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Madagascar
Small Enterprise Development Volunteer - Peace Corps Madagascar

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Law and Order



The tragic reality of Madagascar’s reputation abroad is that the strongest cognitive association the country has, at least as far as the Western world is concerned,  is to a children’s cartoon about a group of eccentric animal castaways, creating a positive hue in the mind of the average Westerner. It is phenomenal that the country receives greater international recognition as a result of the films, as opposed to being an enigmatic landmass adrift off the Southeastern coast of Africa.  However, this fuzzy association that much of the Western world has to the country of Madagascar papers over the dire reality of a country teetering on the verge of anarchy as a semi-failed state.  I have no intention of deliberately disparaging Disney, yet my experience here begs the question whether they might have the gall to make the same film and name it Somalia.

The reason I bring up this point, and more particularly my approximation of Madagascar as a semi-failed state, is that there have recently been a number of striking incidents in my life here that shine a glaring light on the lack of state capacity.  The political theorist Max Weber famously defined a state as a political entity having legitimate claim to exercise of force over a defined territory. So in one sense Madagascar is a semi-failed state in that the current governing body is only recognized as legitimate by a handful of nations. Another factor is a dearth of state capacity, which leads to the degeneration of law and order here.

To provide some context for this story I’ll mention that I was selected by Peace Corps, along with a few other volunteers to participate in a Training and Design and Evaluation workshop to help structure training for new groups of volunteers in my sector.  My good buddy James was also selected and seeing as I’d been in this country for nearly a year and had yet to see the rainforest, I figured I would visit him at his site out East, close to Moramanga, and take the time to visit his forest before we both made our way to the Mantasoa training site.  I was enthusiastically greeted by James in Moramanga and ushered into his favorite bar in town to have a beer while we waited for a taxi-brousse (local van transportation between cities), to take us to his village. 

‘I should tell you, right now is a pretty exciting time in my town, and I’m going to have a lot of people I need to talk to as soon as we get back,’ James said as we watched the rain coming down in sheets outside the door.

‘Of course man, no problem, but what’s new in town?’ I asked.

‘Well, we had five guys in town just get out of jail today and it’s looking like there’s going to be a pretty big homecoming for them,’ he replied.

As the story goes, there were five fairly well liked and important young men in town, some of whom were guides in the forest.  One day, for reasons still unclear, a lady up the road leveled an accusation against these five young men claiming that they were guilty of clearing and burning the forest, allegedly a crime in Madagascar.  Given the prevalence of the practice however, I would guess that often there’s an ulterior motive on the part of the accuser that would lead to the accusation and eventual incarceration on such a charge. 

An ulterior motive may well have been the case in this particular instance, according to James, who informed me that the accuser was a moderately wealthy, ‘land-grabbing’ woman who lived slightly outside of town and was universally despised.  I then asked his honest opinion about whether these men were cutting and burning the forest….

‘No man, I mean, I’m not sure but…. pssshh, na not at all.’

I was then told that in many Malagasy prisons, and supposedly this particular one, individuals are crammed into a small room with the rest of the inmates, regardless of duration.  In a country where many families cohabitate with rats in their family homes one can only imagine the condition of the prisons.  In addition, the onus is on the incarcerated individual’s family to pass by the jail, often located in another town, to provide food or money to feed the inmate for the duration of his prison term. Beyond blighting one’s reputation, incarceration is often an insufferable hardship for families who in the end are often forced to pay a bribe to extricate a loved one from prison.

