Urban legends of intervention

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SACRED COWS IN KOSOVO

 

»A local cattle herder was walking on the road with his animals, when he saw a UN police car coming up with high speed. He wanted to get his cows out of the way and started beating them with the stick he was carrying. The UN police car stopped and out jumped an angry UN police officer. He started yelling at the farmer and threatened him with punishment. What had happened? The police officer was a Hindu from India for whom cows are sacred.«

 

(Source: Story remembered by Berit Bliesemann de Guevara from interviews with German military personnel at the KFOR field camp in Prizren, Kosovo, June 2004)

 

THE AFGHAN FOOTBATH

 

»The military decided to set up Camp Warehouse, just outside Kabul, on premises that had partly been used as barracks before, but at the time were mainly an empty field. In the beginning, pioneer troops had to share one toilet in the only remaining building of the compound. Even worse, the "toilet" was only a hole in the ground. Hence, mobile toilets were soon ordered and, after a few weeks of delays and trouble, finally delivered. But before soldiers could start using them, they realized that many of the Afghan construction workers hired to set up the camp's infrastructure had blue feet. As it turned out, absent other cleaning facilities, Afghans had chosen to wash their feet in the toilets before prayer. It took some time to convince them that this was not the intended purpose of those "flexiloos".«

 

(Source: Story remembered by Florian P. Kühn, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, based on his interviews with German military personnel, Kabul, May 2006)

 

THE TEMPLATE REPORT

 

»A story circulates in the small circle of aid workers who spend their lives working in various war environments. Depending on whether I was in Kosovo, the Congo, or Afghanistan, I heard different versions of it applied to the World Bank, the United Nations (UN), or the International Monetary Fund, but its basic components remained the same. In the Congo, for example, the story ran along the following lines. The UN recently published a report on its action in the country. Surprisingly enough, entire sections of this document focused on East Timor. The organization launched an internal inquiry to determine the reasons behind this puzzling discrepancy. It discovered that the staff member who had prepared the report had just been redeployed from East Timor to the Congo. On arrival in his new position, he implemented the exact same strategies in the exact same way he had done in all his previous postings. As usual, when reporting time arrived, he took his template report, hit "search and find," and replaced "East Timor" with "the Congo." This time, he simply missed a few occurrences.«

 

(Source: Story sent in by Severine Autessere, Columbia University; quotation from her book 'The trouble with the Congo - Local violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding', Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 84)

 

THE SUCCESSFUL CONDOM DISTRIBUTION

 

»A couple of years ago, a humanitarian organization started distributing condoms as part of a program on HIV prevention in South Sudan. A lot of people regularly lined up to get the condoms. The organization and its donor were very happy: the program was working well, the rural population was sensitized to the importance of using condoms. The population was very happy too: finally an organization that understood their needs, and provided solid plastic containers to transport their tobacco crops. It took years for the organization to realize the misunderstanding.«

 

(Source: Story sent in by Severine Autesserre, Columbia University, based on a confidential interview conducted with a Sudanese journalist in Juba in April 2011. Autesserre remarked that she had heard similar stories involving different players – e.g. MSF, various organizations – and a different use for the condoms, e.g. to carry water or home-made alcohol.)

 

COUNSELLING BETWEEN THE SHEETS

 

»One [story] I heard at a conference in 1998 in Korčula, and it was a Croatian journalist that said he'd been reporting on the war in Bosnia and he'd been in Sarajevo and he'd been in the Holiday Inn. And it was a story about how he'd managed to get off with, but he wouldn't say who, he wouldn't say who, but a very famous western female journalist, but he refused to divulge the name. But it wasn't CNN, you know, most of us listening tried to sort of, "Was it CNN? Was it BBC?" And the story that he told was all about how he got off with this very famous western journalist by telling the woman a hard… a tragic story about that he'd just heard the news his friend had been killed in shelling and so obviously he needed intimate, sympathetic counselling between the sheets.«

 

