Good riddance!

Chi Jaama

Joe sambou


>From: Musa Amadu Pembo <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: [log in to unmask]
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Fwd:Foday Sankoh of Sierra Leone died Yesterday!
>Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 18:06:42 +0100
>
>30 July: Foday Saybana Sankoh, the once-feared rebel leader
>who plunged his country into a decade of brutal civil war,
>died in hospital late Tuesday of natural causes. He was 65.
>Sankoh had been in detention since May 2000, after his
>bodyguards opened fire on a crowd of protesters outside his
>Freetown. More than 20 people died in the incident. Sankoh
>had been in poor health since August 2002, when he suffered
>a stroke which left him partially paralyzed. Following his
>indictment last March for war crimes and crimes against
>humanity, he was transferred to the custody of Sierra
>Leone's Special Court. His condition continued to
>deteriorate, however, and in late March he was transferred
>to the Choithram Hospital for observation and treatment. In
>recent months, Sankoh was said to be in a catatonic state,
>unable to care for himself or to respond to his
>environment. The rebel leader, once known simply as "Papay"
>to his thousands of admiring young followers, died in
>hospital at 10:40 p.m. Tuesday.  A former corporal in the
>Sierra Leone Army, Sankoh served with the 1960s-era U.N.
>peacekeeping force in the Congo, and even did a brief
>signals course in England. His military career ended
>abruptly, however, when he was implicated in a coup attempt
>against then-President Siaka Stevens. Cashiered from the
>army, embittered and jobless after serving six years at
>Pademba Road Prison, Sankoh made his living as a portrait
>photographer in the eastern town of Segbwema. He later made
>his way to Libya where, in the late 1980s, he is said to
>have founded his rebel movement, the Revolutionary United
>Front (RUF). It was while training in the Libyan camps that
>Sankoh met another future rebel leader, now President of
>Liberia Charles Taylor. Sankoh and his followers reportedly
>fought alongside Taylor's NPFL in Liberia before launching
>their own rebellion into eastern Sierra Leone in March
>1991. Portrayed as fighting for Sierra Leone's dispossessed
>rural population against a corrupt urban elite, Sankoh's
>RUF soon acquired a reputation for unparalleled brutality,
>often hacking off the limbs of those they believed to be
>sympathetic to the government. In November 1996 Sankoh
>signed a peace agreement in Abidjan, but soon abandoned it.
>In early 1997 he travelled to Nigeria where he was detained
>by the Nigerian authorities on weapons charges. Following
>the military coup in May 1997, Sankoh was made the nominal
>vice chairman of the AFRC, and ordered his followers to
>join the junta. Following the AFRC's ouster in 1998 the
>Nigerian authorities sent him back to Freetown, where he
>was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. In March
>1999, following the bloody rebel attack on Freetown, he was
>released and sent to Togo to negotiate a ceasefire and
>later a peace accord which would gave him control of a
>commission overseeing the country's mineral resources and
>the protocol rank of vice president. He returned to
>Freetown in December 1999, but his cooperation with the
>government lasted barely five months. Court officials said
>Tuesday there would be a post mortem to establish the exact
>cause of death.
>
>United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has asked the
>Security Council to approve the immediate deployment of
>Nigerian peacekeepers to Liberia, using logistics from
>UNAMSIL, the U.N. peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone. In a
>letter to the Council on Tuesday, Annan said he needed a
>mandate to speed up the transfer of one, and possibly two,
>battalions from Sierra Leone to Liberia. Annan asked the
>Council to give UNAMSIL "the necessary mandate to use its
>resources to provide full support for the deployment and
>sustainment" of a vanguard peacekeeping force from the West
>African regional body ECOWAS. In Monrovia, the Liberian
>government rejected a LURD ceasefire which would have left
>the rebel group in control of the capital city's port.
>Rebel leaders said they would pull back to Freeport to
>await the arrival of West African peacekeepers, and then
>withdraw beyond the Po River. "(LURD) must release their
>stranglehold on the city and that means withdrawing to the
>positions they held prior to the June 17 ceasefire
>agreement," Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Lewis
>Brown told the Reuters news agency in Accra. Despite LURD's
>announcement of a unilateral ceasefire, fighting between
>government and rebel forces continued in the capital
>Tuesday. In the east, government troops battled to
>recapture the port city of Buchanan, which was overrun by
>MODEL rebel forces on Monday. Because of the rebel attacks,
>Liberian President Charles Taylor is reportedly
>reconsidering his pledge to step down and leave the
>country. Earlier this month, Taylor accepted an offer of
