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.
