Civil War in Sierra Leone
Map of Sierra Leone
| date | 1991 to 2002 |
|---|---|
| location | Sierra Leone |
| exit | government victory |
| conflict parties | |
|---|---|
Supported by: Guinea United States UNAMSIL |
|
| commander | |
|
|
|
| troop strength | |
 Sierra Leone 4000+ ECOMOG 700+ UNAMSIL 6000+ 
|
±20,000 |
The civil war in Sierra Leone lasted from 1991 to 2002. The Revolutionary United Front , led by Foday Sankoh and supported by the Liberian warlord and later President Charles Taylor , fought against the country's changing governments. Sierra Leone's diamond deposits played a major role in the conflict .
background and history
Sierra Leone is rich in diamonds. Since independence in 1961, power has been in the hands of a few, who have benefited exclusively from the wealth of diamonds and have hardly shared it with the majority of the population. Corruption and mismanagement were widespread, and Sierra Leone was one of the poorest countries in the world. Several military coups further contributed to reducing confidence in the government.
In 1989, the Liberian civil war broke out in neighboring Liberia , in which various warring factions fought for power and natural resources. From 1991 , one of the warlords in Liberia, Charles Taylor , supported the Sierra Leonean Foday Sankoh and his rebel organization Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in starting an armed struggle against the government in the east of the country on the Liberian border. The main motive for Taylor here was to gain control of the Sierra Leonean diamond mines via the RUF and to finance his own war by trading in " blood diamonds ".
The RUF itself fought out of dissatisfaction with the government and hunger for power. She aimed to overthrow the government, but she never really made it clear what kind of government she wanted to replace it with. Many RUF fighters were young men with no prospects who were hired by the rebels, or child soldiers who were kidnapped and forced to fight.
course
1991–1995: Beginnings of the war
The regular Sierra Leonean army was initially little able to oppose the RUF, since it had been weakened so as not to represent an internal power factor and to reduce the risk of a military coup. As a result, the rebels were able to conquer several cities and the diamond mines in the east of the country. The proceeds from diamond mining now went to the RUF and Charles Taylor while the government was near bankruptcy. The underpaid army soon began raiding and looting villages, forcibly recruiting people, including child soldiers, and collaborating more and more with the RUF. RUF and army violence was primarily directed at civilians, while serious fighting between soldiers and rebels was very rare. The population threatened by rebels and soldiers organized their protection through ethnically based self-defense militias, which quickly arose in all major cities and refugee camps and for a long time represented the only reliable security producers in Sierra Leone.
In 1992, a group of young officers led by Valentine Strasser deposed then-President Joseph Saidu Momoh . The reasons for this putsch were the lack of payment and the inability of the government to deal with the rebels - from the point of view of the putschists. Fighting with the RUF continued. In 1995, Strasser tried to hire the private security and military company Gurkha Security Group . However, after suffering heavy casualties in an ambush, she soon withdrew from Sierra Leone. As a result, in April of the same year, Strasser hired another company, Executive Outcomes (EO). In the absence of funds, the government promised EO diamond mining concessions at Koidu in Kono District .
EO did not trust the unreliable army and instead worked more closely with the self-defense militias, which they professionalized. Together with the militias, EO was able to quickly repel the RUF using superior technical means such as combat helicopters and recapture the most important source of foreign exchange, the diamond mines of Koidu, and free the civilian population there. About 300,000 refugees from these areas were able to return. However, less resource-rich areas were neglected, so that the civilian population there was further exposed to the attacks of the RUF.
1996: Another coup and elections
On January 16, 1996, Secretary of Defense and General Julius Maada Bio seized power. It is believed that EO knew about this but did nothing about it, considering Bio to be a more reliable business partner. The first free elections since 1967 were held under Bio in February, which the RUF tried to prevent with a terror campaign: they chopped off the hands and arms of civilians on the grounds that they could not vote like this, but did not spare children either . Despite this, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah was elected President of the SLPP party.
Finally, in November 1996, the RUF was forced to sign a peace agreement with the Kabbah government in Abidjan . Under pressure from the IMF and World Bank to reduce military spending as a highly indebted country, Kabbah terminated the contract with EO in 1996. The leader of the largest self-defense militia, Chief Hinga Norman, became de facto defense minister under Kabbah and organized the militias as a backup army collectively known as the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) while attempting to massively downsize the unreliable army.
From 1997: Intervention by ECOWAS
In May 1997, officers seized power as the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council led by Johnny Paul Koroma . They allied themselves with the RUF and established authoritarian rule. The constitution was suspended, demonstrations and political parties were banned, government forces targeted institutions and people in the legal system, who left the country in droves. Kabbah had to go into exile in Guinea and asked the international community for help. Army and RUF were merged into the People's Army. Civilians responded with a campaign of civil disobedience and were aided in their peaceful struggle against the coup plotters by the CDF's armed struggle against the People's Army.
Troops from the Economic Community of West Africa , and especially Nigeria , in cooperation with the British mercenary organization Sandline International (which in turn had emerged from the already active Executive Outcomes), then intervened in the conflict in March 1998. They were able to drive the putschists out of the state capital , Freetown , and reinstate the elected government. Kabbah received a warm welcome from the public upon his arrival in Freetown. The army was officially disbanded and a few months later work began to build a new, more reliable army, which initially only operated under the command of ECOWAS. Beginning in February 1998, the RUF began what it called Operation No Living Thing , initially primarily in the Kono region and soon nationwide, in which an increasing number of civilians were killed or maimed in exchange for their alleged support to punish the government.
