Introduction
The opening up of cannabis sativa (hereafter cannabis) for legal consumption across European countries and the United States today signals a dramatic upending in the historical criminalisation of the drug and those involved in its production, sale, and consumption. Such shifts come when drug-related activities amongst poorer nations are at the same time being increasingly monitored by the wider international community as harbingers of a future more in line with Robert Kaplan’s ‘anarchy’ rather than as a public health and human rights issue. This is particularly true for conflict-affected states such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (hereafter DRC, or the Congo), where cannabis and violence are seen to go together, destabilising Congolese society, creating insecurity, and spreading HIV. In light of cannabis’s reported role as a contributing factor to the region’s persistent violence, together with fears that it may serve as a gateway drug in the region (Wikileaks 2010), international opinion has settled rather solidly on an anti-narcotics stance (Carrier and Klantschnig 2012), particularly as cannabis is seen as Africa’s most problematic drug (UNODC 2011). Regional African bodies such as the African Union (AU) and the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) have quickly followed suit and, as illustrated by a recent statement made by AFRICOM's deputy to the commander for civil–military activities, are increasingly asking for greater enforcement, legal action, and international pressure against the trade of cannabis in the area. ‘Drug trafficking is a destabilizing factor that threatens global security [for which] a multilateral approach is necessary to counter its harmful effects’ (Dalrymple 2012).
The difference between these two narratives is striking, particularly as evidence from the broader scientific community linking drugs and violence is inconclusive and still hotly debated. Limited work linking violence in the DRC to the cannabis trade certainly points to an opportunistic link, but has failed to determine the mechanisms through which and the extent to which the drug in fact shapes violence in the region. Drawing from four months of qualitative research on the trade in cannabis in eastern DRC, this paper presents an alternative story of drug-related violence and insecurity. Namely, I argue that the dangers stemming from an entanglement with the drug are rather, as one informant aptly stated, the result of ‘security’.
This paper begins by locating the illegality of cannabis as a historicised creation of the colonial period. Building on previous work by the author (Laudati 2014) which traces the early uses and myriad utilities of the plant within traditional and modern Congolese society, this paper considers the early roots of the plant’s classification as an illegal substance through to modern-day drug policies that maintain prohibition of the plant. The paper then settles the bulk of its contribution on empirically gathered qualitative evidence that suggests that current narratives of the drug’s dangers miss key aspects of how the production, consumption, and sale of the drug contributes to DRC’s landscape of violence and (in)security.1 By highlighting the nuanced role that cannabis plays in the region, this paper contributes to a growing indictment of the simplistic and often made but poorly understood causal link between natural resources and violent conflict (Ross 2004; Laudati 2013; Stearns 2012). Offering an alternative view, this paper hopes to not only contribute to better peacebuilding initiatives but to open up much needed discussion and debate about natural resource violence.
The making of a shadow economy
As previously reported (Laudati 2014), the consumption of cannabis was widely accepted throughout the Congo certainly by the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but probably much earlier (Clarke and Merlin 2013). Travel diaries written during the colonial exploration period of the Belgian Congo attest not only to a prevalence among Congolese communities but also illustrate the openness with which early European travellers approached drug use in the region, some of them said to have ‘encouraged and occasionally joined in the [ … ] ecstasies’ (Roberts 2004, 54). Following the establishment of colonial rule in the region, however, European views on cannabis in the region shifted. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the prevalence of cannabis was so negatively considered that it was acknowledged by the Belgian administration as ‘a real problem’ and the colonial tribunal put into law ‘repression of the cultivation, consumption, and sale of Indian cannabis’ (Dembour 2000, 86). Pre-dating even international regulations set forth under the 1925 Geneva Convention on Opium and Other Drugs, cannabis laws in the Congo were enacted in 1917 (INCSR 2011). Ironically, these legal restrictions occurred at roughly the same time that cannabis was being widely utilised (and actively promoted) across Europe and North America (and in Australia) for a variety of purposes, from a medicinal cure-all to a popular woven fibre. Particularly notable was its importance for manufacturing sails and ropes during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries – an arguably essential ingredient to the development and promulgation of overseas trade around the world, upon which the colonial empire – or as Campos suggests, ‘the maritime empire’ (2012, 40) – was ultimately founded (Clarke and Merlin 2013).
