DRAINING THE SEA, OR FEEDING THE FIRE
provide for their security in the future, further enhancing the attractiveness of the insurgent
alternative and allowing the insurgents to use the prevailing level of distrust to build more
support for their cause among the population. As Samantha Power put it in a recent article on the
forced migration in the Darfur region of Sudan: “It is no wonder that Darfurians say that they
will not return to their homes unless international peacekeepers are deployed to protect them.
They will never trust Khartoum again.”
(ies) can be relied upon in the future to protect them and ensure their security has been called the
Having witnessed the failures and potential
depravity of the current regime, claims that an alternative will be better may well be more
compelling. As Shafer puts it: “support for the insurgency may derive from calculation that the
insurgent, not government, programs offer more. If so, it is unreasonable to expect people to feel
In another recent example, Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, deputy chief of one of the largest Sunni tribes in
Iraq said, “The United States is using excessive power…. You cannot win the hearts and minds of
the people by using force. What's the difference between dictatorship and what's happening
In politics, as in romance, familiarity may breed contempt.
Moreover, as noted above, the use of resettlement has often galvanized support for nationalist
movements where none existed before. As Bender put it: population regroupment often managed
within the span of months to accomplish what the colonizers had not managed to do over a period
of centuries, namely, the dismantlement of traditional social and economic patterns.
resettlement efforts did indeed improve population control, they left their inhabitants
“psychologically and socially insecure and often economically destitute. When the regime was
unable to integrate the people into the modern sector or to provide adequate protection, as in
Vietnam and Algeria, the insurgents capitalized on the ensuing vacuum.”
Indeed,
throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and from Algeria to Vietnam to Mozambique, steps taken to
Second, one simply cannot underestimate the long-term effects of the resentment and anger that
result as a consequence of brutality and repression. Such resentment has proven time and again
to be a very effective recruitment tool for insurgent movements (and for terrorist organizations).
While “coercion may seem a necessary course of action to the incumbents,” as Claude Welch has
observed, “nothing may better drive persons into opposition that life and livelihood may be at
stake. Escalation of violence by the government forcing an all-or-nothing choice can confirm
influential pamphlet, Imperial Policing in the 1930s, “Excessive severity may antagonize the
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Convention