Abstract
One of the biggest challenges the interviewees faced throughout their engagement with the LRA, and upon their return to civilian life, was to make sense of their experiences in the bush, or more specifically, of their participation in war and violence. How do they understand themselves as actors in armed conflict? What do their actions mean for their sense of self and their identities? In this chapter, I show how combatants cope with violent action and identity by means of their nar- rative, that is, how violence became part of their stories. I argue that combatants at least partially manage to cope with the conflict between their claimed moral selves and their immoral actions by negotiating and resolving them narratively, in both the past and the present. I will identify and detail two overall strategies: (1) to distance oneself from one’s violent identity, and (2) to commit to this vio- lent (role) identity in one way or another. These two strategies are not mutually exclusive, but may overlap in individuals. In sum, they help combatants to make sense of themselves and their actions. They also provide a key to understanding how combatants can both resist immersion in the LRA and become committed fighters after all.
Decoupling identity and action: Techniques of neutralisation
This chapter builds on the premise that combatants strive to be, and to be ac- knowledged as, good persons. Indeed, the stated internal conflict only exists if people feel conflicted about their transgressions and their moral implications. I argue that this premise does not only hold true for former LRA combatants who – by the forced nature of their engagement – are no more prone to violence than any other person. In fact, almost every person tries to be good, even while pur- posely committing crimes. As Sykes and Matza (1957) have shown, the idea that delinquents and other criminals reject values commonly held by society, such as honesty or abiding by the law, is faulty. The criminologists argue that the morals of people engaging in crimes don’t differ from those of the ordinary person – with one important caveat: They are convinced that their actions are not violations of this moral order. Delinquents understand that the misdeeds they are accused of are just that – except that, in their particular case, they are exempted, justi- fied, or negligible. These argumentative techniques ‘neutralise’ the reprehensible
quality of their offences. They allow delinquents and other criminals to reframe their deviant behaviour in a way that it does not harm their self image as decent persons. The authors identify five such “techniques of neutralization”: (1) denial of responsibility, (2) denial of injury, (3) denial of the victim (i.e. their victim- hood), (4) condemnation of the condemners, and (5) appeal to higher loyalties. I will quickly introduce these techniques before exploring their relevance for the study of combatants’ narratives.
(1) Delinquents might admit to deviant acts, but deny personal responsibil- ity for them. They will argue that the actions or the resulting harm were not intended, or blame their actions on socialisation, bad influences, or structural incentives. By positioning themselves as being “more acted upon than acting” (Sykes and Matza 1957: 667), delinquents surrender responsibility to forces be- yond their control. By using this technique, delinquents position themselves as victims whose deviant acts are a product of their own violation.
(2) In denial of injury, the delinquents deny neither their actions nor their responsibility, but question that there is a resulting harm that needs to be ad- dressed. One person’s vandalism is another one’s art, hooligans beating each other up really is just consenting adults’ choice of how to spend a Sunday after- noon, and occupying an empty house in a place with a housing shortage comes down to the re-appropriation of public space. With this technique, delinquents acknowledge the unlawfulness of their actions, but refuse to understand them as morally reprehensible.
(3) The delinquents can also deny the victim in two ways. First, they can question the differentiation between victim and perpetrator. They may argue that the inflicted harm is not an unpremeditated offence, but that it serves as a rightful punishment or retaliation for something the victim did. Second, the of- fender can also make the victim disappear. This one is easiest and most tempting when the victim is invisible in the first place, that is, in the case of offences that happen without any physical confrontation or identification of or with the victim. This is evident for cases of shoplifting, where delinquents don’t know who has to pay for the damage done and assume that whoever it is doesn’t suffer from the loss, be it because they are insured or because they are too wealthy to be bothered.
(4) In condemning the condemners, delinquents shift the attention away from their own actions to those accusing them: Who are they to judge? What right
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do they have to question them? Are their actions any more moral? How would they have acted in the same situation? By focussing on the attitudes, arguments and identities of their condemners, delinquents try to change the topic so that the nature of their actions gets lost in debate. More recently, this technique has re-emerged under the term ‘whataboutism’.52
(5) Appealing to higher loyalties covers a range of strategies. The argumenta- tive figure is that a norm is (temporarily) suspended by the application of more important norms. For instance, most people would agree that stealing in general is wrong, but might be excused under particular circumstances, such as not being able to buy food to take care of one’s children. If a person cannot do justice to two or more conflicting imperatives, they will prioritise which one to violate in order to abide by the other. These dilemmas do exist, but they are also created by the delinquents themselves through their stories.
Delinquents will strive to find ways to neutralise their crimes, thereby less- ening the internal conflict between believing in particular rules and norms and violating them – that is, between moral attitudes and immoral actions. We find these and other narrative strategies towards violent action also among former combatants. They are always more then purely self-serving declarations. They are central for the combatants’ self image, as displays of their attempts to control their stories, and vivid examples of how they try to make sense of their expe- riences. In the following sections, I will detail four techniques of neutralisation used by the interviewees: (1) vilifying others, (2) proving one’s own goodness, (3) undoing one-sided violence, and (4) reframing violent actions.