Based upon historical records of high imprisonment rates during this period, Bernault (2007) argues, the decree of the cultivation of cannabis along with the creation of a range of other punishable offences by the French and Belgian colonial governments in 1910, was in fact a deliberate tactic to further the ‘criminalization of native life … through administrative and short-term sentences [which] thus provided tremendous leverage for taking hold of the colonised … and for controlling local economies and native labour’ (Ibid., 63). While the use of these indigénats 2 coincided with wider political-economic issues – namely the tax demands already placed on African populations, a concurrent subsistence crisis and the slow increase in monetary circulation that made the payment of fines unrealistic – they nevertheless were also part of an ‘intense policy of taming … resistance to white domination’ (Ibid., 66). The use, cultivation and trade of cannabis as argued by Nancy Rose Hunt (2016) was deliberately singled out because it signalled defiance by the native population. As Hunt describes, cannabis diverted attention away from the preferred colonial task of copal (tree resin) production, which was linked to the colonial monies needed to pay taxes. Stated otherwise by a local chief at the time, natives did not want to collect copal because cannabis offered them another lucrative resource. In response the colonial administration led military campaigns to uproot cannabis plants, which were seen as a threat to colonial economic interests.
The significance that cannabis played as a ‘political expedient’ for securing outside interests, particularly in regard to a colonising enterprise, was not limited to Central Africa. Paterson (2009), for example, shows in his thesis on the early trade in South Africa, that the prohibition of cannabis in 1922 was precipitated by fears that ingestion of the plant led to crime and labourer indolence among the ‘coloured’ and Indian populations, whom they relied on for labour, and later the drug was seen a major contributor to cases of ‘black peril’ – the racist belief that all black men were sexual predators. Early laws surrounding the prohibition of cannabis, then, were largely reflections of the mounting racialised politics of the time, rather than concerns based on demonstrable scientific evidence. As Zimmer (1997) argues, the American temperance movement of the early twentieth century to prohibit intoxicating substances in the US was similarly dominated by racial associations. As she explains, ‘alcohol was associated with European Catholics, opium with Chinese, cocaine with African-Americans, and cannabis with Mexicans … drug use by the dangerous classes made the drugs themselves appear more dangerous.’ In explaining cannabis’s early associations with ‘violent delirium’ in Mexico as a result of the use of the drug by the lower classes – ‘people often considered criminal and violent as a matter of course’ (Zimmer 1997, 7) – Campos (2012) makes a similar claim.
These claims have arguably served neo-colonial recastings over control of the DRC as well. A modern-day equivalent is retold by Ritchie (2012) describing a visit by the previously named Republic of Congo’s first elected post-independence leader, Patrice Lumumba to the White House during the Kennedy administration in 1960. A well-known smoker of cannabis (Ludwig 2002), Lumumba’s use during his visit bolstered condemnation of his character (Rotter 2000,179), building evidence against the ‘psychotic’, and ‘irrational’ ‘drug addict’ that ‘he will not prove satisfactory’ (Ritchie 2012, 28–29; Mahoney 1983, 39), which is likely to have fed the flames of support for his eventual assassination. Regardless of these conjectures, the period of colonial rule in the region marked a perceptible shift in how cannabis was henceforth regarded and regulated by international actors. Even following the period of Mobutu’s rule of the country, whereby the high dignitaries of the regime famously took part in drug trafficking on a broad scale (Labrousse n.d.), cannabis laws regarding the sale and consumption of the herb have not been amended since they were first codified.
While regulations and laws dictating the use and trade in cannabis in the DRC continue to operate using the antiquated policies introduced during the colonial period, the current government response to the trade is reflected in the country’s unwavering legal commitments to controlling it as much as by the dubiousness with which the trade is talked about in administrative circles. According to a report by the US State Department (INCSR 2011), the DRC does not encourage or facilitate illicit production or distribution of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances, nor does it encourage or facilitate the laundering of proceeds from illegal drug transactions. Many would argue that the DRC also does little to disincentivise or discourage would-be drug traffickers from taking part in one of Africa’s most illustrious agricultural economies. For example, while the DRC signed up to the 1988 UN Drug Convention on 20 December of that same year, it did not ratify the treaty until 28 October 2005. Similarly, while the DRC attends the AU Conference of Ministers of Drug Control as well as the meeting of the Heads of National Drug Law Enforcement Agencies, it cooperates only marginally with its neighbouring countries concerning counter drug operations. Furthermore, according to the 2011 UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report on Central Africa, the DRC does not officially report cannabis seizure figures to UNODC. This is arguably because against a backdrop of poor infrastructure, continuing insecurity, weak government institutions and low official capacity, there are indeed logically ‘higher priorities to deal with’ (Interview, Bukavu, September 2012) than narcotics control. As a result, there are no available statistics on the acreage or yield of cannabis cultivation efforts, and the only available information on seizures often comes from other countries, when Congolese nationals are arrested while attempting to traffic cannabis and other drugs into the neighbouring countries of Rwanda, Burundi, Zambia, Angola and Tanzania. The lack of attention given to the trade undoubtedly has helped shape misconceptions about its prevalence – such that one informant from the UN Political Affairs Office in Baraka asserted that ‘there is no such trade in South Kivu’ (Interview, August 2012). This stance, however, appears to be changing.
