IRIN Briefing on the civil war

Sierra Leone has suffered nine years of civil war that have devastated the country and created a deep, unrelenting humanitarian crisis. In 1999, close to 2.6 million of the country’s 4.5 million people were either displaced or refugees. The rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) led by Foday Sankoh has displayed a staggering capacity for brutality. In May this year, the RUF overturned a fragile peace process and plunged the country back into war. How did the RUF start? Sierra Leone academics argue that the RUF originally had a legitimate political pedigree based on student-led opposition to the repressive and corrupt one-party regime of Siaka Stevens (1968-85). Student radicals and lecturers thrown out of universities in the 1980s after a series of protest actions headed for exile in Ghana under the government of Jerry Rawlings. Led by intellectuals such as Abu Kanu and Rashid Mansaray, they travelled on to Libya for military training, where they met fighters of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). What about Sankoh? Initially he was among those in Sierra Leone that helped recruit would-be revolutionaries. Sankoh is said to have nursed a deep grievance against Steven’s All People’s Party (APP). A former corporal and army photographer, he was imprisoned in 1971 for six years for his part in a failed coup. On his release, he opened a photographic studio in the southern city of Bo, joined radical circles, and eventually arrived in Libya. Forthright and charismatic, he reportedly made a strong impression, particularly among the young radicals. In 1990, he travelled to Liberia with the NPFL/RUF and met Taylor, then a faction leader in Liberia’s civil war. Taylor reportedly sponsored the RUF as a means to destabilise Sierra Leone, then a rear base for the West African peacekeeping force ECOMOG that was preventing him from seizing the capital, Monrovia. Taylor reportedly helped broker a deal with the government in Burkina Faso - an NPFL ally - on behalf of the RUF for the supply of Burkinabe mercenaries, with payment to be made in diamonds, analysts claim. When did the war begin? The RUF launched its campaign in eastern Kailahun from Liberia in March 1991. Sankoh was head of the military wing of the RUF that included in its ranks NPFL members and Burkinabes. According to Sierra Leonean writer Abdul Koroma, the rebels were quick to demonstrate their brutality, decapitating community leaders and putting their heads on stakes. Oxford University researcher Paul Richards claims that the Burkinabes did attempt some politicisation, but most of the lectures to villagers were delivered in French. Forced recruitment of children was also an early feature of rebel strategy. The intellectuals in the RUF opposed the methods being used, but within the first year of the rebellion, they had been eliminated in internal purges as Sankoh took over the movement. Among the victims were Kanu and Mansaray. What does the RUF want? Despite its brutal attacks on civilians, it claims it is a movement of the downtrodden in opposition to the country’s corrupt and “tribalistic” political class. In the early days of the RUF, there was some legitimate recruitment in the southeast against the detested northern-based APP, then led by Steven’s successor, Joseph Momoh. In 1990, Momoh began moves to reintroduce multiparty democracy. Sankoh said in a statement in March this year: “We seized the moment of 1991, at the height of (APP) misrule, to face the challenge of countering the nefarious plans that party had hoped to put in place to entrench itself in power.” Why do some say the RUF is a revolution of the youth? Paul Richards argues in ‘Fighting for the Rainforest: War, Youth and Resources in Sierra Leone’, that three decades of bad government blighted people’s opportunities and hopes, and the RUF presented an opportunity for disaffected youths to redeem an element of power through the barrel of a gun. Paul Kamara, newspaper proprietor and chairman of the League for Human Rights also believes there is an aspect of “youth anger” to the RUF’s ability to maintain the loyalty of some within its ranks. “It began with the process of economic decline under the APC,” he says. “As things became worse, people referred to themselves as ‘embalmed body’ - they could no longer feel. From that embalmed body, Foday Sankoh capitalised on youth anger and youth hunger to conscript so many people. When they came to town, they called themselves ‘cyborg’ - human killing machines with no feelings.” But a report this year by Partnership Africa Canada (CAP) into the link between diamond smuggling and the war, stressed that: “Only a fraction of Sierra Leone’s young people joined the RUF of their own volition … (The vast majority) were children who were kidnapped, drugged, and forced to commit atrocities.” Girls were also kept as sex slaves. Numerous human rights reports document how terror techniques were used to instill allegiance such as forcing abductees to kill their parents and neighbours. Francis Kai-Kai of the government’s Demobilisation Disarmament and Reintegration commission points out that some children were abducted when they were so young, and have fought for so long, they no longer remember where they came from, much less why they are fighting. The only family they know and trust is their rebel unit. In addition, RUF “officers” are themselves former abducted children. Even the senior RUF field commanders are only in their mid-20s. What about government forces? Successive governments have recruited from among the same “alienated youth” as the RUF. In 1991, Momoh doubled the size of the army to counter the RUF threat, drawing conscripts from urban ghettoes, but could not supply or pay his men. In 1992, young officers led by Captain Valentine Strasser (26) overthrew him. Some of Strasser’s lieutenants were only 21 years old. Discipline further disintegrated in the badly-equipped and poorly trained army, and field commanders began recruiting and arming conscripts, some of them children. The government’s inability to defend local communities led in 1993 to the rise of the Kamajor (traditional hunters militia) in the south, who fought on the government’s side. The militia also used child soldiers. By 1994, as the countryside collapsed into banditry, communities were being attacked by violent youths who were either RUF, or renegade soldiers - the so-called Sobels (soldier-rebels). The country’s diamond-producing areas in the south and east were overrun by RUF and soldiers, who were also mining diamonds rather than fighting the rebels. The distinction between the army and RUF virtually disappeared in a coup in 1998, when the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) invited the RUF to join the government. The AFRC/RUF was pushed out of Freetown by Nigerian troops after nine months in power, but attacked the capital in January 1999. In a brutal two-week occupation of the eastern suburbs of the city, some AFRC/RUF units committed horrendous atrocities against civilians. In the current conflict, the AFRC has rallied to the side of the Kabbah government. Both the RUF and pro-government forces are guilty of using child soldiers. In the renewed civil war the concern is that more children will be recruited, and if the conflict continues for much longer, the government’s shaky war coalition could collapse and the poorly supplied government forces turn again to banditry against the civilian population. What is the role of diamonds in the conflict? Diamond smuggling, and the regional connections it has spawned, are regarded as key to the conflict. The CAP report points out that other countries that have faced the same social and political problems as Sierra Leone have not degenerated into such levels of violence. “Only the economic opportunity presented by a breakdown in law and order could sustain violence at the levels that have plagued Sierra Leone since 1991,” the report notes. “The point of the war may not actually have been to win it, but to engage in profitable crime under the cover of warfare.” An estimated 85 percent of diamond production in Sierra Leone is believed to be smuggled out of the country, mainly through Liberia, and has helped fund the RUF’s war effort. In clear recognition of the link between control of the diamond fields and the civil war, the power-sharing Lome peace agreement signed last year in Togo awarded Sankoh the post of chairman of the Commission for Strategic Mineral Resources and Development. In 1960, official diamond production peaked at two million carats. In 1998, the government recorded exports of only 8,500 carats, but Belgium’s High Diamond Council (HRD) - the world’s trading centre for rough diamonds - registered imports of 777,000 carats from Sierra Leone. Annual mining capacity in neighbouring Liberia is estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000 carats, but the HRD received an annual average of over six million carats from the country. The PAC report adds that Cote d’Ivoire, where the small diamond industry was closed in the mid-1980s, apparently exported an average of more than 1.5 million carats to Belgium between 1995 and 1997. Analysts have called for tighter monitoring and regulation of the international diamond trade, and the deployment of UN peacekeeping forces in the diamond areas to block smuggling routes.