This is part three of summary in Damien Lewis wrote in his
book Operation Certain Death. I have added in links to the original reports he
references.
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To better understand the lessons of the British military
intervention in Sierra Leone, one has to first understand the roots of that
country’s troubles. The level of human suffering in Sierra Leone has to be seen
to be believed. A visit to a Freetown amputee camp is a harrowing experience to
which no statistics can do justice. Yet the statistics are uniquely horrible in
themselves and do require pause for thought. The country is about the size of
Ireland, which a similar population of some 5 million people. Yet life expectancy
hovers at around half that of the Irish at just forty years, and child
mortality rates are the highest in the world. Out of every thousand children
born in Sierra Leone, three hundred will be dead by the age of four. Imagine
what that means. If you lived in Sierra Leone your child would have a
one-in-three chance of being dead by the time it reached its fourth birthday.
During the decade of war, somewhere in the order of 100,000
people were senselessly, brutally maimed in Sierra Leone – the chopping off of
hands and feet with old axes and machetes making these people an added burden
on a country that was already on the very brink of collapse. Because of the
internecine war waged by the various rebel factions over the years, a
staggering two-thirds of the population fled from the fighting – this tiny
country spawning one of the largest refugee crises in the world.
In its January 2003 report, entitled “We Kill If You Cry,”
Human Rights Watch writes of a nation ‘haunted by silent war crimes.’ Sexual
violence was the single biggest war crime, the report stated, far more
widespread than the highly visible amputees. Although the war was officially
declared over on 18 January 2002, ‘an unknown number of women and girls still
remain with their rebel “husbands” who abducted them’. Survivors of rape – boys
as well as thousands of women and girls – were in desperate need of counseling,
health care and basic education. The Human Rights Watch report named the RUF
rebels, the West Side Boys and the AFRC as being the main groups responsible
(plus Liberian forces sent in by Charles Taylor to fight alongside the RUF).
The report points out that due to a lack of funding and its limited scope, the
UN Special Court will try only a very few of the leaders responsible for such
crimes, while the vast number of the perpetrators will go unpunished.
http://hrw.org/reports/2003/sierraleone/
‘Child combatants were forces to rape women old enough to be
their grandmothers,’ the report continued. ‘Rebels raped pregnant women and
breastfeeding mothers, and fathers were forced to watch their daughters being
raped. The rebels targeted young women and girls they thought were virgins.
Women were raped so violently that they sometimes bled to death, or suffered
from tearing in the genital area. Many victims who were pregnant at the time
miscarried. Thousands of women and girls were abducted by the rebels and forced
into sexual slavery. Their “husbands” deliberately carved the name of their
rebel faction onto the breasts of the abducted women and girls.’
In Sierra Leone, the principle targets of the war were
civilians, as opposed to the combatants. The normal rules of war were turned on
their heads. In his 1999 report for the Canadian government, David Pratt,
Canada’s Special Envoy to Sierra Leone, wrote:
The conventional ‘Rules for Armed Combat’ have disappeared.
Civilian populations, rather than being afforded protection, became the targets
and tools of war. Murder, rape, mutilation, looting, abductions, human shields,
child soldiers, land-mines, property destruction; Sierra Leone is rife with
such issues. Of particular note is the plight of women and children, who have
borne the worst of the atrocities inflicted by the rebels. Refugee camps and
hospitals are full of victims who have had one or more limbs amputated, the
youngest bring just a few years old. Approximately 3,000 kidnapped children are
still unaccounted for, and for those who survived, there are no schools.
The scope of the humanitarian tragedy is staggering. A
decade of war has resulted in 75,000 dead. The country has been traumatized by
violence, human rights abuses and atrocities on a massive scale. The rebels
have two calling cards; dead civilians, and hundreds of living civilians with
their hands, feet, ears or genitals crudely amputated. The latter served as a
living and constant warning to anyone in their path, and rumors of an RUF
attack were often enough to clear entire towns and villages. The children of
Sierra Leone have borne the brunt of the conflict. In many cases, children were
forced by the rebels at gunpoint to kill family members or neighbors. By
committing acts of violence against those close to them, not only are they
traumatized, but they cannot go back to their families or their communities.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1999/crisis-e.htm
Somehow, a ragtag group of rebels who espoused no coherent
political or social doctrine and had little popular support, was able to force
Sierra Leone to its very knees. How was this possible? And how did it come
about? How did the RUF, the West Side Boys and the renegades of the SLA (the
so-called ‘sobels’ – soldiers by day, rebels by night) come into being? As
Sierra Leone’s President Kabbah himself pointed out: ‘While we unreservedly
condemn the junta and its rebel allies, we most not forget to ask ourselves why
this happened in the first place.’ The answer has much to do with poverty,
social exclusion, corruption and the abuse of power by successive civilian and
military governments in Sierra Leone. After decades of such abuse, the people
of Sierra Leone finally turned on themselves in an orgy of violence and
self-destruction that had its roots deep in their frustration and a desperate
thirst for money and power.
