical to an understanding of the confrontation that took place there. Each of these will be considered in turn:

   1. The war was always closely connected to the competition for resources       particularly diamonds, and this association was strengthened through time,

  2. the conflict can be linked to the collapse of the state, the emergence of pervasive criminality among state and non-state actors along with the proliferation of small arms,

  3. the Sierra Leone war has never been restricted to a single state; rather it has always been part of a regional process whereby boundaries have not impeded the flows of resources and weapons or the movement of people.

The Diamonds of Sierra Leone

  Although the economy of Sierra Leone has been diversified during both the colonial and post-colonial period, diamonds have played a special role since   their initial commercial exploitation in the 1930s. Diamonds are an unusual resource in that they are extremely valuable per unit of weight and thus small quantities can bring substantial returns; diamonds are, in other words  very lootable. The value associated with these gems reflects an almost century-long effort by the De Beers company, originally of South Africa to create an artificial demand by successfully associating diamonds with love and marriage, while at the same time controlling the supply through a world-wide cartel.

    Diamonds appear in Africa in two forms: in kimberlite dikes which are usually mined by centralized organizations using heavy machinery and in alluvial deposits which are much more accessible. Most West and Central African diamonds are alluvial, and thus, readily available to casual miners who dig pits in river beds and pan for diamonds much as one would pan for  gold. Typically, this type of diamond extraction is a precarious tedious poorly-paid and unhealthy enterprise and one without a framework of regulations to protect miners, but it is one of the few non-agricultural employment options available to poorly-educated young men in isolated parts of Africa. The miners tend to be manipulated by local landowners or by entrepreneurs who organize them into small groups – providing credit and basic equipment in exchange for stones. There are environmental as well as social and economic ramifications of this system- the convergence of diamond diggers, many producing holes up to 30 ft deep leads to soil loss, severe gullying and sometimes to the undermining of roads and other structures.

   Diamonds were first found in quantity in Sierra Leone in the eastern provinces of Kono and Kenema. The initial exploitation was based on a tributary system whereby miners were given the right to prospect in specified areas by paramount chiefs; they then turned their trove over to the chief and were provided with a share of its total value. At the same time the colonial government was looking for potential concessionaires to develop the main diamond areas, settling on the Sierra Leone Selection Trust (SLST), a De Beers subsidiary, in 1934. The SLST was given a 99-year lease and, shortly thereafter, the right to hire its own security forces to protect against intruders. When the SLST found itself in competition for access to diamonds with the local chiefs and miners, the region took on the complexion of a gold-rush frontier with substantial petty crime and smuggling.

    The mining areas, in effect, provided a safety-valve for young men seeking a livelihood, and De Beers’ efforts to keep out illicit miners was ultimately a losing one. In the 1950s, illegal diamond mining and smuggling expanded rapidly with most diamonds being sold for hard currency in Liberia. The Lebanese community played a central role in this process, often with members of the same family covering both ends of a smuggling ring in Sierra Leone and Monrovia. In order to bring this situation under control, the colonial government reduced the size of the SLST concession, provided a legal basis for local mining to function, and expelled 40,000 foreign miners who had flocked to the area.’ Many Lebanese were able to  obtain licenses, however, as they came to play a growing role in both the  legal and illegal diamond trade. Gradually De Beers became disillusioned with this process and moved its regional headquarters to Monrovia.

    Diamond riches came to play a more critical role in the political economy of Sierra Leone as the country moved towards independence in 1960 and then, as part of the patronage politics of the 1970s and 1980s. Taxes and fees associated with mining had contributed substantially to the national treasury during the colonial period, but even before the SLST completely pulled out in 1984, decreasing numbers of diamonds were being traded through official channels. Instead, profits were siphoned off by the leadership of the ruling party and its clients. Contacts with the international market continued to be made by Lebanese traders resident in Sierra Leone and at one point, the diamonds were actually contributing to each of the factions in the Lebanese Civil War. By the late 1980s, smuggling had become so rampant that hardly any stones were still part of the legal exchange structure.

The Process of State Collapse

The start of the war in Sierra Leone can be dated from March 1991, when a group of insurgents known as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) crossed over from Liberia, but conditions favorable to the success of the RUF had been developing for decades. The role of diamonds in contributing to the enrichment of politicians and their followers has already been mentioned but diamonds provided just one of the sources of illicit wealth that sustained the political elite. Within a decade of independence, state operatives had come to profit from the taxes and fees associated with cash crops, from bribes and paybacks contributed by foreign companies seeking access to fisheries, rutile (titanium oxide) and bauxite, and the expropriation of property. Potential challengers to this systematic looting by the state were intimidated by the instrumental use of violence.

