In Sierra Leone, Peace Comes at a Price

The rebel soldier who hacked off 8-year-old N’Damba Koroma’s left hand--whoever and wherever he is--already has been pardoned.

Little N’Damba, meanwhile, can do nothing except go on with her life, hoping that somehow her hand will grow back.

The girl is among the thousands of civilians systematically violated during this West African country’s eight-year civil war. A peace deal was signed in July to end it.

By signing, the government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah averted being toppled. The Revolutionary United Front under rebel leader Foday Sankoh won the right to participate in running the country. As part of the deal, rebels like the one who chopped off N’Damba’s hand were granted a general amnesty.

The agreement touches on a sensitive issue of peace and justice. Is it sometimes necessary to sacrifice justice for the sake of peace and stability? From the Balkans to Cambodia to South America, it is a question that bedevils those trying to end civil conflicts.

Here in Sierra Leone, a wide range of people including community leaders, editors, human rights activists--and victims themselves--claim that the deal is merely the latest in a series that shows that the rest of the world has a double standard when it comes to war-battered Africa.

They say international commitments to fairness and democracy are neglected as long as the fighting stops. But they insist that there never will be true peace without justice for people like N’Damba.

International officials respond that imperfect arrangements sometimes are necessary to prevent further bloodshed and get a country back on the road to stability.

In the case of Sierra Leone, where at least 50,000 people have died, U.N. and U.S. officials insisted that the peace agreement was the best way to stop the violence and prevent the war from spilling over into neighboring countries.

Officials from Togo, the nearby West African country where the deal was signed, as well as from the Economic Community of West African States and the Organization of African Unity, mediated the peace negotiations. Regional ambassadors for the United States and Britain, who were instrumental in nudging Kabbah to negotiate with the rebels, were present as observers.

However, it was the United Nations that served as “architect” and “moral guarantor” of the peace process, said Ambassador Francis Okelo, the U.N. special envoy to Sierra Leone, who signed the agreement. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged the Security Council to authorize deployment of 6,000 peacekeepers to help disarm and demobilize former fighters.

“It was the best agreement in the circumstance . . . in as far as [it] has served the immediate purpose of stopping the war,” Okelo said.

Okelo said the U.N. did not force the decision to grant a blanket amnesty, and added that it showed that Sierra Leoneans felt “this was worth the price if the country is to breathe and stabilize again.”

A senior Western diplomat based in Freetown was more blunt: “Frankly, I think you come out with the best deal you’re going to get. . . . The question was, you were faced with the bad, badder and baddest; which one are you going to take?”

Momodu Koroma, Sierra Leone’s acting information minister, acknowledged that his government had no choice but to compromise in order to end the conflict. “It’s not a question of rewarding the rebels,” Koroma said. “It’s a question of what are the alternatives.”

When he signed, Okelo added a disclaimer that under international law, crimes against humanity committed by the rebels are not exempt from prosecution.

In theory, suspects could therefore be tried abroad. However, it would be impossible in practice for an ad hoc or international tribunal to try any suspects without the consent of the nation involved, local human rights activists said. And some of the culprits are likely to be in power.

Double Standard Seen in World Community

The agreement left many people in Sierra Leone angry and frustrated.

“What [the international community] is saying is that if people have guns and are willing to commit atrocities, they can have a place in government,” said Olu Gordon, political editor at For Di People, Sierra Leone’s leading daily newspaper. “What kind of a message is this sending?”

Gordon and others argue that the amnesty flies in the face of recent efforts by the United Nations to hold parties responsible for human rights abuses they commit, as the world body has done after the Balkan conflicts. “There are very clear double standards between what happened in Kosovo and what happened here,” said Gordon. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘Let’s find a quick fix [for Sierra Leone] and get this over with.’ ”

Such critics want an international war crimes tribunal for Sierra Leone like those that were established for the Balkans and for Africa’s worst recent human rights horror--the genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994.

Instead, many residents feel Sankoh and his supporters in Sierra Leone are being rewarded.

The rebel leader, a former army corporal, launched a bush war in 1992 to overthrow President Joseph Momoh.