Given the structural barriers said to preclude the establishment of well-trained, well-paid law enforcement agents capable of mounting effective investigations, the DRC has in recent years made significant, if uneven, anti-drug efforts, including periodic neighbourhood-wide sweeps in areas of known cannabis sales in Bukavu, and the occasional seizure and subsequent burning of hundreds of sacks of cannabis (see also UNODC 2011). Furthermore, according to local traders, arrest by military and government officials is not uncommon and several traffickers interviewed had spent substantial time in jail having been caught trading cannabis. The ‘sporadic’ but ‘impressive’ drug control measures may also reflect what Aning (2013) refers to as ‘profitable collusion’ between government officials and traffickers. Interviews with officials responsible for drug control at the local level demonstrate that they rely on information (not simply funds) from ‘friendly’ traffickers who can be used for access to and arrest of other traders, who are then often released after paying a substantial fine. And while there is no proof that senior officials engage directly in drug trafficking, corruption in conjunction with narcotics trafficking is thought to be widespread, possibly reaching into the highest levels of the government (INCSR 2011). The presence of corrupt border officials, in particular, is seen as being a critical element for the volume of drugs trafficked to neighbouring states (UNODC 2011).
Interestingly, despite more dubiously inspired acts of government drug control, people in positions of authority ranging from the UN Political Affairs Office and commanders of DRC’s national army, the Forces Armées de la République démocratique du Congo (FARDC) to the Ministry of the Environment, when interviewed about the trade, narrate almost an identical explanation for the drug’s current place in modern Congolese society. Cannabis, more than the abuse of alcohol or tobacco, is claimed to be responsible for the spread of violence (UNODC 2011) and HIV by obscuring rational faculties for the prevention of reckless sexual and violent acts. Such narratives have found widespread play across a range of written academic scholarship, policy and non-governmental organisation (NGO) papers, as well as media sources. Late twentieth century tropes of ‘[youth gangs] supplied with … beer and cannabis to stoke their aggression’ are embedded in already deeply racialised narratives of the Congo as the Dark Continent (quote taken from Bill Berkeley’s Zaire: an African horror story, 1993). This narrative clearly fits into the early twentieth century conceptualisations of cannabis (and Africa itself) as dangerous. Modern day narratives of ‘red-eyed youths and heavily armed children high on marijuana’ (Kiley 2003) linking child soldiers, forced cannabis use, and the murder and mutilation of civilians (see also Amnesty International 2003) reflect, as Stearns (2012, 4) notes, a common cliché in simplistic depictions of the conflict and demonstrate a clear continuity of the link between cannabis and violence through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Yet, now as before, the causal claim between cannabis and violence finds little actual evidence in the literature, begging for a more critical and careful interrogation of these purported links and why such policies persist in the face of unsubstantiated evidence.
Producing violence
Research examining the link between illegal drugs and violence is far from extensive. The paucity of attention in the literature dedicated to examining the drug trade is not surprising, however, given the difficulty of studying an illegal substance, which makes getting access to data logistically tricky and at the same time means that the information provided may be not be reliable. The handful of existing studies on drug trade tend to focus on understanding the role of drugs in shaping armed conflict, namely the extent to which illegal drugs contribute to the onset, duration, or severity of conflict (Ross 2004; Cornell 2007). While all of these studies fail to find any conclusive evidence linking the onset of civil war with drug cultivation, there is some disagreement about overall impact of drugs on violence. Several studies, for example, argue that drugs serve as yet another form of ‘resource conflict’ that extends the length of conflict and increases its intensity through the economic opportunities provided to rebel groups (Le Billon 2001; Fearon 2004), while others suggest a lack of any link between narcotics and conflict (Bodea and Elbadawi 2007). The inconclusiveness of these studies of the role of cannabis in wartime is further complicated by the emphasis of most on harder drugs, such as coca and opium, versus cannabis, which is generally held to be more widespread. As a result, sites and the time frame of production are difficult to identify (Buhaug and Lujala 2005). Ross (2004) for example presents 13 case studies to study the effects of natural resources on armed conflict in which drugs features prominently alongside diamonds and oil as having a significant impact on war. Illicit drugs are associated with five of these thirteen cases, but in all but one of the five cases – Peru – drugs are not the sole natural resource considered. Of these five cases, two highlight the role of coca-producing states while two cases mention opium production. Interestingly, both opium-producing areas list gems as an additional influencing factor while the remaining two cases of drug production apart from Peru also list gold and oil as factors relating to violence in these regions. Cannabis features in only one case, that of Liberia, and it is featured alongside a host of other natural resources including several mineral and agricultural commodities, making any direct causal connection between cannabis and armed conflict simply untenable.