Evil others: Necessary and unnecessary violence
When asked about violence they had perpetrated themselves, combatants were typically less forthcoming than they were with questions about violence they witnessed or experienced, or questions on non-violent actions.53 Those who ad-
52Most prominently, whataboutism referred to the Soviet Union’s practice of discrediting any
critique by pointing to failures or neglects in Western politics instead of addressing the issue at hand. Whataboutism became a central argumentative figure in the leadership of the 45th president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump. See also Merriam Webster (2017).
53While some combatants might not want to reveal their own participation in violence, the
magnitude of forced killing in particular seems to be overestimated. In their large-scale surveys, Annan et al. (2008, 2006) found that about one-fifth of the abducted male and female youth were forced to violate a civilian, and about one-tenth were forced to hurt a family member
mitted to having perpetrated violence were often quick to add that none of this happened voluntarily (thereby denying responsibility), and often talked at length about how they avoided or limited violence whenever possible.54
In an environment where the perpetration of violence became largely unavoid- able, combatants came to understand that not all violence is the same. In their narratives, they emphasised the differences between what they saw as necessary and unnecessary, good and bad, forced and deliberate violence. One of the tech- niques former combatants used was to distance themselves from “authentically violent” perpetrators (Hochstetler et al. 2010). For them, morally reprehensible action happened where people enjoyed violence and even exacted punishments where there was no offence:
Based on what I witnessed in captivity, normally orders were given not to commit brutalities. But some people became very enthusiastic and they committed atrocities. [...] If you disobeyed orders to not commit atrocities, you would become very famous and people would see you as someone who defied orders and performed out of his own will. [...] Even when there were no orders barring people from caus- ing suffering to civilians, some people still committed crimes out of insanity. (Joshua, ll. 862–894)
[T]hose things [like mistreating civilians] highly depended on the kind of person [you were]. Personally, I didn’t have such kind of a dark heart. I returned without having hurt anyone. The repercussions of acting inhumane can be so bad, that is why I distanced myself from it. Most of these rude people vanished and perished. I had that feeling that if I acted that way, I would also perish. It wasn’t my will to go into captivity, so there was no reason to act weird and badly. I’d rather be killed for failing to execute a duty that I am forced to do like killing people. (Hope, ll. 741–754)
Even though Hope and Joshua were involved in violations of civilians (in par- ticular, looting), they distanced themselves from those who they saw as being
or friend. The proportions of abductees forced to kill a civilian, family member or friend are slightly lower; about one-eighth of all combatants said they were forced to kill a soldier in combat. Even though survey data faces the same caveat that it only shows self-reported incidents, the researchers are confident that under-reporting of violence is not a major issue; see Annan et al. (2006: 54).
54The perpetration of violence is a textbook case for the difficulty of judging whether research
participants are telling the truth, but it also shows the value in moving beyond questions of truth and lie. See Chapter 2 starting on page 15.
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“out of sanity” and having “a bad heart”. Their narratives follow a logic of “justification by comparison” (Cromwell and Thurman 2003), in which their own actions weren’t understood as morally reprehensible. They argued that they only perpetrated as much violence as they were asked or forced to, in contrast to others who seemed to have developed a taste for it. This narrative strategy also allowed them to address their participation in violence without accusing themselves. By referring to and comparing themselves to more serious offenders, antiheros (Copes et al. 2008: 259), and evil others (Presser 2008: 93), they relieved themselves of the weight of their deeds.
While some combatants attributed acts of unnecessary violence to individual mad men (and women), others identified instances of atrocious behaviour with a particular grouping within the LRA: namely, child soldiers (lutino mony). Typ- ically, these accounts came from older combatants who had been abducted as adults. They argued that the younger combatants had fewer moral inhibitions about following violent orders: “As adults, there were some things you would try to dodge from doing, unlike children who did everything they were commanded” (John, ll. 1927–1931). As adults, they reasoned, they understood the nature of their actions better, and therefore acted with more restraint. Interestingly, youn- ger combatants used the same argument as a defence; they didn’t know better: “[W]e were abducted and trained to be child soldiers, so as a child you tend to master anything you are told. So we thought those were really good things we did” (Charity, ll. 851–855). Here, Charity also resorts to another narrative strat- egy: By identifying herself as part of a group of combatants – “we” who became “child soldiers” – she escapes addressing her own actions by disappearing into a more or less defined group.
Evil others are conceptualised both as authentically violent perpetrators, those who are “out of sanity” (Joshua, l. 842) and enjoy, or feel no moral inhibi- tions about committing atrocities, and as child soldiers who, due to their young age, don’t know better because they haven’t yet internalised moral imperatives not to hurt others. On the other side, violence was often portrayed as necessary where it addressed needs of self-care (in particular, food and sex) and of self- defence. In their narratives, combatants tried to distance themselves both from authentically violent personalities and from individual acts they saw as morally reprehensible. A striking example is that of sexual violence. In their studies of sexual violence among combatants of armed groups in the DRC, Baaz and Stern (2009) found that combatants didn’t think of all sexual violence as being
equally reprehensible. In their accounts, the male combatants did not generally condemn or condone sexual violence against women, but differentiated between somewhat excusable (or at least understandable) ‘lust rapes’ that stemmed from necessity and lacking resources to properly court women, and ‘evil rapes’ that weren’t committed to satisfy sexual ‘needs’, but were aimed at humiliating and hurting the victim (for instance, by penetrating women with inanimate objects such as sticks). While they had no sympathy for those who committed ‘evil rapes’, the satisfaction of legitimate sexual ‘needs’ justified, or excused, taking shortcuts under circumstances that prevented male combatants from getting the women’s consent.