(Source: Literal transcript of a story reported by Vanessa Pupavac, University of Nottingham, recorded at the conference 'Conflict, Intervention and the Politics of Knowledge', hosted by the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, 25-26 November 2010)

 

THE TRANSLATION TRICK

 

»I am not sure whether this has really happened, and I actually do not remember whether I have read it somewhere or whether I heard it at some conference or from someone in a personal discussion... Anyway, there is this anecdote about a conference held in Bosnia in the first couple of years after the Dayton Peace Agreement, when the situation was still very tense and politics pretty much the prolongation of war with other means. So at this conference, there were delegates from all three ethno-national groups in Bosnia – the Bosniaks, the Serbs and the Croats – , and there were members of the international community. So there was the need of an interpretation from English to local languages. But local delegates insisted on translation into their ethno-national language – Bosnian, Serbian or Croatian –, although it was ridiculous as all three are so similar and are derived from the common Serbo-Croatian language used during Yugoslav times; so they do understand each other very well. So, what the international conference hosts supposedly did was they had one interpreter hidden behind a curtain but three channels from which to choose the language – but on all three, it was the same interpreter doing the translation. That is how they tricked the locals in order to get them to the conference or negotiation table. …Maybe this story has really happened, I don't know, but I thought it was such a nice example of the "invented traditions" that form the basis of nationalism that for many years I told my students this story to illustrate my point.«

 

(Source: Story sent in by Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg, August 2011)

 

ON THE BUS WITH KARADZIC

 

»April in Belgrade: Karadzic (and, eventually, Mladic) in the Hague, too… The setting: A gorgeous evening in the apartment of my friend and one of the activists for the governing Democratic Party in Serbia. Company: friends of a friend of a friend, all appearing pro-European and politically active at the municipal level. Time: a few years ago (2007), before the arrest of Karadzic in Belgrade. After a few hours and glasses of nice wine or domestic brandy, one in the company decides to open himself to "our Canadian" (that is, me) and start talking. He tells the story, in a very engaging and a funny manner, how he could have "earned" 100,000 Euros, if only... The story goes like this: one evening, waiting on the bus station for the bus for New Belgrade, another fellow passenger comes and starts talking to him. The man is older and the accent is recognisably Bosnian. So far, nothing strange in the story. After the Bosnian war, there are more than 300,000 Bosnians that ended up in Belgrade. Besides, my informant speaks with equally unmistaken Montenegrin accent. You can hear their accent everywhere as well. But, once the bus came and they were both in the bus, my informant realises, with the help of the bus's artificial light, that his fellow traveller is a well-known war criminal, Radovan Karadzic. My informant decides slowly to move towards the back of the bus, starts plying with the cell, thinking should he call police, follow Karadzic, or something else, and then simply sits on the seat and watches how Karadzic leaves the bus after few stops, only to disappear in the dark.«

 

(Source: Story provided by Dejan Guzina, participant at the ISA Innovative Panel 'Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders', International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, 17 March 2011)

 

THE POISONING OF THE REBEL LEADER

 

»I was in Sierra Leone, Freetown, the capital, 2009. I have been there previously in 2004, right after the war. As I was… I held a taxi, a little red taxi. The myth is – although this is not the myth – that they are all driven by former rebels. That may not be true. Anyway, I got in the taxi, there were other people in it, and I started chatting with the driver which is what I do. And he asked me a few prefatory questions about Foday Sankoh who is the leader of the RUF and I apparently answered them correctly. Because he then told me, "You know, he was poisoned, he did not die of natural causes. We don't know how he was poisoned but we know he was poisoned." He gave me this look. Now, that could mean many things, but there is also traditional practices that have knowledge of poisons. So, perhaps he died naturally, perhaps somebody poisoned him. So it is really interesting, he was just like giving me secrete knowledge but it wasn't secrete because there were three people in the back seat and he probably told every white person that got in his taxi that, you know.«

 

(Source: Literal transcript of a story reported by Patricia Maulden, recorded at the conference ?Conflict, Intervention and the Politics of Knowledge?, hosted by the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester, 25-26 November 2010)