In 1996, Sankoh signed a peace agreement with Kabbah, by then the democratically elected president. The deal fell apart when the military staged a coup in 1997 and invited the rebels to join them in Freetown. The rebel-military partnership ended in February 1998, and a Nigerian-led African peacekeeping force helped restore Kabbah to power. But the rebels continued to fight.

Under the peace agreement, not only have the rebels been pardoned, but they also received four Cabinet posts and four deputy ministerial positions, and the rebel movement has won permission to transform into a political party.

A death penalty imposed on Sankoh in 1997 has been lifted. He will become vice president in Kabbah’s new coalition government and also will lead a new commission on national reconstruction, development and strategic resources.

The agreement calls for the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission similar to the one set up in South Africa to allow those who committed crimes during the apartheid era to confess their guilt in exchange for a pardon.

“Strong efforts should be made to have that commission function so that there would be some sort of emotional closure, even if there’s not legal action taken against those who carried out atrocities,” said John L. Hirsch, a former U.S. ambassador to Sierra Leone and vice president of the International Peace Academy, an independent nonprofit organization.

Sankoh returned home Sunday after stopovers in several African nations to thank those who helped him, and appealed to Sierra Leoneans to open their hearts.

“We stand before you today to ask for your forgiveness and a spirit of reconciliation across the country,” Sankoh said in a speech broadcast on radio. “You, who we have wronged, you have every human right to feel bitter and unforgiving, but we plead with you for forgiveness.”

That is easier said than done in this poverty-stricken country, where thousands of innocent civilians have been forced to their knees.

Muctarr Jalloh’s right hand was chopped off by a rebel high on drugs, who forced Jalloh’s uncle to hold the limb in place. When Jalloh fell to the ground, rebels sliced off his right ear. He also lost his parents in the war.

Jalloh, 26, a former university English and art student, said the rebels attacked him “just because we said we didn’t want them to rule us; we wanted a civilian-elected government.”

Rebel officials deny that their troops were responsible for amputations, instead blaming militias.

Kabbah, the president, has called on his people to forgive, forget and move on. While many people said they could forgive, they said it will be difficult to forget.

Human rights activists argue that the sense of injustice that prevails is likely to fuel continued violence.

“We don’t feel that any peace that is not built on justice will last, because the cycle of impunity is not broken,” said Corinne Dufka, a researcher for Human Rights Watch based in Freetown.

Liberia Presents Similar Situation

Some people are skeptical about the peace deal because they simply don’t trust the former rebels.

The same is true in neighboring Liberia. People there have the same view of their president, Charles Taylor, whose rebel faction contributed to plundering the country during a seven-year civil war in which more than 200,000 perished.

The United States and other nations pushed for early elections in Liberia in 1997 against daunting odds. Liberia’s political opposition warned that warring factions had not been disarmed and that the political playing field was far from level.

With more than a dozen peace accords and almost 20 cease-fire agreements signed during countless negotiations in Liberia, the international community seemed ready for any kind of leader in the country, a nation founded by former American slaves--as long as the leader brought stability.

Taylor, a powerful propagandist, won a landslide victory. Critics say that was more due to fear of what he might do if he lost than to belief in his democratic credentials.

Now government corruption, executions, intimidation and torture are teaching Liberians that warlords like Taylor seldom make good democrats.

“What you have is the silence of the heavy weapons, but there is no peace,” said Togba-nah Tipoteh, director general of Susukuu, a community development organization based in the Liberian capital, Monrovia. “There cannot be peace in the absence of justice.”

In the Republic of Congo, self-declared President Denis Sassou-Nguesso seems to be entrenching himself in power after ousting elected President Pascal Lissouba in 1997.

The Organization of African Unity has welcomed Sassou-Nguesso into its ranks. Western powers, including the United States, are trying to moderate the new president’s behavior and coax him to embrace democracy despite his former Marxist tendencies and his unorthodox rise to power.

This approach underscores the view of some Africans that for the international community, ensuring stability on their continent outweighs concerns over how it was obtained.