As a result, such studies tell us little about the linkages between the drug trade and armed conflict, for the simple reason that such macro-level studies are unable to capture the dynamics between illicit drugs and violence as distinct from the presence of other natural resources. Even suggestions that the drug trade presents yet another source of revenue to prolong conflict are barely remarkable, given recent attention to the diversity of resources actually drawn on by armed actors, which complicates notions that armed actors draw from a set of specific violent commodities (Laudati 2013). And if, as Williams (2011) asserts, there is no such thing as a war that is not an economic war (as all groups require some sort of funding), then any future studies linking armed conflict and natural resources must move beyond thinking in such narrow frames.
Furthermore, these studies tell us even less about the specific role of the trade in cannabis, as many of these studies tend to aggregate the connections of various drugs to armed conflict, whether cocaine, cannabis, or opium into one singular category of drugs – despite recent scholarship which cautions against making such generalisations (Laudati 2014). Secondary evidence, for example, suggests that the links between cannabis and armed conflict around the world, and those between the drug trade in harder substances and violence, notably in Latin America where kidnappings and summary executions are common, vary considerably. Even attempts to understand the drug’s singular hand in shaping and influencing armed conflict around the world is far from clear. Findings from an earlier study conducted by Ross (2004), which point to two cases of armed conflict involving cannabis, suggest that the causal arrow runs in the opposite direction to the assumption that drugs lead to armed conflict – instead arguing that drug production was an outcome of the civil war in these two areas because the regions fell outside the government’s control for a series of consecutive growing seasons. All of these considerations point to the need for more nuanced scholarship to better understand the role of illicit drugs as a variable in resource war and for disaggregated studies that better account for the variable role of drugs in conflict.
The contribution of cannabis to violence has gained particular notoriety and is seen in many circles as partly responsible for the acts of violence against women that the DRC, cited by UN officials as ‘the worst place to be a woman’ and ‘the rape capital of the world’, has become infamous for. According to a report by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC 2013), cannabis consumption ‘diminishes moral responsibility and increases violent tendencies’ which many organisations, including the international NGO Women under Siege (2013), contend ‘fuels much of the sexualized violence committed in the DRC’. While these statements lack any evidence in support of such claims, they further fail to consider, as Ambler, Klantschnig and Carrier (2014) argue, that the effects of drugs are felt and perceived through cultural filters. While the rape as war crime discourse and the subsequent role of cannabis in contributing to the production of rape during wartime, may to some extent be relevant, sexual violence against women in the region has been much more profoundly influenced by the ‘normality’ of gender relations in the DRC where women’s socio-political positions are highly restricted (Douma and Hilhorst 2012). Rather, the application of drugs is ‘soaked in sociality and culture, and understanding fully the effects and appeal of their pharmacology requires understanding the social and cultural contexts in which the drugs are consumed … ’ (Ambler, Klantschnig and Carrier 2014, 5).3 The remainder of this section then attempts to (re)position the role of cannabis according within its wider application for DRC’s wartime actors and by doing so demonstrate that the drug’s association with fuelling wartime rape has arguably become yet another ‘dangerous tale’ for (mis)understanding the Congo’s violence (see Autesserre 2012).
Most contemporary reports of cannabis use in the region have largely focused on the psychophysiological effects of drugs on fighters, which are said to either stimulate their desire to fight or reduce their inhibition or fear. According to these narratives, cannabis presents the stimulus for armed actors to engage in violent acts – most notably rape and the murder of one’s family members. While numbers quantifying the extent of cannabis usage among armed combatants are near impossible to recover and professed testimonies that ‘everybody smokes’ untestable, its consumption by military fighters is nonetheless, extensive. This has been found to be particularly true for children recruited or forced into combat service. A programme co-ordinator for an international NGO working in eastern DRC stated in a recent report by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (Bindu 2010) that as many as 95% of children used in armed conflicts are introduced to drugs, of which cannabis is the most common. Testimonies provided by former child soldiers at the trial of Thomas Lubanga at the International Criminal Court state that they were forced to smoke cannabis before going into battle, as their commanders believed the drugs make the minors fearless (International Justice Monitor 2010). Interviews conducted by Amnesty International (2003) recount similar experiences of former child soldiers being given cannabis to facilitate their engagement in war crimes. While the use of cannabis as a tool of war to control or motivate the actions of child soldiers (Kindornay, Lum and Sawyer 2009) presents perhaps the most harmful use of the drug among child soldiers, it is not confined to minors only. A recent study by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (2009; see also Kelly 2010), found that Mai Mai soldiers commonly smoke cannabis to decrease their fear of battle. Even during the Simba Rebellion of 1964, APL (Armée populaire de Libération) rebel leaders reportedly employed the practice of getting young fighters ‘high on dope … and armed with traditional weapons [i.e., bows and arrows] … to throw themselves into attacks’, against the better-armed Congolese national armed forces (Lanotte 2010). The consumption of cannabis thus is not simply seen as being an expedient for violence but rather many believe it to be a central element in the Congo’s violence. As one FARDC captain in Uvira explains, ‘If an armed group wants to be created, it is cannabis that does this. It is needed to change people’s mind. There is no pastor that goes to armed groups. Their gospel is the cannabis’ (Interview, September 2012). Regardless of the divisions surrounding cannabis’s actual contribution, whether as an ingredient or as predecessor for the lead-up to violence, cannabis usage among fighters in the region is in reality much more varied and complex (see Elbert et al. 2013).
