Table Of ContentREBEL LAW
FRANK LEDWIDGE
Rebel Law
Insurgents, Courts and Justice
in Modern Conflict
HURST & COMPANY, LONDON
First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by
C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,
41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL
© Frank Ledwidge, 2017
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United Kingdom
Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by
Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016,
United States of America.
The right of Frank Ledwidge to be identified as the author
of this publication is asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 9781849047982
This book is printed using paper from registered sustainable
and managed sources.
www.hurstpublishers.com
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1. Law, Legitimacy and Insurgency 15
2. Needing a Better Deal 27
3. Offering a Better Deal: Insurgent Courts in the Twentieth
Century 47
4. Caliphates of Law: Insurgent Courts Today 65
5. Disruptive Litigation 85
6. Counterinsurgent Dilemmas: Hints from History 107
7. Twentieth-Century Counterinsurgency Judicial Strategy:
The British Experience 123
8. Counterinsurgent Judicial Strategy Today 139
Conclusion 165
Notes 171
Index 209
v
INTRODUCTION
‘Kingdoms are won and lost in the realms of law and legitimacy.’1
The genesis of this project lies in my work. By profession, I am a bar-
rister, trained in the practice of law. For seven years, I practised my
profession in England. Since the mid-1990s, I have worked in many
countries and regions as an advisor on the development of institutions
of justice: the Balkans, Iraq, the former Soviet republics of Central
Asia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Libya and Ethiopia. Occasionally, I have
been called up to be deployed as a reserve military officer, in the
Balkans and Iraq, although my trade within the military was intelli-
gence. In both my military and my civilian capacity, almost every coun-
try in which I have worked, apart from the United Kingdom itself, has
been either in the middle of conflict or recovering from it.
As a lawyer working with the day-to-day problems of ordinary
people, one develops a keen awareness of the centrality of the law and
ways of resolving disputes to most people. Whether those disputes
arise from what we call ‘civil’ matters, relating to property or redress
of grievance, or whether they revolve around criminal matters, is of
central importance to the people involved. Beyond the day-to-day
affairs of ordinary people, the law holds government together; after all,
what is government but the authority to issue and enforce laws? What
are courts but mechanisms to ensure compliance to those laws?
Working in those conflict zones, it was clear that the importance of
courts and laws did not diminish even in the midst of communal vio-
lence or indeed civil war. On the contrary, often courts and law
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REBEL LAW
assumed an even greater importance as the struggles went on. In
Kosovo, during the war itself I observed the workings of Serbian ‘secu-
rity courts’ imprisoning dozens of evidently innocent men. After the
war, there was huge controversy about which laws were applicable
after the departure of much of the paraphernalia of the Serbian state.
In Central Asia, post-9/11 state misuse of laws relating to terrorism—
with attendant internment—had the effect of exacerbating what was
otherwise a perfectly containable problem. I remember meeting a
prosecutor in the town of Namangan in the grotesquely corrupt state
of Uzbekistan where hundreds of dissidents, particularly moderate
Muslim men, had been imprisoned. The reasoning was that they were
practising Muslims and therefore dangerous terrorists. I outlined to the
prosecutor what had happened in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, with
internment resulting in increasing support for insurgent groups and
antagonism towards the government. A year later, the Uzbek state went
beyond imprisonment and settled on out and out murder. In May
2005, 600 people seeking some form of political change were massa-
cred in Namangan’s town square. All this was largely common fare for
the human rights lawyer.
It was only when I served as a justice advisor for the UK military mis-
sion in Helmand in Afghanistan in the early days of the disastrous war
there that the real potential of courts used not against insurgents—in this
case the Taliban—but by them, became very clear indeed. While the
foreign mission, including myself, was trying to shore up a totally dys-
functional and entirely corrupt judicial system, our opponents in the
Taliban were busy demonstrating to the people of Helmand what their
version of justice looked like. For very many of those people, it looked a
whole lot better than the one we were working on.
When I came back from Helmand, I wrote two articles. The first
was published in the RUSI Journal, the second in the Journal of the Royal
Society for Asian Affairs.2 In those pieces, I suggested that despite a pleth-
ora of reports streaming from Afghanistan on the justice sector, and the
efforts being put in to reform it, little had been written on its role in
both powering and countering insurgency. The focus of the work being
done in the sector had been on assessing and critiquing (largely nega-
tively) the international efforts so far—often only from the point of
view of development and the so-called security sector, mainly the
2
