This is part five of the Appendix to Damien Lewis book “Operation Certain Death”

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After the successful rescue of the Royal Irish hostages in September 2000, the British military intervention continued in Sierra Leone. Soon after, the Royal Irish contingent at Benguema was replaced by some three hundred further British troops who took over their activities. By the end of 2000m some three thousand SLA troops would have completed the IMATT training course. In fact, IMATT was mandated for a three-year contract to sort out the situation in Sierra Leone, with a budget in excess of some £30 million. The British military continued to operate in Sierra Leone, doing by default what the UN had proven itself incapable of – enabling the SLA to operate effectively against the rebels and bring about an end to the country’s internecine civil war.

IMATT was and remains a British-led initiative, which is not under the UN. It uses only experienced military personnel: in addition to the Royal Irish Regiment, the Royal Gurkha Rifles, the Royal Anglian Regiment and several other units have served under IMATT in Sierra Leone. There are also smaller allied contingents, including several Canadian and American troops. In 2000, the Canadians deployed military personnel under Operation Sculpture, and they worked alongside the British forces training the SLA. Between August 1999 and March 2000, IMATT cost the British taxpayer some £7.4 million – and that was prior to the massive military interventions of Operation Palliser and Operation Barras. The price tag for the British military intervention in Sierra Leone is not inconsiderable.

At the start of 2001 – several months after Operations Palliser and Barras – three scenarios were facing IMATT. Under the first, ‘golden scenario’, the rebel forces would disband in the face of British forces and a newly revamped SLA. In the second, ‘silver scenario’, the 13,000-strong peacekeeping forces of UNAMSIL would move into the rebel areas, and oversee a nationwide rebel disarmament program.

Colonel Mike Dent, IMATT’s CO, was pretty clear about the British forces’ mandate against the rebels. “We need to orchestrate success and ensure that when we attack, we can take our objective completely. This is to build up confidence within the Sierra Leonean ranks, to test what our training teams have taught them, and to send a message to the RUF and quite possibly other forces in … Liberia as well.”

The issues facing Sierra Leone cut across many traditional British political enmities. Though IMATT was a Labor government initiative, it enjoyed a large groundswell of Conservative support – despite concerns about ‘mission creep’. In a House of Commons debate on Sierra Leone on 25 May – just as Operation Palliser was really getting to grips with the RUF in Sierra Leone – Crispin Blunt MP, a Tory, spoke approvingly of the British military actions.

‘The RUF is a bunch of terrorist gangsters, which supports itself in power through the supply of money that it gets from Sierra Leone’s diamond mines and its relationship with Liberia, where the diamonds are marketed. The key military objective must be to destroy the RUF by taking control of ground that is vital to them – that is the diamond-producing areas. I believe that is achievable, given that the RUF has no cultural basis of support and no tribal loyalty. The operation should be properly followed up by retraining the Sierra Leone Army, training the police force and the civil service and putting in place civil institutions.’

For his unstinting support over the last four years in Sierra Leone, Tony Blair received the personal thanks of President Kabbah. In an open letter Kabbah expressed profound thanks for ‘the principled and ethical position’ that Britain has taken on the conflict in his country. Blair himself certainly sees Sierra Leone as a success story, one demonstrating the efficacy of his policies on international intervention in troubled nations: ‘When people say that they run an ethical foreign policy, I say Sierra Leone was an example of that.’

One of the greatest difficulties now facing the country is the numbers of those who in one way or another have been involved in the fighting – either as rebels, militia, Kamajor or SLA. There are an estimated 50,000 such combatants, and only eight-thousand-odd of those could be integrated back into the IMATT-trained RSLAF. The rest – some, 40,000 – were destined for the UN-operated Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration program, which aims to provide some training and civilian jobs for the new non-combatants.

The enemies of IMATT went far beyond the borders of Sierra Leone. Consider the wider scenario. It was one in which Liberia’s Charles Taylor helped the RUF by taking their conflict diamonds, selling them internationally, and providing weapons in return. That was the way by which the RUF converted diamonds into money and arms. By extension, any enemy of IMATT’s was also a friend of Liberia’s. And as the RUF was initially trained and backed by Libya, there were even wider international implications. Add into that the recent diamond deals that the RUF have done with al-Qaeda operatives (conflict diamonds being an untraceable and unfreezable form of almost ready cash), then IMATT was in effect taking on the minions of Osama bin Laden and his world-terror network as well. All the more reason, therefore, for the British government’s serious commitment to getting the job done in Sierra Leone.

In May 2000, President Taylor attacked the role British forces were playing in Sierra Leone. ‘The British government has been among the collaborating governments which has posed a direct threat to the security of Liberia by rearming a non-restructured Sierra Leone Army, and the Kamajors… which include special forces of Liberian dissidents in Sierra Leone.’ Turning up the heat on its war with Britain and the US, Liberia accused the two nations of supporting Liberian rebels and backing a plot to assassinate Charles Taylor himself. In interviews with the BBC, Taylor denied charges that he was aiding the RUF, and went on the counter-attack. ‘Isn’t it easy for the Great United States to confront this little country with evidence, so that everyone will say, “Yes, you are wrong”?’ Taylor went on to claim that the US had sent American assassins into the country to kill him, posing as missionaries and diplomats. The US was supposedly paying $2 million for the killing of Charles Taylor.

In the spring of 2003, David Crane, the Chief Prosecutor of the UN Special Court in Sierra Leone, revealed growing evidence of an al-Qaeda link to the civil wars in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. President Taylor was allegedly harboring al-Qaeda operatives. ‘We know that they are moving about. We know that they are trading in diamonds, laundering money and being protected by Charles Taylor,’ David Crane told the Reuters news agency. It was high time to examine the region’s terrorist links, Crane said, before the world community would come to rue the day that it had ignored the area for so long. ‘Charles Taylor is harboring terrorists from the Middle East, including al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, and has been doing so for years. Taylor is a player in the world of terror and what he does affects the lives of those living in the United States and Europe.’ Interestingly, the US is the worlds single biggest market for diamonds, accounting for some 50 per cent of the global trade.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/terrorism/2003/0209blood.htm

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