Background
The civil war in Sierra Leone

There is still a civil war going on in Sierra Leone, in practical terms. Since 1991, the country has suffered war, terror and a deep, unrelenting humanitarian crisis which have left it devastated. The war has curbed agricultural production drastically, cut government revenues from mining and seen the destruction of hundreds of schools, health clinics, and administrative facilities. Forced displacement has effected more than half the population estimated at 4.5 million. Between 20,000 and 75,000 people have been killed and thousands mutilated. Dislocation of people, the brain drain compounded by the war, and destruction of schools have exacerbated the educational crisis in the country, which has a literacy rate of about 20 per cent.

The rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) led by Foday Sankoh has displayed a staggering capacity for brutality. In May 2000, the RUF overturned a fragile peace process and plunged the country back into war. Sankoh was captured on 17 May 2000, but this has not kept the RUF from continuing their fight and terror actions. It is well documented that the RUF is using terror tactics such as mass rape, torture and mutilation of civilians, abduction of children to become child soldiers or sex slaves and massive intimidation. 

The worst of it might be that there do not seem to be other motives for this than maintaining control of the rich diamond fields of Sierra Leone. The war in Sierra Leone is being fought more over economic resources than over ideology.

Why did there break out a war in Sierra Leone? 
Before the outbreak of war, corruption and mismanagement in the diamond sector was one of the main reasons why Sierra Leone became, according to UN figures, the poorest country in the world. With the breakdown of state structures and the effective suppression of civilian opposition, wide corridors were opened for trafficking of arms and ammunition and drugs, all of which eroded national/regional security and facilitated crime within the country and between Sierra Leone and Liberia and even Guinea. 

Besides the internal ripeness, the brutal civil war going on in neighbouring Liberia played an important role for the actual outbreak of fighting. Charles Taylor - now president in Liberia, then a scrupulous faction leader in Liberia's civil war - reportedly sponsored the RUF as a means to destabilise Sierra Leone. Sierra Leone then was a rear base for the West African peacekeeping force ECOMOG that was preventing Taylor from seizing the Liberian capital, Monrovia. Taylor reportedly helped broker a deal with the government in Burkina Faso on behalf of the RUF for the supply of Burkinabe mercenaries, with payment to be made in Sierra Leone diamonds, analysts claim.

How and when did the war begin?
The RUF launched its first campaign into eastern Kailahun (Sierra Leone) from Liberia in March 1991. Sankoh was head of the military wing of the RUF that included in its ranks NPFL members and Burkinabes. According to Sierra Leonean writer Abdul Koroma, the rebels were quick to demonstrate their brutality, decapitating community leaders and putting their heads on stakes. Oxford University researcher Paul Richards claims that the Burkinabes did attempt some politicisation, but most of the lectures to villagers were delivered in French. Forced recruitment of children was also an early feature of rebel strategy. The intellectuals in the RUF opposed the methods being used, but within the first year of the rebellion, they had been eliminated in internal purges as Sankoh took over the movement. Among the victims were Kanu and Mansaray.

What is the RUF?
RUF is the Sierra Leonean rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) led by Foday Sankoh. Sierra Leone academics argue that the RUF originally had a legitimate political pedigree based on student-led opposition to the repressive and corrupt one-party regime of Siaka Stevens (1968-85). Student radicals and lecturers thrown out of universities in the 1980s after a series of protest actions headed for exile in Ghana under the government of Jerry Rawlings. Led by intellectuals such as Abu Kanu and Rashid Mansaray, they travelled on to Libya for military training, where they met fighters of Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), according to IRIN.

Rebel leader Sankoh initially was among those in Sierra Leone that helped recruit would-be revolutionaries. Sankoh is said to have nursed a deep grievance against Steven's All People's Party (APP). A former corporal and army photographer, he was imprisoned in 1971 for six years for his part in a failed coup. On his release, he joined radical circles, and eventually arrived in Libya. Forthright and charismatic, he reportedly made a strong impression, particularly among the young radicals, according to IRIN. In 1990, he travelled to Liberia with the NPFL/RUF and met the Liberian Charles Taylor. Taylor, as a means to destabilise Sierra Leone, thus started sponsoring the RUF.