    In the late 1980s, as the state became completely superfluous as well as predatory, sustaining its patrimonial structure became difficult. When the International Monetary Fund (IMF) called for fiscal restraint in exchange for continued loans, social services were all but eliminated and even the rice subsidies that had kept the Sierra Leone Army (SLA) in line were sacrificed.

A volatile combination of conditions were emerging in Sierra Leone: 1) increasing rural-urban migration that contributed to a growing cohort of young men lacking education, skills or job prospects, 2) a return to the subsistence sector by farmers discouraged by poor cash crop prices and by isolation from markets caused by deteriorating roads and petroleum shortages and, 3) as a result of 1 and 2 above, the need for expensive food imports that drained the state’s limited supplies of hard currency.

All that was absent from this brew was the potential for severe ethnic or religious conflicts. Politicians had manipulated ethnicity for their own purposes, particularly rivalries between the northern Limba and Temne people who had dominated the APC government in the 70s and 80s and the Mende of the south and east, but these antagonisms had not yet become the source of major confrontations.

   When the RUF forces entered Sierra Leone, led by a former SLA corporal named Foday Sankoh, there was much speculation as to what factors had stimulated the invasion. It was widely believed that Charles Taylor wanted to both punish Sierra Leone for having worked against his interests with the regional peacekeeping group, ECOMOG, and to distract the SLA from fighting against him in Liberia. A secondary factor, however, was the genuine disgruntlement on the part of dissident youths with a corrupt government, and for some, the breakdown of the patronage networks that had previously supplied them with some support. Certainly, what might be termed a rebellious youth culture had been forming for years on the edge of Freetown and other cities. Many unemployed and undereducated members of these groups worked part-time as thugs, enforcing government edicts. Gradually, the youth culture had come to be influenced by students who railed against the APC regime and then by the efforts of Libya’s President Ghaddafi to provide training for selected malcontents as a means of spreading his messages and expanding his network of allies.

    When the RUF took shape as a loosely organized contingent of dissidents, it was initially based on a vague desire to replace the government in Freetown with a more egalitarian alternative, but it evolved into a less ideological and more wealth-seeking movement. From the beginning, Charles Taylor provided support for Sankoh and the RUF that included facilities for training in Liberia, instruction in guerrilla warfare, weapons, and fighters from Liberia and Burkina Faso (Burkinabe). It was undoubtedly part of the equation that the RUF would compensate Taylor with the proceeds from diamond sales when it was in control of the mines.

    By the time of the RUF invasion, Sierra Leone had come to resemble its pre-colonial and early colonial counterpart in terms of spatial structure.

Before independence, African rulers had typically tried to control their core areas, accepting that authority would decline with distance and that it was more critical to dominate people and resources than territory. Then, when Freetown emerged as a colony in the late 1700s, it included only the basic urban and peri-urban area; it was not thought necessary to politically dominate the hinterland. The independent state of Sierra Leone reflects this legacy in that it came to focus on a series of connected islands, each of which contributed income to the center or served as a conduit for exports. Those areas that were not considered economically viable functioned as labor reserves, much as during the colonial period. The RUF insurgency eventually mimicked this pattern. The Regional Context From its inception, the war in Sierra Leone reflected the country’s position within a larger region. It is possible to identify a series of nested relationships in West Africa that are critical to the endemic warfare that has come to prevail in the area. At one end of the scale is the Mano River Union (MRU) which includes Liberia and Guinea as well as Sierra Leone. The borders between the MRU countries have always been porous; ethnic groups that spanned the border moved freely between countries and a legal and illegal trade has always taken place, especially in response to the presence of the US dollar in Liberia.

   At the level of West Africa as a whole, there have been two competing contingents. First there are the Francophone states which include, among others, Burkina Faso, the Ivory Coast and Togo, countries that have often collaborated to further their mutual interests and which allied themselves both with France, as expected, and with Anglophone Liberia. Then there is Nigeria, the regional powerhouse that has ties with its own coterie of primarily Anglophone countries, including Sierra Leone. Ostensibly, all of these states are unified in an organization known as ECOWAS which promotes West African co-operation, but the reality is much more complex. A diplomat even referred to the political jockeying engaged in by these countries as West Africa’s version of the ‘Great Game’.

