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