A land seared by violence

The stated reasons for the outbreak of the rebellion in Sierra Leone are the stuff of every revolt against the state by a disaffected people - rampant corruption and misrule. M. S. PRABHAKARA traces the evolution of the decade-long unrest.

WHERE DOES one situate the beginnings of the seemingly endless horror and tragedy in Sierra Leone: an estimated 50,000 dead, over a million people displaced, horrific crimes against women and children and other civilians, rape, mutilation, arson and mass murder? How does one understand this nearly decade-long conflict routinely described as a civil war - surely a contradiction in terms, for no war can be described as civil, least of all one which has involved a people, across national borders sharing a common moral, material and geographical landscape despite the differences in language, religion and ethnicity, in such unimaginable brutality?

The conflict began in March 1991 with the outbreak of the rebellion in the eastern part of the country bordering Liberia against the one-party rule of the All Peoples' Congress. The leader of the revolt was Mr. Foday Sankoh, a former corporal in the national army and a man of many parts (including a brief career as a photographer). He headed a rebel movement called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). It is not accidental that the rebellion broke out in the area bordering Liberia, rich in diamonds - a constant factor in all the strife, given the close linkages between the RUF and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, a rebel movement then led by Mr. Charles Taylor, one with an equally gruesome reputation and a major actor in an equally gory Liberian drama. Mr. Taylor is now the elected President of Liberia and his rebel movement is now a legitimate political party, the National Patriotic Party - surely a tempting model for Mr. Sankoh to follow.

The stated reasons for the outbreak of the rebellion, and its persistence over nearly a decade, are the stuff of every revolt against the state by a disaffected people - rampant corruption and misrule. The initial grievances were probably justified. The APC Government led by Mr. Siaka Stevens, Prime Minister and later President, had faced numerous challenges, including coups and counter-coups and even palace coups from within its own support base, ever since it assumed office following the party's victory in the general elections of March 1967 over the Sierra Leone Peoples' Party which had negotiated the transition of Sierra Leone from a Crown Colony to an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth in 1961.

The adoption of a republican constitution four years later did not make any difference, for the problems faced by Sierra Leone, like those of every other post-colonial state, cannot be resolved by cosmetic changes. In a process all too familiar, the Government after the reverses in the 1977 general elections, introduced a single party system in June 1978, with the APC as the only legal party.

This, inevitably, led to more instability, more coups and counter-coups and palace coups, culminating in the emergence of yet another military strongman, Captain Valentine Strasser, who staged a coup in April 1992, committing the new regime among other things to crushing the uprising in the east by the RUF.

Sierra Leone has seldom been out of the news since then, though not in the South African media. Military rule only seemed to obscure the cruelties of the RUF which had battled equally virulently against the Government in Freetown, be it civilian or military.

At least on two occasions, in 1994 and 1995, it was close to capturing Freetown and was beaten back by British and South African mercenaries hired for the purpose. However, the election of Mr. Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, candidate of the SLPP, as President, in Sierra Leone's first free multiparty polls in two decades in March 1996, revived hopes of peace once again. Two days after he assumed office, the RUF responded by apparently suing for peace and accepting the Government's proposal for a ceasefire; and on November 30, 1996, Mr. Kabbah and Mr. Sankoh signed a peace accord in Abdijan.

The accord, however, collapsed less than two months later when fighting broke out. Soon thereafter the elected Government itself was overthrown by a coup organised by the armed forces and led by Major Johnny Paul Koroma. One of the acts of the junta was to name Mr. Sankoh, then in detention in Nigeria, as the Vice- President (in absentia) of the new regime.

The developments since then are even more complicated, with the added dimension of the involvement of Nigeria, via the agency of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and its peace-keeping arm, the ECOWAS Ceasefire Monitoring Group (ECOMOG). A major player in the developments both in Liberia and Sierra Leone over the past decade, Nigeria, itself then under military rule, took the lead in securing the restoration of the civilian Government in Sierra Leone; and Mr. Kabbah was duly restored in March 1998.

The fiercest phase of the civil war began on January 6, last year. According to a Human Rights Watch report, ``the battle for Freetown and the ensuring three-week rebel occupation of the capital was characterised by the systematic and widespread perpetration of all classes of atrocities against the civilian population of over one million inhabitants, and marked the most intensive and concentrated period of human rights violations in Sierra Leone's civil war.'' It was also then that Sierra Leone became world news, with relief agencies and NGOs becoming other important players in the drama.

Once again, there were negotiations for peace, a condition for which was the release of Mr. Sankoh, still held by the Nigerians. A ceasefire agreement signed on May 18, last year, was followed by yet another peace accord (which has once again broken down in the developments over the past three weeks) signed in Lome at a regional summit of West African leaders on July 7, last year. The deal offered the RUF four Cabinet seats in a national unity Government, in return for their disarming. It does not even require the wisdom of hindsight to see that this would only enable the rebel leader to secure for himself and his followers a power base in the capital and continue his long term plan to capture power in Sierra Leone

The developments since then - especially since the beginning of this month when several peace-keepers of the U.N. Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL), approved by the Security Council on October 22, last year, have been killed and about 500 held hostage by the RUF - are the stuff of everyday news, the fare of every TV dinner.

What interests this correspondent, reporting from South Africa, is the selectivity in the ``concern of the international community'' over these developments, in particular Britain and the United States, anxious only about the lives of their citizens but determined that their forces would not be deployed to support the broader U.N. efforts to ensure peace in Sierra Leone, or even protect the lives of U.N. personnel who are in Sierra Leone on a Security Council mandate. Some things never change.

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