IRIN interview on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration

Sierra Leone’s National Committee for Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (NCDDR) set up in July 1998, plans to complete its mandate on 31 December this year. In an interview with IRIN in Freetown in mid-March, NCDDR Executive Secretary Dr Francis Kai-Kai gave a synopsis of the programme, its achievements and the challenges ahead. QUESTION: Dr Kai-Kai what progress has the DDR programme made so far? ANSWER: We have actually completed part of our mandate. We were set up to do DDR - disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration. We have been involved with the reintegration of the ex-combatants and the process we have followed has been very straightforward. We asked the combatants to register at district level so that all of them throughout the country could have access to the process. About 56,751 ex-combatants had registered for reintegration support all over the country by the end of 2002. We have been doing our best to provide a wide range of assistance in vocational training skills, agriculture, business management and in education even at university level for those who have the qualifications. As we speak, we have supported 75 percent so far, which is about 38,689 who are in ongoing or completed projects. For the remaining 25 percent, an estimated 14,700 ex-combatants, it is planned that they will be placed into programmes before the deadline of 30 June. Disparity in opportunities You may realise that the whole country is accessible now. However, not every part of the country has the same opportunities. Most of the ex-combatants that are remaining are in districts that were disarmed last and this caseload is concentrated in the east and south, especially around areas bordering Liberia. These were areas long occupied by the Revolutionary United Front [RUF]. Kailahun, which borders Liberia and remained the seat of the RUF for a long time, and Pujehun, also bordering Liberia to the south, have the largest concentration of the remaining 25 percent. But we are doing our best to complete this caseload as we had already given notice to our donors that we want to complete reintegration by the end of this year. We want to make sure that every registered combatant is in the programme by end of June. And we will use the rest of the year to service them and also to take care of winding down our institutions. So come December 31, we should be able to actually close the institutions. Funding We know that we still need to complete that caseload and of course to complete it there are some assumptions that we are making especially funding. Funding is critical to the process. We reduced our activities recently and we are looking at a funding gap of US $5-6 million. This will give us the opportunity to give every ex-combatant training by June and service them up to the end of the year. Funding is still an issue. We have our traditional donors and we hope that they will help us to see that the programme comes to closure successfully with all the combatants. Medium-long term factor There is this issue of medium-long term engagement of the ex-combatants. What we have done as an institution is to lead the combatants through a transition from the bush to the disarmament and demobilisation process and now reintegration. We support them for between 6 and 12 months, sometimes 18 months. but for those in schools we have supported them for 2-3 years, especially those who disarmed much earlier. Challenge Our support is relatively short term and the challenge we have now is how to make sure that the ex-combatants that have gone through the DDR programme stay committed and engaged to peace. That they stay occupied in their communities and become good citizens in the long term. These are long term issues that we cannot address as an institution but we believe other institutions which have long-term mandates to provide job opportunities and programmes will step in because it is now not only a problem for ex-combatants alone but it is also a problem of youths. It is a big issue now. We do not just want to carry a group called the ex-combatants forever, we would like them to merge with the population. Because they are very special characters given the fact that they belong to the category of people who perpetrated war they have had this significance but now they should be part of the community. However, we are also aware that in some communities they might still be resented. And therefore there would be need for someone or some institution that could oversee that. Q: What has their reception in communities been like? Have there been cases of resentment? A: The overall reception was good. There was a great desire for peace because the war had gone on for so long. With the President's [Ahmed Tejan Kabbah] plea for reconciliation throughout the country and our social reintegration programme at chiefdom levels we have been able to manage and spread the message on the importance of reconciliation and to a large extent it has been successful. However, there are some areas where we have had problems especially among ex-RUFs. There are lots of them who find it difficult to go back to their original homes and this is because of the serious things that they did there. They are taking time to go slowly to test the waters and we hope that with time a lot of these problems will be phased out. But we have pockets of resistance. Q: Where exactly are these? A: There are some ex-RUF combatants in the north, who came from the south and east and have not been able to return home because of resistance. We are focusing our attention on such areas. We are making sure we have reconciliation workshops by organising various social programmes there. Other ex-combatants are in Magburaka and Kono. There are others in Kailahun district who also come from the north and are not going back there. They are just hanging around. But again, we are trying very much to let them know that life is getting back to normal, the chiefs have been installed, government authority is going back to these areas. And we believe that a lot of these needs will now be addressed since we have the chiefs. In the areas that we did not have chiefs, we had government-appointed chiefs whose authority was not as high as the ‘natural’ chiefs elected by the people. We used to have some fairly senior ex-combatants who liked to be in charge because they had been in authority and in control of areas. And with the bulk of the youthful population it was easy for them to challenge some of the authority of the appointed chiefs. But now that the proper chiefs have been elected and have been inaugurated and recognised by the government, government’s authority goes through them, things are getting back to normal and with time these issues will be