Testimonies of former soldiers reveal a diversity of reasons why cannabis consumption among soldiers is so common. One soldier recruited by Rassemblement congolais pour la démocratie (RCD) relates how cannabis is used as a protective charm. ‘Before engaging in scenes like that, before killing, you first have to smoke some chanvre – when you do that, it stops the spirit of the person you’ve killed from entering inside you’ (Amnesty International 2003). Another reason cited for cannabis’s high use rate among soldiers is its use as a coping mechanism after battle to ease the pain of injury or extreme tension caused by confrontation, particularly in the case of hand-to-hand combat. The use of drugs, including cannabis, as well as datura – a flowering plant that causes hallucinations – and amphetamines, is so prevalent among child soldiers in particular, who are given the drugs in order to enable them to cope with the violence experienced and expressed through war, that a detoxification phase is embedded in the reintegration stages of UNICEF and other NGO-led Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes. Cannabis’s utility then for members of armed groups is not limited to battlefield scenes; it equally serves to alleviate the long periods of boredom in between periods of fighting or provides temporary relief from the difficult conditions in which they live. As one former child soldier related to staff from the Bukavu-based NGO Bureau pour le Volontariat au Service de l'Enfance et de la Santé (BVES n.d.), ‘I started smoking cannabis because my friends in the camp told me that it would help me to not think too much about my family.’ Widespread use of the drug even after demobilisation has also been found. As an interview with an ex-child soldiers suggests, continuing drug use in the aftermath of violent conflict may in fact be indicative of wider societal and policy failures to successfully reintegrate demobilised soldiers. ‘We have used drugs, and often the addiction lasts after we have been demobilized … Some continue to take drugs because of neglect. They are not helped to integrate into society, or to understand what has happened to them’ (Bindu 2010).
Capturing outside attention perhaps more than the consumption of cannabis during wartime, is its participation as part of the war economy. Presenting a source of revenue for armed groups, cannabis has been shown to contribute to financing a conflict – what Georg Elwert (1999) has termed ‘markets of violence’. As evidenced by the United Nations Group of Experts, cannabis features as one of the cash crops responsible for financing armed operations in the eastern Congo. Cannabis presents such an important source of financial resources for the Rwandan-speaking Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR) that a JMAC/MONUSCO (Joint Mission Analysis Centre/United Nations Organisation Stabilisation Mission in the DRC) officer commented that ‘If you smoke cannabis, you support the FDLR’ (Interview, Bukavu, August 2012). While the FDLR is probably the armed group most heavily involved in the trade, deriving upwards of 70% of their revenue from the cultivation and sale of cannabis in some areas such as the Ruzizi Plain (Interview, CIRESKI staff, Uvira, August 2012), evidence from fieldwork and secondary sources indicate that numerous armed groups, including several Mai Mai factions, and combatants of the Ralliement pour l’unité et la démocratie (RUD)-Urunana, and Patriotes résistants congolais (PARECO) are also involved in the traffic.
The profits from a diversity of natural resource trades ranging from minerals to cannabis have long been noted as constituting a motivating factor in the Congo wars, however, according to CRESA (2012), recent international attention towards the role of mining has brought more restrictive policies and watchdog efforts in the mineral economy, thereby reducing its position as the central source of income for many armed groups. Groups such as Mai Mai Raia Mutomboki are reportedly looking towards other sources that were once considered less important, with cannabis considered the most important of these alternatives. While claims of proportional income are difficult to verify, the noted changes highlight a shifting landscape of resource exploitation and with that a necessary appreciation of how violence is perpetrated within such non-mineral economies.