   Initially within Sierra Leone, and then within a wider context, the actual invasion by the RUF along the Liberian border had a definite geopolitical logic. Liberia had a long-standing claim to part of the boundary zone and so possessed a rationale for supporting the RUF as a means of possibly adjudicating this issue. Border areas in general are often gathering places for the socially and economically marginalized, where government authority is minimal and illegal activities are carried out with impunity. Along the Sierra Leone-Liberian border, for example, diamond diggers had formed villages where anti-government sentiment made the RUF a preferred alternative.

   One of the actual invasion sites, Kailahun province, had become increasingly isolated due to the closure of the railroad by the APC government. The other site, the south-eastern district of Pujehun, had been the scene of a chiefdom dispute that had resulted in strong local antipathy to the government. As a staging ground for the RUF insurgency, the east had one other advantage: it was the most resource-rich part of the country, the best area for growing valuable cash crops such as cocoa and coffee and the site of concentrations of alluvial and kimberlite diamonds.

The Spread of the Conflict

The invasion at Kailahun and Pujehun was to be part of a pincer movement, with the two RUF brigades coming together further in the interior. The goal was to control a substantial, resource-rich territory within which an urban center could serve as administrative headquarters – much as Gbargna in Nimba County had became the ‘capital’ of Taylor’s Greater Liberia. Initially, the RUF incursion went according to plan. Having entered the country with just a few thousand fighters, the RUF expanded with impunity since the local population was unarmed and sometimes sympathetic. The invaders followed a strategy of occupying villages by either co-opting or eliminating the local chiefs, elders and educated elite and commandeering their food or other requirements. Fighting forces were expanded through the recruitment of individuals who fit the original RUF profile: school drop-outs, diamond diggers and general itinerants for whom the RUF promised the potential of easier access to the country’s riches.

    The RUF had no revolutionary programme for relating to the peasantry, however. The rebels terrified most of the rural population and volunteer recruits to the RUF had to be supplemented by kidnapped children and young adults.21 New members were inducted into the RUF ranks through a combination of initiation rites (an established practice in Sierra Leone’s secret societies), material rewards (usually plundered from other villages), training (the bush camps were substitutes for non-functioning schools) and mandatory participation in raids. According to the RUF, once the new fighters were seen as the enemy by the local population, they were unlikely to be welcomed back in their home villages.

    In order to counter this incursion, the government tried to mobilize its limited assets including foreign aid (a declining factor in the 1990s), taxes on cash crops (declining as well because of the war), remittances from citizens living abroad, taxes on rutile and bauxite, and fees and taxes associated with diamond digging and sales. Even when the APC government was replaced in a military coup conditions remained much the same. The SLA units, never trained to repel an invasion, were at first only marginally effective. They were invariably poorly-supplied, erratically paid, and frequently immobilized because of impassable roads or petrol shortages. Under these circumstances, soldiers were known to participate in illicit activities of their own, including raiding villages for tribute and even  co-operating with the RUF in dividing up the spoils of war. They became infamously identified as Sobels, soldiers by day when they fought the RUF and rebels by night when they participated in looting. They were gradually strengthened by new recruits, army regulars provided by the Guinean government and ULIMO fighters, anti-Taylor dissidents anxious to gain a foothold near the Liberia border.

    During the initial year-and-a-half period of their insurgency, the RUF were able to survive and persevere because their resource base was diversified. Food and cash crops were cultivated, harvested and sold, often by forced labor, while diamonds were collected from dispersed alluvial sites as the RUF made their way closer to the major diamondiferous areas in Kono District and Tongo Fields in Kenema District. One Freetown correspondent identified the RUF approach as follows: ‘Escapees from the rebel stronghold report that the intention of the invading force is to cut Sierra Leone, like Liberia, into two, taking the economically viable part which produces the nation’s cash crops and minerals – they don’t want any other part of the country’ By June 1991, the RUF was only 18 miles from Koidu, the district centre of Kono, but the threat of the loss of the diamond mining area caused resistance to stiffen and slowed the RUF advance.

    By this point, the spatial structure of the expanding RUF political entity had taken on a definite form: The RUF territory could be divided into three parts which fluctuated over time: a) areas firmly under RUF control, mainly in Kailahun, Pujehun, and some of Kenema Districts, b) expansion/ contraction areas where RUF raids and the destruction of villages were sometimes followed by army counter-attacks and government reoccupation and, 3) more distant areas where the RUF propaganda machine spread rumors of an imminent attack (see Figure 2 – Strategy I). In effect, the RUF hoped to minimize confrontations by intimidating the rural population into rapidly deserting their villages even before an attack had taken place.

