Storm Brewing Over British Involvement In Sierra Leone

Storm Brewing Over British Involvement In Sierra Leone
May 15, 2000 

Desmond Davies
PANA Correspondent 

London, UK (PANA) - While Sierra Leoneans in the United Kingdom over the weekend organised a rally in London to back British intervention in their country, the Labour government has been coming under increasing pressure from the press and opposition politicians to explain Britain's involvement in Sierra Leone.

Last week, 700 British troops arrived in Freetown ostensibly to evacuate British, European Union and Commonwealth nationals following the threat of a rebel attack on the city.

But their role has since changed to taking up defensive positions in and around the capital.

The British Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Sir Charles Guthrie, was in Freetown over the weekend to assess the situation on the ground.

The press and the Conservative opposition believe that there is a risk of the troops being sucked into the fight against the rebel Revolutionary United Front.

"The danger of mission creep is obvious," the right wing Daily Telegraph said in an editorial.

But Foreign Secretary Robin Cook insisted that British troops were in Freetown to support UN forces and that they would not be deployed in a combat role.

"The best way we can stabilise the situation in Sierra Leone is to continue the role of making sure that the UN forces can get in and can be deployed as effectively as possible," he said.

It was expected that the peacekeepers would be up to full strength in a month, Cook added.

This, though, has not placated those who have suggested that Prime Minister Tony Blair's government pressured President Tejan Kabbah to sign an unfavourable peace deal in Lome in 1999.

This granted amnesty to the rebels for atrocities committed during the war, and gave government posts to some of their leaders, including Foday Sankoh.

Now shadow foreign secretary Francis Maude is calling for an investigation into the suggestion of British government pressure on Kabbah.

"RUF leader Foday Sankoh was responsible for the mutilations and killings attributed to his forces. To have imposed him on the government was quite wrong," he said.

Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, head of the mercenary organisation, Sandline, which provided weapons to Nigerian forces that returned Kabbah to power in 1998, is of the same view.

"Thousands of lives could have been saved and thousands of children would not have been maimed if the Blair government had not acted in such an unseemly rush to get a peace accord at all costs," he said.

Responding to these accusations, a British Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesman said: "It wasn't a perfect solution to bring someone with his (Sankoh's) record into the government, but it was the least bad of a series of unwelcome options." 





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