addressed. Because we were a transitional institution which could not stay long enough to address some of these problems some of which are community-level problems which have to be addressed by the authorities. Q: As ex-combatants along the border areas await to be reintegrated what happens to them with regard to the ongoing conflict in neighbouring Liberia? A: We are doing our best to see that they are all in programmes, ourselves, UNAMSIL [United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone], UNDP [United Nations Development Programme], generally a host of other agencies are very much focused on these programmes trying to make sure the ex-combatants are engaged such that the difference of being in that programme and going to war is like that between day and night. And we are happy that there is nothing like a systematic move by the ex-combatants to go across the Liberian border. Q: But there have been reports that Sierra Leoneans are involved in the conflict in Cote d’Ivoire and also in Liberia. Don’t you think that ex-combatants waiting for reintegration could be tempted to seek "employment abroad"? A: The year 1999 and 2000 were difficult years for the RUF. There were cracks in the RUF and a fellow called "Mosquito" [Sam Bockarie] who was some notorious rebel commander who broke away and took a handful of rebels with him to Liberia and we understand he’s been fighting on the side of Charles Taylor. So they have been roaming Liberia. It may well be part of the group in the Ivory Coast. There are also lots of Sierra Leoneans in Liberia and it could be possible there are some of them out there. But what we know on this side is that there is no systematic movement among the ex-combatants to go to Liberia or Cote d’Ivoire for that matter. We have no evidence on that. Q: Working on the assumption that there could be some Sierra Leoneans involved in the wars in Cote d’Ivoire or in Liberia and in the event that these wars ended, the fighters would return home. Do you see this as a possible threat to the peace and security in the country? A: Absolutely. We are looking at the horizon, looking at the immediate threats in the horizon – that constitutes one of them. But I believe that the present peacekeeping capacity we have and our own security should be able to deal with that, but it is definitely one of the threats we see on the horizon. You might get some band of breakaways who might wish to come back – but we are not wishing for that. Yes there are threats especially given the instability in Liberia, but even as UNAMSIL downsizes we are beefing our own security. Q: What is the status of the female ex-combatants? A: We had about eight percent of them. First of all we have female ex-combatants whom, a lot of them, are being taught different skills. Some are in tailoring and others in other handicrafts, tie and dye. However, the bulk of our ex-combatants are male. During the disarmament process, we set a pace and it all depended on the peace process. If the peace process stalled, then automatically the DDR process would stall. And actually in the designed programme we made every provision for the female ex-combatants. Bush wives We even created separate areas for them but the females that came up to disarm claimed to be wives of the ex-combatants - they were "bush wives". And so the separate areas we created for them, before we knew it were occupied by the men and when we tried to demobilise them, they refused to go. Immediately we realised that the females were actually 'bush wives' and so what do you do in this kind of situation? It became really difficult for us. We had to resort to an easier way of handling the process. We also had difficulties in ensuring that humanitarian agencies would come to our aid because that time, nobody wanted to touch the ex-combatants. Most agencies by their own mandates claimed that they could not do anything for ex-combatants. Change of tack We changed our programme. We said we were not going to allocate more separate areas for the women because when we demobilised men instead of going home they would just transfer to where the women were so that they would occupy these areas permanently. We created various demobilisation centres and these other centres which were not meant for permanent occupation. They were for processing the ex-combatants. We designed the programme in such a way that they would not stay for more than three weeks. We had to change and forget about having a separate area. Q: Were the women disarming? A: When we started the disarmament process there was little compliance with the process from the RUF so we were doing it on a one-man one-gun basis. You had to submit a weapon to be part of the programme. By doing that we almost limited women – it was difficult for them during that period. This was also the period when people defected from their commanders and came to disarm because they were tired of being in the bush. During the latter part of the programme, the third phase of the programme which commenced in May 2001 there was more compliance and we did group disarmament. People disarmed as military units. They were asked to submit all the weapons so we put down all the people who had come. That way it was easier to include the women as part of the programme. Not excluded Women were not excluded not by us, and not by our policy because we said that all units should move, all units should be demobilised. And so what we expected was for commanders to come forth with their men or women and to present all their weapons and ammunition. We tried to establish a ratio of the weapons to men so that we could not have 100 guys, including women come forth saying they were ex-combatants and only submitting, say, five rifles. We had to establish very strict criteria to make sure we didn’t loose weapons. Through that we were able to manage the process, both the human beings and the weapons. Focus to demilitarise Our focus was mainly to demilitarise. Our aim was to remove the weapons out of society. So if you judge us by women coming forth or not then I understand the frustration, but if you judge us by the weapons we have removed out of systems, the way we dismantled the battalions, the brigades and so on, then the picture is totally different. We did the DDR to create an enabling environment for other agencies to come in and provide assistance to all the vulnerable groups. Our mandate was very straightforward, to disarm, demobilise and reintegrate. The rest we hoped the humanitarian agencies would come in and, working with various government ministries, help to perch up the remaining pieces. We hoped that more socially-oriented NGOs would tackle the issues, such as the 'bush wives' some of whom after the war was officially declared over were ashamed of their status and quietly went back into various parts of the country.