 

THE UN-TRAINED CHILD SOLDIERS

 

»There is another story that I have no idea if it's true or not. But it is one that clearly appeals to people. So, I was at an international conference on children's rights in Belgium and Radhika Coomaraswamy gave speech. And then in the break afterwards, there was somebody who was telling a story about how Coomaraswamy got UN Special Representative. Coomaraswamy had gone to, was it Ruanda or was it the Congo, I think it was Congo, and was inspecting the retrained Congolese army. And among the lined up ranks of soldiers, there were child soldiers. So, obviously, you know, Coomaraswamy was supposed to be having a role banning child soldiers, and the whole idea of the story is that there she is, this big delegation concerned about child soldiers, but there she is, the reality is, there are child soldiers in the very front of her.«

 

(Source: Literal transcript of a story reported by Vanessa Pupavac, University of Nottingham, recorded at the conference 'Conflict, Intervention and the Politics of Knowledge', hosted by the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, 25-26 November 2010)

 

CHARGING MOBILE PHONES IN LIBERIA

 

»It's a story about some nice NGO workers who wanted to be as open as possible to the Liberians. So they started to allow people in the neighbourhood where they had their office to come in and charge their mobile phones. At first, there was just one, then it was two, then it was three, then it was four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And then one day they couldn't work anymore because the whole, their whole office was full of Liberians who came there to charge their cell phones. In fact, they couldn't, even if they had managed to get some physical space, they couldn't work because all their computers had been unplugged and removed from the sockets by Liberians who wanted to charge their cell phones.«

 

(Source: Literal transcript (extract) of Morten Bøås's contribution as speaker at the ISA Innovative Panel 'Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders', International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, 17 March 2011)

 

IRISH PORNOGRAPHY

 

»[B]etween 2006 and 2008 I was working in Eritrea, in the south. So, I was more part of a local community than the expat community, which was really small. But UNMEE was there, the UN Mission for Eritrea and Ethiopia – that's peacekeeping, you know, to patrol this border dispute that's an ongoing thing there. And the urban myth that I kept hearing, or the story, or maybe it's true, I am not sure, or maybe it is just gossip, you can decide – the recurring myth… This kept coming up when I said I was Irish, I am an Irish passport holder, and people would kind of laugh and go, "Oh, you're Irish", and they'd kind of… that there's something interesting or significant about this fact. And they would tell me this story, that the reason that there are only African peacekeepers now in Eritrea, or Asian ones, is that all the Europeans got booted out by the government, because the Irish peacekeepers that were in town in Asmara were caught with a pornographic video that they had made in a hotel in Asmara. They had employed a load of prostitutes and made their own pornographic video, because pornography is illegal in Eritrea. So, that was the sort of myth or piece of gossip that I kept coming across from different sources, as we were teachers, local teachers mainly. That was sort of common knowledge. So, I don't know if that is actually true, I don't know, but it kept coming up in various embellishments, you know.«

 

(Source: Literal transcript of a story reported by Fiona B., recorded at the conference 'Conflict, Intervention and the Politics of Knowledge', hosted by the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, 25-26 November 2010)

 

CANNIBALS IN THE CONGO

 

»There is a story […] that peacekeepers […] are at risk, because there are these practices of cannibalism. And it's very, very common. So, I first heard this story in DRC, Ituri, and this was told to me by, I think, some Croatian peacekeepers [...]. And they were pretty worried, because they had heard these graphic stories about peacekeepers who had been captured and had literally been suspended over a pot – alive. I did a lot of research […] and found out that these stories were pieces in the news across the world. And, increasingly, it's a graphic story about a spit and a pot and hot water and spices and all that kind of thing. […] I also remember, in the Congo it has been used as a way of highlighting the dangers of being on patrol for peacekeepers and constructing, if you like, a security discourse about the dangers of peacekeeping.«

 

(Source: Literal transcript (extract) of Oliver Richmond's contribution as speaker at the ISA Innovative Panel 'Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders', International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention, Montreal, 17 March 2011)

 

