(Page 3 of 43) - "Draining the Sea or Feeding the Fire?": The Use of Population Relocation in Counterinsurgency Operations authored by Greenhill, Kelly.

DRAINING THE SEA, OR FEEDING THE FIRE

reasons I shall articulate below, life in the majority of resettlement camps tends to create amongst
their inhabitants a culture of antagonism strong enough to provoke discontent and resistance—
thereby galvanizing further support for the insurgents—while failing to inculcate either the
climate of security and cooperation sought by “hearts-and-minds” theorists or the climate of fear
deemed a prerequisite by “coercion” theorists. Instead, the end results of resettlement schemes
most often fall between two stools: undermining support for the counterinsurgents and the sitting
regime, without leading the population to fear the consequences of failing to cooperate. Thus, in
what has been called “a contest between authority and popularity,” the incumbent regime
frequently fails to win votes on either count. Conversely, therefore, resettlement schemes should
succeed under two very different (read opposite) sets of conditions—and sometimes they do:
one, in those rare cases where promises made by the counterinsurgents actually are fulfilled and
the quality of life actually is improved for the displaced population—i.e., where a culture of
cooperation and co-optation can be inculcated; and two, when the resettled population’s lot
deteriorates so significantly after resettlement that they can do nothing but fight to stay alive—i.
e., when resistance appears futile. However, under the second set of conditions, the military
successes achieved tend to be short-lived and are often, over the longer term, outweighed by
political costs associated with the use of profound brutality and repressive tactics, such as torture
and starvation.

Before going further, a few definitional clarifications are in order. Following the US Army
definition, I define an insurgency as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a

constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict.”

[12]

Counterinsurgency is therefore “all military and other actions taken by a government to defeat

insurgency.”

[13]

Also, although resettlement, regroupment, and relocation may mean somewhat

different things in different contexts—or even within the same conflict—for the purposes of this
paper, I shall use them interchangeably to refer to “any non-voluntary, government-directed
relocation of non-combatant populations to new settlements designed to undermine insurgent
movements.” Similarly, with one important qualification, while terms like strategic hamlets,
blockhouses, agrovilles, aldeamentoes, etc., technically refer to different kinds of settlements,

such distinctions are unnecessary for the purposes of the argument forwarded herein.

[14]

other words, a concentration camp masquerading as a “camp of refuge” is no more likely to be

successful than is an aldeamento that is called a “concentration camp” likely to fail.

[15]

What

fundamentally matters is what does and does not happen in these settlements and the effects they
have on the attitudes and dispositions of the inhabitants. Which leads naturally to the question of
what exactly I mean by “success” in this context. I define success in the context of population
relocation schemes as those that are able to effectively separate the population from the control
and/or direct physical and/or psychological influence of the insurgents, thereby allowing the
counterinsurgent forces to achieve their either their military goals (partial success) or both their

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