ECOWAS troops remained in the country to support the government; fighting between CDF, government army, ECOWAS and rebels continued. In May 1999, rebels again attacked Freetown. Weeks of fighting ensued in the city, killing around 5,000 people and causing destruction before ECOWAS regained the upper hand.
1999–2002: International Aid and End of War
In July 1999, the RUF and the government in Lomé signed another peace agreement . The violence nevertheless continued, and even the UNAMSIL peacekeeping mission of the United Nations was initially unable to bring it under control. Because of unclear mandates and internal conflicts, the UN peacekeepers avoided armed conflict, thereby enabling the RUF to seize UNAMSIL equipment and weapons and capture over 500 peacekeepers in May 2000. The British army then intervened in the former colony and was able to turn the situation around with a more robust military operation than the UN intervention. At the same time, changes to the mandate made it clear that UNAMSIL should also take robust action and that the number of troops for what was then the largest UN mission was increased to 17,500 soldiers. The RUF leader Foday Sankoh was captured by British soldiers and in cooperation with the British UNAMSIL showed increasing success from 2001, the disarmament of the rebels could begin. The United Nations Security Council imposed a diamond boycott on Sierra Leone as well as on neighboring Liberia, which handles almost all of the smuggling that financed the RUF. Shortly thereafter, the world's largest diamond dealers committed themselves in the so-called Kimberley Process to stop buying diamonds from conflict areas. Both of these severely weakened the financing of the internal warring factions.
The official end of the civil war was announced on January 18, 2002, two days after the decision to set up the Special Court for Sierra Leone was made. The new elections on May 14 of the same year confirmed Ahmad Tejan Kabbah in office with 70.1% of the votes, while the party-converted RUF did not win a seat in parliament.
In 2005, the UNAMSIL mission expired and was replaced by UNIOSIL , which was tasked with assisting the government of Sierra Leone in strengthening human rights, promoting reconstruction and development and preparing for the 2007 elections. Finally, in 2008, UNIOSIL was transformed into the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone (UNIPSIL). The mission expired on September 30, 2010.
Follow
50,000 to 300,000 people lost their lives during the civil war, around 2.6 million had to leave their homes. These losses can be clearly seen in the graph of the population development from 1990 onwards.
The RUF made it a trademark to sever the limbs of civilians during raids on villages. As a result of this approach, there are approximately 20,000 amputees in the country.
The Special Court for Sierra Leone has dealt with the war crimes committed and held those responsible accountable. The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission was also involved in the investigation. The TRC did not have the right to condemn acts and perpetrators or to form an opinion of its own.
See also
- Liberian Civil War
- History of Sierra Leone
- Blood Diamond (themed film)
literature
- Literature list on the topic sierra-leone.org (English)
- Kieran Mitton: Rebels in a Rotten State: Understanding Atrocity in the Sierra Leone Civil War. Oxford University Press, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-023972-5 .
- Ishmael Beah : A Long Way Gone - Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. Sarah Crichton Books, US 2007, ISBN 978-0-374-10523-5 . ( alongwaygone.com website (English))
- Lansana Gberie: A Dirty War in West Africa: The RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone. Indiana University Press, US 2006, ISBN 978-0-253-21855-1 .
- Patrick K Muana, Chris Corcoran, Russell D Feingold: Representations of violence: art about the Sierra Leone Civil War . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison (WI) 2003, ISBN 0-615-12818-1 , pp. 100 . ( full text as digital copy)
- Paul Richards: The War in Sierra Leone , Clingendael Institute, 2003, pp. 9–18.
movies
- SL Peacekillers - People and Power , Documentary, Al Jazeera , 2018.
- Rebel , Feature Film, 2012.
- Was Don Don , documentary, 2010; various international awards, two nominations for the Emmy Awards .
- Blood Diamond , Feature Film, 2006.
- Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars , Documentary, 2005.
- Lord of War - Dealer of Death , Feature Film, 2005
- Sierra Leone: Soldiers of fortune , documentary, 2004.
- Innocence under Seige: Healing a Scarred Generation , documentary, 2002.
- A Child's Century of War , Documentary, 2001.
- Children of war: a report from Jaques Pauw , documentation, 2001.
web links
- Special Court for Sierra Leone/Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone (English)
- Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission website
- Civil War information page
- Important Documents at the End of the Civil War
- BBC News: Timeline: Sierra Leone
- Sierra Leone Civil War 1991–2002 (War For Profit Documentary) on YouTube , accessed July 21, 2013.
itemizations
- ↑ Elections in Sierra Leone (1996). In: African Elections Database. Retrieved December 29, 2010 .
- ↑ World Population Prospects . United Nations, Population Division; Retrieved July 29, 2017.
- ↑ FACTBOX: Sierra Leone's civil war . Reuters, January 8, 2008.
- ↑ Case Study Sierra Leone . (PDF; 311 kB) United Nations Development Office, 2006.
- ↑ Gberie, Lansana: A Dirty War in West Africa: the RUF and the Destruction of Sierra Leone. Indiana University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-253-21855-1 .
- ↑ Sierra Leone - The Fight for Justice: The War Wounded and Amputees Association. ( Memento of September 28, 2012 at the Internet Archive ) Medico International