While few would argue that the Congo’s warscape is solely motivated by such quests for economic gain, the violence in the region has been enabled to continue by the ability of conflict actors to gain access to resources to help sustain group’s fighting – whether through direct purchase from the sale of cannabis or through the process of exchange or what Williams (2011) calls the ‘sell game’. Its exchange for ammunition between the FDLR and the FARDC is just one oft-cited example. In Lulamba, for example, FDLR members produce sacks of cannabis, which are then sold through Mai Mai Fujo and FARDC intermediaries. As one former FDLR major interviewed by the Group of Experts stated, these collaborations may even take the form of exchange. ‘[The FARDC] would offer us ammunition in exchange for anything, ranging from cannabis to money to bush meat – anything.’ According to former FDLR combatants, the group obtains most of its AK-47 ammunition from Congolese armed forces officers in exchange for cannabis or the profits from commercial activities in mining zones (CRESA 2012). It has even been reported that where FDLR do not grow the plant, cannabis is used as a revolving-door kind of currency by which the FDLR exchange goats they have stolen from other areas for the plant, and then this cannabis is traded for guns, ammunition, and other supplies, usually with the national army (UNODC 2011; see also Spittaels and Hilgert 2008). Some speculate that such trade ties help maintain a climate of civil war in the region (UNODC 2011), as these ties undermine the army’s neutrality, reinforce its abusive behaviour, and diminish the efficacy of its military operations (Stearns, Verweijen and Baaz 2013). This argument is particularly convincing when the trade serves as one of the issues at stake over which groups may not only collaborate, but fight. National Geographic recently reported that rebel forces had cleared protected land – important habitat for endangered gorillas – in Virunga National Park to plant cannabis, and in the process, several park rangers had been shot and killed by militiamen keen to protect their lucrative investments (Lovgren 2011).
Engagement in the trade by different armed elements is often viewed as motivated by the search for profit. A 2012 UN Security Council report for example, accuses military leader Colonel Innocent Zimurinda of deriving personal revenue from the cannabis trade (UN Security Council 2012).
Yet the military personnel visibly engaged in the trade are not often top-ranking officials with a reliable source of income and authority. Low pay, in particular, has long been established as a force for many FARDC soldiers to seek additional income. If estimates by CRESA (2012) are correct – that, on average, more than eighty 25-kg sacks of cannabis produced in the high plateaus of South Kivu are sold in Uvira and Fizi for a profit of approximately $40–$60 per sack per week (double if successfully smuggled to neighbouring countries), individuals handling the commercialisation side of the trade can earn $4,800 within a single week. Yet following such narrow logic, Garrett, Sergiou and Vlassenroot (2009) caution, underestimates the actual complexities of war economies. Emphasising a war economy approach necessarily starts from the false assumption that these actors are driven by predatory ambition (Cuvelier, Vlassenroot and Olin 2014). Raeymaekers (2014, 12) argues that this assumption fails to ‘account for the ways the pursuit of power moves beyond economic rationality writ small’. In this case, participation in the cannabis trade did not provide a windfall to any of the military or rebel group members interviewed (nor to the growers), but could generate substantial profit to ‘big’ traders as similarly noted above in the work by CRESA (2012). Rather in line with Goodhand’s (2008) typology of the different incentive systems present in conflict and post-conflict settings, the engagement of military actors within Congo’s cannabis trade can be understood as a war economy, a shadow economy and a coping economy, concurrently (Laudati 2014).
The footprint of different armed groups’ involvement in the trade also varies depending on the form of their engagement. For example, groups with substantial ties to Congolese societies such as the FDLR are responsible for a significant share of the actual production. The same qualities however that promote the FDLR’s ability to engage in production, notably geographic isolation, also stand as barriers to the group’s ability to participate in the commercialisation end of the drug’s trade, necessitating that the group collaborate with members of the military and other armed groups against whom they are said to be fighting. While some military elements directly trade with armed groups, it is more often the wives of national army officers that play the role of key wholesalers in this exchange, buying in larger quantities from the grower in rural areas and selling to individual smokers or smaller traders in the larger towns and bigger cities. They may also accompany the transportation, with or without an overt military escort. Elements of the military, in contrast, control the roads and checkpoints along which the drugs must be transported whereby they can ensure that the drugs move smoothly from the points of production or the wholesaling towns to the urban markets. Thus, it is evident that the activities related to armed group involvement in the cannabis trade are not aimed at waging and sustaining war per se, and its financial contribution to official military strategies is limited – particularly among armed actors beyond the FDLR. However, the degree of its influence on the region’s wider conflict dynamics remains to be seen.
Sowing the seeds of insecurity
Insecurity resulting from civilian participation in the cannabis trade is generally incurred in two ways. First, traders and growers are always alert to the direct and more obvious danger of being caught by security forces, which almost always leads to hefty fines and threat of a prison sentence that respondents note can be anywhere from a few months to several years. Encounters with armed men (including military forces as well as rebel groups) may also result in physical beatings or the theft of their cannabis along with other personal items. Second, growers are faced with an additional source of insecurity that has broader implications for the welfare of the wider household.