Later that night James and I met up with his most trusted friend and closest ally at site, a middle-aged man named Tahiry.  We parked on a bench inside a candle lit wooden shack that served as the town’s general store. The wood plank counter was cluttered with plastic tubs of corn, rice and an assortment of beans.  Behind the counter, stacked against the wall, were bottles of warm beer, sodas and small bottles of rum.  As the town was in a festive mood and I had just arrived, James ordered three small glasses of rum for the three of us.  As the rain pelted down outside I began to make small talk with Tahriy about his family and life with James.  Tahiry, an exuberant man in general, quickly turned somber and began to explain how his family was all very distraught over the recent disappearance of his sister’s daughter.  She’s only eleven years old he tells and was last seen by her younger sister at their house, getting into a car full of people in it. It’s unclear who took the young girl or where she may have been taken to.  Tahiry explained that his family has informed the police and are doing all they can but also noted that these things happen in Madagascar all of the time and the children are rarely found.  What’s more, many individuals in town suspect that it could be the work of black market organ thieves, a business that allegedly thrives in some parts of Madagascar. 

Apart from the organ thieves, another insidious force infecting Madagascar is the Dahalo.  Ostensibly roving bands of cattle-thieves in their nascent stages, dahalo have in certain regions evolved into qausi-Mafioso, para-military organizations that rape and pillage towns throughout Madagascar, most significantly in the South of the island.  It’s unclear how centralized control has become over dahalo in the South.  I’ve heard on numerous occasions of military being deployed to combat dahalo forces as they ravage towns.  As far as I’ve gathered, in the central highlands dahalo do exist but are mostly unaffiliated gangs of bandits.  Imagine a gang in the United States but semi-militarized.

As the night wore on with Tahiry, conversation meandered to the subject of the dahalo, at which point James leans to me and says, ‘Eric, you’ve got to hear his dahalo story, it’s crazy.’

One late night in 2011, Tahiry explained, there was a band of dahalo that passed through the town on a large flatbed truck making its way between two larger cities.  The dahalo disembarked and entered a small wooden hut housing one of the village shops on the edge of town.  That night the shop was being watched over by one of the village elders, a very well respected man in town.  Brandishing semi-automatic weapons, the dahalo demanded all of the money the old man had hidden in the store.  After cleaning out the shop’s coffers a member of the gang cracked the old man on the head, splitting his skull, and leaving him to die. 

When the town’s people heard the commotion, knowing it must be dahalo, the men of the village rushed out brandishing machetes and planks of wood.  Details of the events that transpired are foggy but the men in town were able to overwhelm and capture a few of the dahalo members, while the remainder scampered into the bushes with large gashes on their arms. Having captured the dahalo, the men in town proceeded to bind the bandits before cutting off their hands and feet.  From Tahiry’s retelling it is unclear whether the dahalo died from loss of blood or were then killed after having their hands and feet removed, yet either way Tahiry assured me that those dahalo were maty (dead).  A few days later, Tahiry says, a man came out of the forest looking sickly and asking for water at a store on the outskirts of town. Noticing a gash on his arm the store owner hastily alerted the men of the town who apprehended the remaining bandits.  Tahiry assured me that they suffered the same fate as those who had been caught a few days earlier. 

‘So why,’ I asked him, ‘aren’t these individuals taken to the police?’ To which he explain that in the beginning, dahalo were taken to the prisons when they were captured.  Yet as soon as one was incarcerated, someone would pay a bribe to the police, and the townspeople would see the bandit ride out of town in the back of a flatbed truck a few weeks later.  I’ve even heard tell of murders in this country where the murder weapon was found to be registered to a policeman yet had been mysteriously appropriated by the dahalo.  I do not level these accusations lightly but corruption is one of the most intractable and devastating diseases in this country, and I’ve been told unequivocally that in certain cases, not all mind you, the line between protector and perpetrator becomes hazy. Tahiry continued to explain to me that he doesn’t wish things to be this way. He implored me to understand that village justice becomes a cruel and necessary pre-condition of existence when the government has failed you.  When your town is fighting off the dahalo and you can’t rely on the government to protect your family, honor due process or respect the rule of law, instinctually a community devolves into a brutish Hobbesian condition in order to defend itself. It’s either a nasty brand of vigilantism inspired by self-preservation or the risk of losing one’s family.   

I am not going to say I agree with him or sanction the town’s response to the dahalo. All I will say is, I’m glad it’s not me making the decision.

Until next time, Veloma.