>asylum in Nigeria which would shield him from war crimes
>charges by the U.N.-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone.
>Taylor insisted he would remain on until peacekeepers
>arrived in his country. Now, according to the Reuters news
>agency, his spokesman says he may decide not to leave after
>all. "We are of a different opinion now in the government
>about the validity of the overtures of the president to
>step down," Vaani Passawe said. "So if you start hearing us
>say differently, you shouldn't be surprised." Passawe said
>Taylor's offer to go into exile had been interpreted by the
>rebels as a sign of weakness. "In fact, it has escalated
>the war," he said.
>
>29 July: The leader of Liberia's largest rebel group said
>Tuesday his troops would break off their attack on Monrovia
>and declare a unilateral ceasefire to allow West African
>peacekeepers to intervene in the war-torn country. "We will
>stop fighting until the peacekeepers arrive, unless
>attacked by Taylor's forces," LURD leader Sekou Conneh
>(pictured left) was quoted as saying. According to news
>services, the rebels said they would pull back to Freeport,
>where the peacekeepers are expected to deploy. Once the
>force arrives, they would withdraw beyond the Po River,
>about seven miles from the city. The announcement came
>hours after Nigerian Foreign Minister Oluyemi Adeniji
>(right) suggested in a BBC interview that no peacekeepers
>would be sent until the fighting stopped and there was a
>peace to keep. "Let them stop the fighting now," Adeniji
>said. "Usually before you include peacekeepers into any
>situation, fighting stops, and then the peacekeepers will
>go in and make sure they separate the combatants to make
>sure to make sure that the ceasefire is not violated, and
>if violated, to be able to identify who's responsible for
>the violation." Adeniji, who until recently served as the
>United Nations Secretary-General's Special Representative
>in Sierra Leone, said there was also the question of
>logistics and resources for the peacekeepers, which are
>initially expected to be drawn from two Nigerian
>battalions. "It's not enough for Nigeria to designate
>troops, but these troops will have to make sure are going
>to be properly supported," he said, adding: "That's where
>the international community comes in."
>
>Fighting around the Liberian capital Monrovia this weekend
>engulfed the Samukai refugee camp, which had been home to
>more than 3,500 Sierra Leonean refugees, a spokesman for
>the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Tuesday.
>UNHCR staff said large numbers of the refugees fled the
>camp ahead of a rebel advance. Other reports, however,
>allege that the rebels were expecting a government
>counter-attack in the area, and advised the refugees and
>Liberian residents to leave the area. Some of the refugees
>at Samukai had been registered for an emergency sea
>evacuation to Sierra Leone on July 20. Plans to take a
>fifth shipload of evacuees to Sierra Leone had to be put on
>hold when the latest round of fighting which broke out on
>July 18 prevented the ship, the MV Overbeck, from docking
>in Monrovia. The U.N.-chartered ship is standing by in
>Freetown to resume evacuations once the security situation
>allows. In its first four voyages, the Overbeck conducted
>1,250 refugees to safety in Sierra Leone.
>
>West African security chiefs meeting in the Ghanaian
>capital Accra say it is unlikely that regional peacekeeping
>troops will be deployed immediately in Liberia, the BBC
>reported. Two Nigerian infantry battalions, one just
>finishing a tour of duty with the U.N. peacekeeping force
>in Sierra Leone, had been tapped to be the vanguard of the
>new ECOWAS force, ECOMIL. Officials said, however, that the
>fighting between Liberian government and rebel forces was
>preventing the regional body from sending even a
>reconnaissance mission. MODEL rebels captured the Liberian
>port city of Buchanan Monday, while LURD overran the
>government stronghold of Gbarnga and continued their attack
>Monrovia. Government forces were said to be mounting
>counter-attacks on Tuesday in an effort to retake the two
>towns. In London, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo told
>the BBC his country was ready to send peacekeepers to
>Liberia, but that Nigeria lacked the means to finance a
>peacekeeping operation alone. "It is our problem, but it is
>not our problem alone," he said. "It is in fact Africa's
>problem and it is a world problem...(the troops) are not
>there because we haven't got the capacity to do all that is
>necessary, and we made that clear." Obasanjo said twelve
>years of peacekeeping efforts in Liberia and Sierra Leone
>had cost his country $12 billion and more than 1,000
>Nigerian lives. A peacekeeping force in Liberia is expected
>to cost over $100 million, and the Obasanjo said that so
>far no country had stepped forward with the necessary
>funds. "What we are saying is give us adequate material and
>logistic support and we will do the job," he said. "We have
>two battalions of over 1,500 ready to go in. We cannot do
>that alone."
>
>
>
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