Despite its brutal attacks on civilians, RUF claims it is a movement of the downtrodden in opposition to the country's corrupt and "tribalistic" political class. In the early days of the RUF, there was some legitimate recruitment in the southeast against the detested northern-based APP, then led by Steven's successor, Joseph Momoh. In 1990, Momoh began moves to reintroduce multiparty democracy. According to IRIN, Sankoh said in a statement in March 2000: "We seized the moment of 1991, at the height of (APP) misrule, to face the challenge of countering the nefarious plans that party had hoped to put in place to entrench itself in power."

A report this year by Partnership Africa Canada (CAP) into the link between diamond smuggling and the war, stressed that: "Only a fraction of Sierra Leone's young people joined the RUF of their own volition … (The vast majority) were children who were kidnapped, drugged, and forced to commit atrocities." Girls were also kept as sex slaves. Numerous human rights reports document how terror techniques were used to instill allegiance such as forcing abductees to kill their parents and neighbours. Francis Kai-Kai of the government's Demobilisation Disarmament and Reintegration commission points out that some children were abducted when they were so young, and have fought for so long, they no longer remember where they came from, much less why they are fighting. The only family they know and trust is their rebel unit. In addition, RUF "officers" are themselves former abducted children. Even the senior RUF field commanders are only in their mid-20s.

What are government forces doing?
Successive governments have recruited from among the same "alienated youth" as the RUF, according to an IRIN report. In 1991, Momoh doubled the size of the army to counter the RUF threat, drawing conscripts from urban ghettoes, but could not supply or pay his men. In 1992, young officers led by Captain Valentine Strasser (26) overthrew him. Some of Strasser's lieutenants were only 21 years old. Discipline further disintegrated in the badly-equipped and poorly trained army, and field commanders began recruiting and arming conscripts, some of them children. The government's inability to defend local communities led in 1993 to the rise of the Kamajor (traditional hunters militia) in the south, who fought on the government's side. The militia also used child soldiers. By 1994, as the countryside collapsed into banditry, communities were being attacked by violent youths who were either RUF, or renegade soldiers - the so-called Sobels (soldier-rebels).

The country's diamond-producing areas in the south and east were overrun by RUF and soldiers, who were also mining diamonds rather than fighting the rebels.

The distinction between the army and RUF virtually disappeared in a coup in 1998, when the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) invited the RUF to join the government. The AFRC/RUF was pushed out of Freetown by Nigerian troops after nine months in power, but attacked the capital in January 1999. In a brutal two-week occupation of the eastern suburbs of the city, some AFRC/RUF units committed horrendous atrocities against civilians.

In the current conflict, the AFRC has rallied to the side of the Kabbah government. Both the RUF and pro-government forces are guilty of using child soldiers. In the renewed civil war the concern is that more children will be recruited, and if the conflict continues for much longer, the government's shaky war coalition could collapse and the poorly supplied government forces turn again to banditry against the civilian population.

How is the situation for the civilians? 
The Sierra Leone civilians seem to be the main target of RUF terror actions. RUF fighters have been quoted saying, "Since you civilians are not here for us, we are here to destroy you," according to Human Rights Watch. Terror has been massive, for years, and it is well documented.

At the beginning of May 2000, the RUF began an offensive action in the Masiaka region. Heavy reinforcements by the United Nations and British troops and a counter-offensive by government-allied militias repulsed the RUF rebels from the Masiaka area around May 14. During its week-long occupation of the area, the RUF committed well documented acts of murder, mutilation, rape, looting, and abduction against the civilian population. 

Women in RUF-controlled areas are at constant risk of being abducted and raped. RUF further is forcing many children, included demobilized RUF child soldiers who earlier had laid down their arms, to join its ranks. Many other children are being abducted by the RUF to carry military equipment and looted goods, and female abductees are regularly raped. The RUF has a long history of using child soldiers, from the first years of armed conflict. Children face some of the gravest abuses in this war at the hands of the RUF," claims Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. "The RUF specifically targets children for recruitment as child soldiers, forced labor, and sexual exploitation."