During the seventies and eighties, Sierra Leone was saddled
with a series of corrupt, dictatorial regimes (often with the tacit support of
the West) that bankrupted the nation, and its people ended up with no effective
means of redress for their grievances. With the nation’s wealth ending up
concentrated in the hands of a tiny and obscenely wealthy elite, the ordinary
people of Sierra Leone felt powerless and marginalized. The battle for
‘ownership’ of Sierra Leone’s wealth – at its simplest, the diamond mines – was
increasingly being determined by force of arms. Those who fought that battle
included corrupt politicians, minders, rebels and ‘sobels’. For some, the
resort to violence brought considerable and immediate profit. According to
security expert Paul Williams, Sierra Leone’s war was largely a desperate
struggle over resources located within a country at the very bottom of the
global economy.
By the early eighties, disaffected youth with no prospects
for education and employment in Sierra Leone had begun talking of revolution.
Under the influence of Libyan leader Colonel Gaddi’s Green Book – a socialist
treatise and supposed cure for Africa’s ills – many of these budding
revolutionaries adopted anti-imperalist and anti-Western views. Rather than
examine the nation’s corrupt and rotten ruling system, the ills of the nation
were laid at the door of the old colonial powers, and Libya began to fan the
flames of discontent. By the late eighties, it was providing money and military
training to angry young men who had no prospects in their own country. Libya
was busy setting up an African revolutionary army, and the young unemployed
Sierra Leoneans were eager recruits. In the folklore of the revolution-to-be,
armed struggle was the way these men would seize power, and with it the status
that for so long had eluded them.
Initially, the RUF, the mother of all rebel movements in
Sierra Leone, did espouse some political aims to overthrow ‘de system’. The
only document ever produced by the RUF, Footpaths to Democracy: Towards a New
Sierra Leone, called for an overthrowing of ‘colonial-style’ rule, a
socialist-style redistribution of resources, and reform of the education system
and the economy – all of which was to be achieved by the armed struggle.
http://www.unhcr.org/home/RSDCOI/3c0cc89c4.pdf
But when, on 23 March 1991, the RUF launched its first major
attack at Bomaru, in Kailahun District, Foday Sankoh had already risen to
become its leader. Sankoh was first and foremost a military man. He purged the
RUF top ranks of any educated, thinking individuals, and replaced them with
uneducated, angry youths. Under his leadership, the so-called revolutionary
movement began to slaughter and terrorize the very people that it was supposed
to be ‘liberating’. The RUF’s Footpaths to Democracy is peppered with phrases
form Mao and other socialist thinkers. But it quotes most widely from the RUF’s
chief ideologue, Foday Sankoh himself, the architect of the RUF’s violence and
evil. For example, this is from an early, and chilling RUF lecture to forced
recruits: There is no fairness and transparency in the system in Sierra Leone.
Despite mineral riches, there is no development of roads, schools and health
centers in rural areas. No one in government is listening. Thus the time for
talking is past. Violence is now the only option. Your people have be abducted for
guerrilla training to regain their birthright.’
The initial RUF recruits were predominantly the rural
unemployed, and included a fair number of criminals, drug addicts and thieves.
For the very start, then, the RUF hardly had the makings of principled
revolutionary movement - and it quickly degenerated into a bandit movement that
visited extreme violence and brutality on the ordinary people of Sierra Leone.
At the same time, decades of corrupt misrule had rendered the SLA little better
than the RUF: it too had recruited its numbers from street children, drug users
and criminals. It was hardly surprising, then, that the rebel RUF, the rebel
West Side Boys and the renegade Sierra Leonean Army joined forces to seize
power. They shared one, collective ideology: the lust for power and the wealth
that would come with it. Under the AFRC, they seized power in 1997 and the rule
of law collapsed into total anarchy.
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I personally feel like Damien leaves out one important
enabling factor in this analysis of how Sierra Leone (and many African nations)
could end up in the situation it did. I absolutely agree with everything he
wrote above but believe that in addition to this it was the unprecedented
on-going supply of weapons that helped make these conflicts possible and
ensured they would drag out for as long as they did.
The following except from Amnesty International does a great
job of outlining just how big this problem is. It was interesting for me also
to have recently watched Lord of War again after reading Operation Certain
Death and realizing that the RUF specifically were called out as recipients of
the illegal trade in guns. In that movie the statement was made that billions
of dollars worth of arms flowed to conflicts around the world from the former Soviet
Union, in some cases with the tacit support of the US.
The following article also points out that the US originally
armed al-Qa’ida, which I will talk more about in my review of Charlie Wilson’s
War.
http://web.amnesty.org/pages/ttt3_arms
http://www.cinemanow.com/Buy/Movies/1007,0,5,,1,2,0/1001,0,5,,1,2,26833/Lord-of-War.htm