From the FT.COM ************************************************************** 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. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- hkanteh ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface at: http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/gambia-l.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------