THE DATSUN SHOWROOM

 

»Another urban myth about peacekeepers was again about Cyprus. There's a story that was circulating from 1975 about the resources that were left behind in the cease-fire line when the UN-soldiers came in after the intervention, invasion of '74. And there was this local story about the UN being after profit because this cease-fire line was covering some of the most valuable territory in the land and it was all full of resources. […] One of the symbolic stories was that there was a Datsun showroom in the Green Line, the cease-fire line, in Nicosia, which was at that time owned by a wealthy man. It was full of stock. […] And the argument was that the peacekeepers did nothing about the repatriation of the property there. In fact they stole the property. They took it for themselves, these Datsuns resurfaced in Turkey and all that sort of things. And that story was released again time and time and time and time over again to me […]. And if we fast forward to about 7 or 8 years later, when the UN-peacekeepers start to realize in Cyprus that they weren't being taken very seriously by local actors from civil society to institutions to auditions and so on, they decided to start doing tours where they would take journalists down, local journalists, […] to the Green Line to see how it was and what had happened there. And completely without irony the climax of this tour was a visit to that showroom. And in the showroom was about 20 or 25 1974-model Japanese cars. The only problem was that they had been trashed, they had been destroyed. And the peacekeeper who did the tour for me was very keen to point out [...] that they hadn't been destroyed in the war. They had been destroyed in 1985 by a bunch of drunken Swedish peacekeepers who decided to have a party down there. So, the myth was now being kind of re-circularised […] by the subjects of it themselves.«

 

(Source: Literal transcript (extract) of Oliver Richmond's contribution as speaker at the ISA Innovative Panel 'Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders', International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention, Montreal, 17 March 2011)

 

KOSOVO CUSTOMS

 

»In Kosovo [...] there is this kind of discourse of internationals about locals, "Did he know who I am?" You must have heard this [...]. I actually heard that from an international, working at the OSCE, who had been held up at the border and had been actually responsible for draftings of the customs laws in Kosovo. And she was held up by a customs officer who was simply doing his job. And she turned around, and she told me this story, she turned around and said, "Do you know who I am? I drafted these laws!"«

 

(Source: Literal transcript (extract) of Oliver Richmond's contribution as speaker at the ISA Innovative Panel 'Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders', International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, 17 March 2011)

 

PEACEKEEPING AS VACATION

 

»And the first one [story] that I came across was when I was working and living in Cyprus, and that was that peacekeepers were tourists. It ran that peacekeeping is actually some kind of conspiracy, so that our troops could go and have a nice time of six months on the beaches of Cyprus […]. Because, what were they really doing there? They weren't really maintaining peace, cause there was no peace to keep, if you like. So the best that we could really imagine, or that the locals could really imagine, what they were up to was enjoying the sun, the sea and food and so forth. And this again is a common story, that peacekeepers don't really do anything; they don't need to have any capacity. It's just a kind of symbolic interventional party: international community wouldn't feel bad about things ruining that place but don't really want to do anything. 

And I heard a more sophisticated version of this in Timor-Leste, a couple of years ago, actually from a Cyprian police officer, who said to me "Well, yes, we've heard this story about us being tourists. But not in Timor. There's not really any tourist infrastructure here, there aren't really hotels, there are some nice beaches, but there are no facilities here, of course. And anyway", he says, "the fact that we're tourists is not really the correct perception, because we're doing our best to integrate with the local environment, with local society." And his example of integration, the justification for why they were doing a serious job and not just messing around in the sun and the sea, was that they drive around in their 4x4s with their windows down. And the act of having the windows down removes the barrier, it removes the resentment between the subject who is being peacekept and the international peacekeeper […].«

 

(Source: Literal transcript (extract) of Oliver Richmond's contribution as speaker at the ISA Innovative Panel 'Urban Legends of Intervention: Narratives about Locals and International Peacebuilders', International Studies Association Annual Convention, Montreal, 17 March 2011)

 

THE OVERVALUED JUJU

 

