‘China is a big family. We have 200 million middle school students. Every day 22,000 girls get married; 44,000 babies are born. We eat better since we opened China’s door. Every day we eat 1.6 million pigs and 24 million chickens. Our premier not only wants young people to have a chance to study and grown-ups to have jobs, he also has to take care of 20 million kids in kindergarten and 12 million people aged 80.

It occurred during the several weeks from mid February 2004 when, slowly at first but with mounting velocity, manhole covers started to disappear from roads and pavements all over the world. As Chinese demand drove up the price of scrap metal to record levels, thieves almost everywhere had sold them to local merchants who cut them up and loaded them onto ships to China.

In the years since, Sudan has become China’s largest overseas oil project and China has turned into Sudan’s biggest supplier of arms. Chinese-made tanks, fighter planes, bombers, helicopters, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades have added new impetus to the civil war between the north and south of the country which has already lasted for two decades. The money to buy those weapons, meanwhile, has come from oil revenues generated largely by the activities of the state-run China National Petroleum Corporation.

“I am from Sierra Leone, and the problem that is affecting us children is the war that forces us to run away form our homes, lose our families, and aimlessly roam the forests. As a result, we get involved in the conflict as soldiers, carriers of loads, and in many other difficult tasks. All this is because of starvation, the loss of our families, and the need to feel safe and be part of something when all else has broken down. I joined the army really because of the loss of my family and starvation. I wanted to avenge the deaths of my family. I also had to get some food to survive, and the only way to do that was to be part of the army. It was not easy bring a soldier, but we just had to do it. I have been rehabilitated now, so don’t be afraid of me. I am not a soldier anymore; I am a child. We are all brothers and sisters. What I have learned from my experiences is that revenge is not good. I joined the army to avenge the deaths of my family and to survive, but I’ve come to learn tha tif I am going to take revenge, in that process I will kill another person whose family will want revenge; then revenge and revenge and revenge will never come to an end…”

UN peacekeeping behavior of the Jordanian peacekeepers themselves in Sierra Leone (they sold ammo and intelligence to the West Side Boys to enable them to attack the Nigerian UN peacekeeping force in return for conflict diamonds)

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.

Where we have failed is understanding the high cost of intervention on the innocent bystanders

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.

In Sierra Leone, Britain achieved proof of concept, a test case exemplifying how war-termination and peace-enforcement can be successfully achieved. Sierra Leone had suffered over a decade of terrible trauma and pain at the hands of a wily, well-armed and entrenched group of rebels. Against all the odds, it has effectively been brought back into the community of peaceful nations.

In the telling of their story there is also the opportunity, indeed the need, to discuss the wider issues thrown up by this short chapter on the history of suffering in a country like Sierra Leone. That discussion in part concerns our response to the demands of international peacekeeping in strife-torn regions across Africa and in the wider, conflict-torn world.