As most cultivators of cannabis harvest their crop in the same climatic period, during the wet seasons (April–May and again in November–December), farmers unintentionally end up flooding the cannabis market with their product at the same time during these wetter months. As a result, prices for cannabis are cheapest during the rainy months and subsequently rise during the non-harvest periods. At first glance this might appear to be the result of local enviro-climatic conditions. Key to understanding the deluge of cannabis in the marketplace at the same time requires asking not only when it is produced (an enviro-climatic condition) but why it is put on the market when it is (a socio-political condition). Because it is not a perishable product, once dried it can be stored up to six months with little reduction in potency. Farmers often acknowledged the benefit that selling during the dry season would provide but felt constrained by a number of factors preventing them from waiting to sell. Poverty was cited as the major reason influencing farmers to sell quickly and closer to the period of harvest, but fear of being caught with sacks of cannabis in the home was raised as a second motivating factor. Thus, concerns over illegal product seizure and arrest pushed farmers to sell when the plant was not yet ripe, at a time when the market already had a ready supply of the drug, and often to the first (and underpriced) buyer, resulting in significant financial loss.
The engagement in an illegal trade in an area of weak state oversight and control means that traders must not only navigate the physical crossing of a landscape of insecurity, but must navigate a complex socio-political landscape of insecurity as well. When asked about the dangers associated with the trade, participants on the whole said that the greatest risk faced by growers and traders was often met ‘along the way’. Despite the real dangers that many traders face in traversing the actual physical environment in an attempt to remain in the shadows, such as the cross-border traders who swim across the Ruzizi’s crocodile-infested waters to reach their target market in neighbouring Burundi, the greatest risks often occurred during encounters with armed actors. These largely random and unpredictable encounters occur during the transport phase when traders and growers are moving sacks of cannabis from the area of cultivation to its first location of sale and are met by individual members of armed militias or FARDC soldiers literally ‘along the way’. While these meetings are commonly seen as being ‘random’ and occurring ‘by chance’ (as opposed to ‘legal’ checkpoints patrolled and enforced by the FARDC), many of the encounters with individual army members, in particular, occur where military checkpoints or bases have been established nearby. During such encounters, transporters are first stopped and asked to provide information about the items they are carrying, which in many cases leads to an immediate search of their goods. Following this initial investigation, transporters (along with their goods) may then be arrested, have their goods seized but their person released, or be asked to pay a fine in lieu of an arrest. In some cases, multiple scenarios happen simultaneously, for example, when military members and individuals from an armed group walk away with the sacks of cannabis along with any cash being carried on the individual’s person. While such episodes appear like nothing more than outright cases of banditry and pillage, most interactions do not leave transporters in absolute destitution, for the very reason that such encounters are mirrors of social relations as much as they are influenced by the search for personal profit. A trader from Burinyi explains, ‘One year ago, we were four traders and we met [FARDC] soldiers along the road who were making charcoal. They stopped us and asked me to give up half of my cannabis. I tried to negotiate by telling them that cannabis is my whole life and that if you take all my cannabis I will have nothing to live by so please take some small quantity instead. They ended up taking six bumbas [3-kg containers] from my original load [of 28 bumbas] plus 28,000 Congolese francs’ (Interview, July 2012).
In most of the cases where room was given to negotiate, traders and growers were able to reduce the initial fines or the quantity of cannabis stolen. Such transactions then are not simply acts guided solely by the powerful, but instead represent what Henrik Vigh (2006) terms ‘navigating terrains of war’. Although largely absent from any scholarly inquisition, these ‘social navigations’ are not specific to the cannabis trade, and are in fact a common feature of day-to-day life in the Congo where everything is negotiated and negotiable. Negotiations between armed group members and civilian traders happen on a much more regular basis outside of these chance encounters with individual soldiers. As ‘legal’ as well as illegal roadblocks remain a common feature of the DRC’s landscape (see Garrett, Sergiou and Vlassenroot 2009), traders often pass through multiple ‘official’ roadblocks in a single journey – each roadblock stop presenting an additional risk of arrest, seizure of goods, and imposed fines. However, these are often preferred to the alternative. Paying a bribe to the police is more reasonable than being sent to the central prison, where bribing is less possible. For example, while almost all traders interviewed for this study reported having been threatened with jail time by local authorities or security forces, or being taken by these same authorities to a local holding station, few of these traders after paying a settlement for their release were ever actually sent on further to the regional prison in Goma.