»In Liberia, there are secret societies und a lot of stories dealing with the invulnerability of certain persons. For example, General Butt Naked, who wanted to extradite himself to the Human Rights Tribunal in The Hague because he believes to be responsible for the death of 20,000 Liberians during the war. His war name derives from the idea that he is invulnerable when he fights with his upper body naked. He is even said to fight completely naked at times, except for his socks. But those are probably war legends, and I am just telling them to give you some background. But belief in certain invulnerability and supernatural spiritual powers is widespread in many parts of Liberia today. In everyday language, these powers are called "JuJu". Thus, if someone has a lot of JuJu, he is invulnerable, that's what people believe. It is a bit like the mushrooms that you pick up in the videogame Marioland and which make you bigger and invulnerable for a certain amount of time. Well, in Liberia in 2010 the following happened. A man claimed to have an extraordinary JuJu. In order to prove this, he asked his friend to shoot him three times with a shotgun. He said he would survive the shoots without any injuries. This was meant to be the prove for his JuJu. First, his friend hesitated, but after being asked several times he finally shot him. Little surprisingly, the guy who was shot died. Now, serious crimes like murder and homicide have to be brought to a formal court in Liberia. These formal courts work by and large like American courts, based on very similar legal propositions. However, the judges, prosecutors etc are all Liberians. Little surprisingly, in such a court there are no legal norms on how to deal with overvalued JuJu. It seems to have taken a while, and also some consultations with the UN rule of law section, until the judge felt able to close the case. In the end, the man was discharged. There were sufficient witnesses who confirmed the event. And, of course, the shooter could not be blamed for the other guy's bad JuJu.«

 

(Source: Story sent in by Hannah Neumann, Coordinator/Researcher of the International Research Network Cultures of Intervention (CoINet), Berlin)

 

CAPACITY BUILDING: CHICKEN FARMS IN LIBERIA

 

»Someone at UNMIL hat the great idea to rope local villages in for egg production. Normally, in Liberia people do not keep chickens for egg production. But UNMIL seemed to need lots of eggs. Now, there was this idea, I think it was the PEx, that one could build chicken farms for the villages, give them some chickens and a bit of feed for the first months, and then buy all the eggs from them. This way, UNMIL would have enough eggs, the villages would have an income, and everything would be fine. So far, so good. The chicken farms were built. Simply concrete walls with plastic foil spanned across a wooden construction to serve as roof. They also brought chickens and feed to the communities and explained that they would come back to buy the eggs. This worked for exactly 6 months – as long as the collection of eggs was accompanied by new feed for the chickens. After this period, the communities were supposed to buy feed themselves, using the receipts from the egg production. Yet, either nobody had explained them this idea, or they had just forgotten it, or there was no feed to buy. Anyway, the chickens grew skinnier, and at some point the villagers took pity on them and ate the chickens. No chickens, no eggs, no feed, no UNMIL visits any more. Yet many villages now have churches that look surprisingly alike…«

 

(Source: Story sent in by Hannah Neumann, Coordinator/Researcher of the International Research Network Cultures of Intervention (CoINet), Berlin)

 

COMMUNICATIONS IN THE CONGO

 

»It is impossible to face the problems of Congo with the actual force and system in place. The information has to travel thousands of kilometres in a country where the communications and transport system is almost inexistent. As an example, we were informed recently of the information trail relating to two armed men that crossed the border here in Gisenyi. This information followed the normal channels. It was reported to the headquarters in Goma; from there it was passed to the High Commander in North Kivu and from North Kivu onto Kinshasa. To verify the information the High Commander in North Kivu asked, "Is it confirmed that they are carrying arms?" The headquarters in Goma could not confirm because they had not seen the armed men, so they said, "No." As a result the information transmitted to Kinshasa was, "Soldiers crossing border unconfirmed." Kinshasa threw the communication out in the rubbish bin.«

 

(Source: Story sent in by Marta Iñiguez de Heredia, London School of Economics, based on an interview with a diplomat on his impressions of the UN Mission in Congo, Goma, 15 July 2009)