From the FT.COM
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Comment: The heart of the matter
The fog of war in Sierra Leone spreads well beyond the country's borders,
writes Antony Goldman
Published: May 11 2000 11:29GMT | Last Updated: May 11 2000 13:30GMT
The war in Sierra Leone is not a battle between good and evil. It is, at
best, a battle between bad and evil.
Ever since Graham Greene found the inspiration for Major Scobie in the
oppressive corruption of colonial government in the 1940s, Sierra Leone has
been sold short by a succession of weak, incompetent and self-seeking
administrations that have enriched a few at the cost of the many, pushing the
country to the peak of poverty well before the civil war broke out nine years
ago.
The current government, led by Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, was elected in 1996 in
conditions that fell some way off anything close to democracy. Tellingly, the
chief electoral officer was appointed finance minister shortly after
validating results widely condemned by opposition parties and independent
observers as rigged.
That little legitimacy to which Mr Kabbah could lay claim was swiftly eroded
by a slide back towards the intolerance, petty thuggery and complacent
corruption that has characterised all previous civilian governments in Sierra
Leone.
Evidence such tendencies even turned up in London this month, with
revelations that the High Commissioner and had sold his country's elegant
Georgian mission on Portland Place for the princely sum of £50,000 - a tiny
fraction of its market value, in circumstances that remain unclear.
With the political elite in Freetown, the capital, increasingly remote and
aloof, other, radical elements seized on the political vacuum that had
developed to tap into the frustrations and anger felt by many in a country
that had become so poor despite its substantial mineral resources and fertile
land.
When the Duke of Kent arrived in 1987 to celebrate the founding of a colony
by freed slaves 200 years earlier, there was no running water or electricity,
even in the capital, there were fuel and food shortages, teachers were not
paid and hospitals had no drugs.
The most well-connected ministers and their business associates, often from
the Lebanese community and descendants of the liberated slaves who founded
the colony, on the other hand, enjoyed fabulous wealth.
From such circumstance emerged the Revolutionary United Front, a movement led
by Foday Sankoh, a charismatic, bitter, intelligent, poorly schooled former
army corporal who had trained in Britain in the 1950s.
His vision of a Green Revolution, the sweeping away of those structures and
people that had brought the country so low, a return to what he called
traditional values, and, perhaps most especially, his willingness to use
violence, found favour amongst those most dispossessed and alienated by the
failure of post-colonial Sierra Leone.
Until the government sought protection in ethnically-based militia, the war
carried few tribal tensions, although the cleavage between town and country
and between the krio elite of repatriated former slaves and indigenous
peoples contributed to the weakness of the state.
It also appealed to Charles Taylor, then aspiring rebel leader and warlord in
neighbouring Liberia and now that country's elected president. His bid for
power seemed to stall in 1990 when Sierra Leone joined a Nigerian-led
regional initiative to prop up the existing, corrupt government in Liberia,
allowing Freetown to be used as a base for the Nigerian Air Force.
Although Taylor routinely rejects reports of close links with the RUF, it
was, perhaps, no coincidence that the RUF launched its own insurrection
barely months after Sierra Leone became involved in Liberia's war.
The fighting that followed quickly developed a reputation for brutality for
which it is still marked out today. Government soldiers, the South African
mercenaries that supported them, the Nigerian-led intervention force that
later replaced them, as well as the rebels, were all reported to have
committed atrocities against civilians.
Hopes that a war that was causing such dislocation and further misery might
be brought to an end were raised frequently during the 1990s - first in 1992,
when government soldiers overthrew Sierra Leone's one party state, in 1996
when elections were supposed to set the seal on a fragile peace, in 1997 when
soldiers again threw out a civilian government that seemed to show little
real interest in ending the war, and most recently after an agreement last
year in the Togolese capital Lomé that was signed by the main protagonists
and supported by their regional patrons that effectively amounted to the
Kabbah government's negotiated surrender.
On each occasion, prospects for peace have foundered mainly because of a
failure to reach a consensus between parties that have little but contempt
for one another - the RUF, with its apocalyptic vision and appeal to Sierra
Leone's most brutalised underclass, being the government's worst nightmare,
and the government and its supporters regarded by the RUF as the very reason
that the country had descended into such decay.
Into this stand-off have entered a number of opportunists, including foreign
powers, aspiring mining and mercenary outfits and others that have only
further complicated the process, playing up to the myriad factions that
comprise the splintered leadership of both government and rebels.
Whether Foday Sankoh is an African Pol Pot,as some have suggested, is a moot
point. That he is a product of the failure of Sierra Leone and its political
elite, a symptom of a much deeper malaise rather than the malaise itself, is
not.
While Sierra Leone's problems are intimately linked to the country's
diamonds, such problems are as much a consequence of how that diamond wealth
was abused for 50 years than efforts now to control them in order to
prosecute a war. Without a plan for dealing with the tensions that have
underpinned the conflict, peacekeeping efforts, in the long term, are bound
to fail.
Moreover, the suggestion that the fighting in Sierra Leone, is, like all
Africa's wars, caused only by a competition for natural resources, is to
reveal only how little the outside world understands the continent, in sharp
contrast to how much better Africa understands the outside world.
Ethiopia and Eritrea have no minerals and stand poised to return to the full
force of battle while Botswana, blessed with immense wealth, has been
Africa's most stable country.
It is equally absurd to blame the UN's failure in Sierra Leone on the
shortcomings of the units despatched to make up the peacekeeping force there.
The RUF is well-motivated but is poorly equipped and trained, armed
principally with rifles and grenades and more skilled in quiet ambushes than
pitched battles.
Whether British soldiers would find it easier in Sierra Leone than the
supremely well-equipped Americans found it in Somalia in 1993 is hard to
predict. But weapons that worked poorly in Kosovo will face more extreme
conditions in the heat and humidity of a West African rainy season, as will
soldiers unaccustomed to malaria and the various other health hazards of the
region. What is certainly true is that the cost of the British force now
assembled will quick match all the aid given to Sierra Leone in recent years.
Nigerian has offered to return its troops to Sierra Leone - for a price. But
western powers reluctant to take on an open-ended an messy engagement
themselves should think twice before engaging a force that was thrown out of
Freetown twice during its own peace initiative, first of all by the Sierra
Leone army in 1997 and again last year by the RUF.
Western defence officials describe the Nigerians' performance in Sierra Leone
as "abysmal", while General Victor Malu, who commanded that force and is now
chief of staff, concedes that training, morale and equipment all fall below
what they should be. There is also the small matter of the well-chronicled
history human rights abuses in Sierra Leone and at home by Nigeria's khaki
brigade.
Britain and the international community are now reaping the harvest of years
of neglect in a region and around issues from which there is little domestic
political capital to be extracted, in a similar way to the impotence offered
in the face of the Zimbabwe imbroglio, which has now, incidentally, been
pushed off TV bulletins and newspaper front pages.
There is no quick fix in Sierra Leone, just as there is not in any
environment in which calls are made for peace enforcement, something that
politicians far from the scene should acknowledge before they embark on
policies that may have most uncertain consequences.
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hkanteh
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