   The rural population that stayed in place faced the risk of kidnapping, murder, theft or property destruction by both RUF fighters and government soldiers in turn. Some tried to disperse as widely as possible so as to avoid being a target, even going so far as moving out of villages during the day and returning at night. Such strategies required the ability to live off wild plants and limited hunting since cultivation was severely limited. Even beyond the conflict zone, villagers refrained from burning vegetation so that smoke would not advertise the presence of a rural settlement.

     By early 1992, the SLA was able to sustain its counter-offensive and the RUF, were actually being pushed back. This was when the government began to engage in what might be termed the rhetoric of normalcy. It would declare areas to be rebel-free and encourage all IDPs to return home, particularly chiefs who were to set an example. The Rehabilitation and Relief Committee was formed to provide returnees with seeds and tools and the repatriation of refugees was discussed. The residue of the conflict was referred to as a mopping up operation designed to eliminate the last vestiges  of the rebellion.

     Yet, in spite of the rhetoric to the contrary, the conflict was far from over. The government did not take into account the larger regional context, within  which the struggle with the RUF was embedded. Since the RUF retained its Liberia connection, there would always be a source of new supplies, weapons and fighters, and setbacks would only be temporary. For example, when the government counter-insurgency made it too costly for the RUF to  hold onto extensive territory, the rebels regrouped and transformed their  spatial strategy. Rather than trying to defend towns and large villages against army attacks, the RUF dispersed to at least six major bases with about 5000 to 6000 fighters each, scattered throughout the national space.  The bases were typically hidden in areas of forest or dense bush, connected  by bush paths, ideally suited for the new guerrilla ‘war without frontlines’. Radio equipment was widely scattered as well, allowing for communication between bases as well as the broadcasting of frequent propaganda messages. The RUF also began to carry out the atrocities for which they were to become notorious, cutting off limbs and other body parts as a mechanism for both sowing terror and undermining the official economy.

    No part of the country was immune from the expanding conflict as food production declined precipitously. IDPs flooded hastily built camps around major towns and refugees fled the country. In October 1992, the RUF finally infiltrated the Kono diamond district, in part because government soldiers were digging for diamonds themselves rather than maintaining a strong defense. The two remaining bulwarks of the Sierra Leone economy were captured later: the major rutile and bauxite producing areas. The RUF were not able to mine and process rutile or bauxite themselves, but they denied the government the opportunity to earn hard currency from mineral sales.

    During the next three years, the relative circumstances of the protagonists fluctuated, although the RUF pushed ever closer to Freetown. This was also the period when the security situation became complicated by two additional elements. Firstly, there was the growing menace of armed bands, often former soldiers who had deserted and who survived by plundering the countryside. Secondly, there was an expansion of local militias, organized from secret societies and groups of traditional hunters that were originally meant to provide intelligence to the SLA on RUF infiltration. They were often referred to by the Mende term, Kamajors, although similar contingents were organized among other ethnic groups and eventually the term Civil Defense Forces (CDF) became standard. The Kamajors were more successful than the SLA at protecting villages against attacks and even reoccupying villages that had been abandoned. In time, the militias were as likely to confront the SLA as the RUF since the former frequently competed with the militias for influence, power and resources in the ongoing conflict.”

    When morale in the capital had reached a particularly low point in June 1995, the government made a contract with Executive Outcomes (EO), a private South African security company, that was certainly more effective than the SLA in countering the RUF offensive. EO possessed both the technology and experience to locate and obliterate the RUF camps, they were very loyal as long as they were paid, and, critically, they allowed the government to retake the diamond areas and obtain a reliable source of income.

The Election and Its Aftermath

In 1996, after considerable preparation and under difficult circumstances, a reasonably fair election was organized to replace the military government and Ahmed Tejan Kabbah of the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) became president. This success initiated another period of optimism: a treaty was signed with the RUF, refugees began to return home. Executive Outcomes left the country, and numerous NGOs committed themselves to a crash development program to resurrect the economy. There were, however, definite signs of trouble beneath the surface. Most disturbing were the indicators of ongoing RUF and even SLA control of selected areas of the country, combined with RUF and SLA clashes with local militias.  There was even evidence that the new government was recreating the patrimonial-style system that had undermined Sierra Leone’s economy in the first place.

    This experiment with democracy was cut short in May 1997 when the military, feeling increasingly marginalized by downsizing and by competition from the CDF, staged a coup and then invited its former enemies, the RUF, to join the new government. The RUF at this point was being supported by a vigorous trade in diamonds for arms.