In a similar manner, sexual violence in the LRA was only under certain cir- cumstances coded as such. Men especially did not address forced marriage in and of itself as reprehensible; it had to be qualified to be understood as a violation. For instance, Henry voiced his disapproval of the sexual abuse of young women and girls that he had witnessed:
The other bad thing I saw was mostly scorning women. [...] I saw it with my very own eyes, they captured students and pupils and then they sexually abused them, that was sad for me to see. [...] It so happened that other little children could be abused by very old people and were forced to marry or have sex with them. (Henry, ll. 1151–1169)
Henry emphasised how upset he was about the sexual violence young women and girls were subjected to. Yet he himself was married to two women in captivity – one died during their escape, and the other left him upon their return. Henry is evasive about the terms of their separation, yet points out that he didn’t take his wives forcefully, but lived with them based on mutual agreement. In any case, he clearly differentiates between the relationships he had with these women and the sexual abuse of young women and girls that he had witnessed. One of the criteria for his disapproval seems to be the young age of the female combatants, and the big age difference between “little children” and “very old people”. When asked whether he himself had a wife in the bush, Henry answered defensively: “I got a wife there, so she could help me by cooking” (Henry, ll. 762–763). Having a wife was seen as normal, even necessary, to go about one’s everyday activities. Clearly, Henry’s relationship with his given wives didn’t seem to fall
4.4. Identity and action Chapter 4. Analysis
into the same category of morally reprehensible sexual violence.55 In the same
way, women often rejected their relationships not just because they were forced, but because they violated other norms, such as their own young age or the age difference between the spouses:
I was four years into babysitting after which I was given to a man and gave birth to a child. It wasn’t easy. I was abducted when I was very young and I didn’t know most of the things. And when they told me to be a wife to that man, I was heartbroken because I was young and the man was old. (Faith, ll. 392–399)
Besides such ‘inappropriate’ relationships within the group, combatants also harshly criticised sexual violence and rape that was perpetrated by other armed groups (most notably, the NRA/M) against male and female combatants of the LRA.
Similarly, violence against civilians was seen as legitimate and at times neces- sary where it addressed basic physical needs of the combatants. In these instances, it could even be perpetrated against explicit orders from the leadership, as Char- ity explained: “So those rules [not to loot from civilians] are also hard to follow. For instance if you are told not to enter the huts of civilians and not to steal any- thing from them, and at that time you are very hungry (laughs) (...)” (Charity, ll. 766–771). Acts of theft weren’t seen as major offences, both in comparison to other, unnecessary acts of violence and because they resulted from necessity: “[O]nce they gave me a group of people to lead I gave orders that forbid the killing of civilians. But we continued to loot food because we needed food to sur- vive” (Isaac, ll. 172–176). Here, Isaac excuses these acts of theft by emphasising how he forbade unnecessary violence (the killing of civilians). Moreover, both interviewees appealed to higher loyalties (namely, their own hunger and survival) to justify the dispossession of civilians. Apart from these reasons of self-care, violence was in some instances understood as necessary to defend oneself against enemy forces and armed civilians. George, for instance, recounted how he and a colleague accidentally met a government soldier while looking for usable goods on the battlefield: “We cut that guy into pieces because he was a potential threat to us” (George, ll. 732–734). In his account, this lethal act of violence was war- ranted because the enemy soldier could have become a threat to their lives as well.
55This understanding is facilitated by the institution of forced marriage, as I will argue below.
These narrative efforts to position oneself as morally decent – for one reason or another – also offer a key to understanding how individuals with different lev- els of commitment can come together and act unified. The relationship between engaged and hesitant perpetrators not only encourages the former, but also helps the latter to become involved with less moral hazard. The existence of enthusias- tic combatants made it easier for others to identify themselves as morally decent, as different from “authentically violent” (Hochstetler et al. 2010) perpetrators. As such, the dynamic between the ‘violent few’ (Collins 2009: 370–412) and those who just ‘tag along’ is crucial for the group’s propensity towards and its use of violence. It allowed individual combatants to find their place in the LRA, and to negotiate their engagement through positioning themselves, thereby upholding claims to moral decency.
Proving one’s essential goodness
Combatants were not only trying to distance themselves from authentically vio- lent comrades; they were also using their narratives to confirm their own decency and moral integrity. This could happen in passing, while explaining or justify- ing singular actions, or it could become a powerful storyline driving the whole narrative. John opened his narrative with the following statement:
[W]hen I was first abducted and taken into captivity I was a mature man already and old enough. [...] What prevented me from returning home was the fear of being captured in the process of returning. I didn’t want to have a wife because I did mind only about myself