The real danger stems from the fact that these things cannot be reported. As traders and growers are acting strictly outside the legal framework, they cannot resort to the protection of state agents (police, army and so on) in the case of foul play or wrongful doing. As Gambetta (1993, 226) argues, this has many consequences including that illegal assets are vulnerable to lawful seizure as well as to theft; property rights cannot rely on written records and are generally poorly defined; and those engaged in the trade are more prone to risk than their law-abiding counterparts. Several respondents spoke about personal injuries suffered at the hands of military personnel. In addressing the under-reported nature of the violence in the trade one UN staff officer interviewed explained:
A reason that it remains under the radar is that when a mining community is looted then they can report on it. Yet when armed actors rip off cannabis farmers – as the latter are doing something illegal – they cannot report to FARDC, PNC, MONUSCO, media or other. They cannot go around saying: ‘I was the victim of a violent raid in which the armed men took my dope.’ (Interview, Bukavu, July 2012)
Often then, the choice is between travelling along more visible routes where roadblock locations are easily known and taking the more hidden paths where chance encounters with armed group members is possible.
Discussion
The trade has changed [since the time of Mobutu] because of security … insecurity is made along the way and any time [a trader] can be caught [by FARDC/state officials] and sent to jail. (Interview, cannabis trader, Sange, September 2012)
Cannabis can be said to present a ‘double-edged commodity’ (Tilly 1985; Shah 2006) first, through the revenues from the direct sale of the product, and second through the fines or fees accrued to security forces or rebel forces for the protection of growers and/ or traders from possible arrest – and in some cases from the very same persons offering protection. At the same time, unlike a similar assertion made by Raeymaekers (2007) regarding cross-border trade in general and the sale of protection by border officials, the promise of protection in the cannabis trade is only partial – both geographically and socially. Officers may promise protection, but ultimately protection requires that these individuals have a monopoly on legitimacy and authority within the various social and political and administrative networks that cannabis passes through. Any promise of protection is thus limited and often does not extend beyond specific territories or override other socio-cultural or even ethnic jurisdictions. Precisely because of the dual economy cannabis presents to state officials in particular, state bodies enjoy a sort of coexistence with the black market economy (see Heyman and Smart 1999), in some cases tolerating or even fostering activities that are supposedly prohibited. This dual economy is enabled by the ability of DRC’s security forces to ‘straddle the “crime or social order” dynamic’ (Titeca 2009, 291) by simultaneously transgressing the law or authorising their non-state collaborators to do so – through the direct sale of cannabis by themselves or their wives – while enforcing the law through the fines imposed in its capture. As the quotation leading this section suggests, security forces contribute as much to insecurity as they do to security. Arguably then, the role of cannabis in destabilising the region may be due less to the drugs themselves than to current drug policies, which inadequately centre on individual drug users rather than those abusing the drug’s illegality.
As an informant decries to Michael Taussig in his book on drug prohibition in Colombia, ‘Politics is a drug … this is the drug we take daily … everyone knows the only way to get ahead is to get a public position so you can be bribed – meaning drugged – and drugged far more deeply than with [narcotic substances]’ (Taussig 2005, 181–182). Greater attention must be directed towards understanding the wider context in which violence in the Congo is enabled and insecurity produced, while at the same time considering which actors benefit. The Congo’s wider socio-political landscape of violence in one sense enables a livelihood, as ordinary people can take advantage of the regulatory imbroglio characteristic of weak states (Cuvelier, Vlassenroot and Olin 2014) to profit from the trade of an illegal substance. Yet that same milieu of disorder enables corruption and abuse by opportunistic security forces – what Judith Verweijen (2013) calls military entrepreneurialism. The criminalisation of the trade reproduces what Bourgois calls a ‘production of an everyday violence that buttresses unequal power relations and distorts efforts at resistance’ (2001, 29–30). Violence enacted on civilians and insecurity produced by security forces has become normalised and, as the drug’s illicit nature prevents oversight by regulatory actors, condoned.
Finally, missing from the story of cannabis’s ties to the violence in the Congo is the range of international actors based in the region that are involved in the trade. It is ironic that the same drug said to fuel violence in the region by local actors is consumed by the same actors responsible for maintaining security and providing humanitarian assistance. Sale of cannabis to NGO workers, most often foreign staff who can afford to (and often do) pay significantly higher prices, as well as to UN peacekeepers, is big business. Even when a study conducted by Africa Confidential on MONUC’s involvement in the trade broke in 2008 (Nsia-Pepra 2014), the Indian contingent (INDBATT) found to be involved (ACHR 2014) were noted not for having consumed it but rather for having purchased it from FDLR. In other words, their liability lay in their association with DRC’s violent actors and not with the drug itself. Those seeking to understand the role of cannabis in the Congo should look beyond current tropes that overstate its impact on violence in the battlefield (which remains lacking in evidence) and instead pursue a more nuanced inquiry that could consider how the narrative that has formed around cannabis’s associated link to the conflict has shaped new forms of insecurity in the region.