The general humanitarian situation has also worsened during 2000 due to the great number of internally displaced (more than half the population) and lack of alimentation, shelter, basic medicines and sanitation. In July 2000 Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned of a health crisis in parts of Sierra Leone, especially among the internally displaced. In just two health clinics during the first half of July, MSF monitored a caseload of 9,000 people, indicating the makings of a health crisis. MSF has seen a rise in the number of patients with bloody diarrhea, many of whom are severely dehydrated. Five of the 10 samples tested were diagnosed as Shigella type 1, which is the most contagious form of diarrhea and can lead to epidemics. Malnutrition is also a serious problem. A feeding center run by an international aid organization received 170 severely malnourished and 500 malnourished children during two weeks in July 2000.

What is the role of diamonds in the conflict?
The UN Security Council on 5 July 2000 decided that "all States shall prohibit the direct or indirect import of rough diamonds from Sierra Leone." Diamond trade from areas occupied by rebel forces, terrorizing civil population, is the main financing source of the civil war - or even the main cause of the civil war, as many analysts say.

A report by Partnership Africa Canada points out that other countries that have faced the same social and political problems as Sierra Leone have not degenerated into such levels of violence. "Only the economic opportunity presented by a breakdown in law and order could sustain violence at the levels that have plagued Sierra Leone since 1991," the report notes. "Traditional economics, political science and military history are of little assistance in explaining Sierra Leone's conflict. The point of the war may not actually have been to win it, but to engage in profitable crime under the cover of warfare. Diamonds, in fact, have fueled Sierra Leone's conflict, destabilizing the country for the better part of three decades, stealing its patrimony and robbing an entire generation of children, putting the country dead last on the UNDP Human Development Index."

An estimated 85 percent of diamond production in Sierra Leone is believed to be smuggled out of the country, mainly through Liberia, and has helped fund the RUF's war effort. In clear recognition of the link between control of the diamond fields and the civil war, the power-sharing Lome peace agreement signed last year in Togo awarded Sankoh the post of chairman of the Commission for Strategic Mineral Resources and Development.

In 1960, official diamond production peaked at two million carats. In 1998, the government recorded exports of only 8,500 carats, but Belgium's High Diamond Council (HRD) - the world's trading centre for rough diamonds - registered imports of 777,000 carats from Sierra Leone. Annual mining capacity in neighbouring Liberia is estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000 carats, but the HRD received an annual average of over six million carats from the country. The PAC report adds that Cote d'Ivoire, where the small diamond industry was closed in the mid-1980s, apparently exported an average of more than 1.5 million carats to Belgium between 1995 and 1997.

The UN embargo on Sierra Leone diamonds is the world's reaction to the brutal actions of the RUF. The Sierra Leonean government had urged for the embargo and its ambassador to the UN, Ibrahim M. Kamara, later on stated that "by taking up the draft resolution today, the Security Council would, for the first time, go to the root of the conflict in Sierra Leone." However, there is justified fear that it will be difficult to enforce the embargo. Earlier embargos on the lucrative diamond trade by rebel UNITA forces in Angola did not have too much effect, as most of the trade was whitewashed through intermediaries. The diamond trade by the RUF rebels is already going through established channels in neighbouring countries. Most of Sierra Leone's diamond trade is controlled by the RUF, and this never gets registered as Sierra Leonean exports. Enforcement therefore seems to rest on the will of the neighbouring countries to abstain from the incomes given by covering the dirty trade in Sierra Leone diamonds. However, no compensation for these countries was discussed in the UN Security Council.

The role of the neighbouring countries therefore seems vital. Thus, in a Partnership Africa Canada report from July 2000, it was recommended to put stronger pressure on the Liberia of Charles Taylor. Recommendations included: 
- reinforcement of monitoring and enforcement of the UN arms embargo against Liberia;
- suspension of Liberia from ECOWAS;
- identification and seizure of offshore deposits of proceeds derived from war profiteering by Liberian officials;
- consideration of an international ban on Liberian registered shipping;
- designation of Liberia as a state sponsor of terrorism and imposition of a broader sanction regime.

Sources: Based on IRIN (UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), 
Partnership Africa Canada, MSF and Human Rights Watch

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