In Sierra Leone, Alliances Are Founded on Quicksand

Perhaps peace is proving so hard to come by in this bloodied West African country because few people here are who they seem to be.

Sierra Leone is a quicksand of alliances, a place where it is impossible to get firm footing without sinking deeper into a quagmire of fleeting allegiances. Yesterday’s enemy is today’s friend. Today’s friend is tomorrow’s enemy. Traitors become heroes, and heroes traitors; combatants turn peacekeepers, and peacekeepers combatants.

The most recent permutation in the deadly masquerade was completed last weekend when Liberian President Charles Taylor orchestrated the release of the last of more than 500 U.N. peacekeepers who had been taken hostage by the rebel group Revolutionary United Front, or RUF.

Taylor, a former warlord, is aligned with the RUF and is still blamed by the U.S. and the Sierra Leonean governments for fueling the civil war here. His country is the main smuggling route for the rebels’ diamonds-for-arms trade, and Liberia remains the subject of an international arms embargo. Yet the Liberian president has been showered with praise for his handling of the hostage crisis by President Clinton and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

“The idea is to encourage him [Taylor] to act responsibly,” one Western official said. “No one believes there has been a conversion.”

Taylor’s implausible public make-over pales in comparison with the conflict’s ultimate chameleon: RUF leader Foday Sankoh. In the past three years, Sankoh has gone from bush warlord to junta co-leader to death row inmate to top Cabinet minister to accused traitor. Under a deal reached last weekend by West African governments meeting in Nigeria, he is now scheduled to be whisked out of Sierra Leone--to yet another incarnation.

Building trust and lasting tranquillity in such an environment requires skills no one here has yet mastered.

Since the country’s former military dictator, Maj. Gen. Joseph Momoh, came under rebel attack in 1991, there have been three coups and more than eight years of fighting.

With the renewal of hostilities last month, the recurring cycle--halted for 10 months after the signing of the peace accord in Togo--appears to be in full swing again, despite the best hopes of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah’s new government forces.

“Yes, you should be careful [choosing your friends] in this country,” said Lt. A.M. Sovula, an intelligence officer with the Civil Defense Force, a Kenema-based organization of traditional hunters, known as Kamajors, who are aligned with the Kabbah government. “But I believe we are all one now. We are all speaking the language of democracy. United we stand, divided we fall.”

Peacekeeping Makes Strange Bedfellows

The newly forged pro-Kabbah military coalition, officially anointed last week as the Sierra Leone Government Forces, brings together yet another unlikely collection of bedfellows.

The Kamajors are now on the same side as their longtime enemies, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, commanded by former junta co-leader Johnny Paul Koroma.

Already there have been reports of complaints among the Kamajors, which Sovula said were unconfirmed, that the former enemies are sparring on the front. Some Kamajors say that they are not getting their share of food and other supplies, and that their dead and wounded are not afforded the same treatment as those of other pro-government forces.

In keeping with the expect-the-unexpected pattern here, Koroma, who toppled Kabbah in a 1997 coup before being overthrown himself a year later, is now the elected president’s best hope for staying in power. Although Koroma apparently did not sanction their participation, just over a year ago his drug-crazed soldiers joined the RUF’s brutal attack on Freetown, the capital, chopping off limbs, executing civilians and raping women for having voted for Kabbah.

Koroma now professes to be a born-again Christian who has seen the error of his ways. Having apologized for the past, he is arguably the most popular man in Sierra Leone’s fickle capital. Just two years ago, he was run out of town by a Nigerian-led intervention force to cheers of jubilant residents.

Last month, as Freetown readied for another threatened rebel attack, Koroma made an appeal on national radio for the population to raise their hands and shout “Jesus!” in solidarity against the RUF. Even though Christians are a small minority here, thousands of screaming residents took to the streets at the designated time.

A few days earlier, 30,000 people crowded into the city’s soccer stadium to hear Koroma deliver a pep talk about standing up to the advancing RUF. The rebels never made it to Freetown--it is still unclear how close they got--and in recent weeks have been pushed farther back by the alliance of pro-government troops, including Koroma’s revolutionary council.

“He either is playing his cards very well for the future, or he is sincerely committed to peace,” said Bishop George Biguzzi, the Roman Catholic leader in Makeni, a rebel stronghold in the center of the country. “When this crisis began, he emerged as practically the only leader. He had the courage to say the right things to rally the people.”

The U.N. peacekeepers also contribute to this country’s brain-teasing alignments.

They wear the blue helmets of the U.N. mission, but the 800 Ghanaian soldiers posted here in Kenema, this diamond-trading hub about 20 miles from rebel territory, are having trouble with the fit.

Last year, many of them were fighting the RUF rebels as part of a West African force backing President Kabbah. With the rebels now thumbing their noses at last July’s peace accord, the Ghanaians are itching for the old days.

“We have to change our approach since there is no peace to keep,” said Maj. Mike Akpatsu, the second in command here. “We are now prepared for combat. We are used to this kind of thing. These are the same rebels we fought before.”

The Nigerians, who have 1,500 U.N. troops here, are also of two minds. They have a long history of intervening in the affairs of Sierra Leone--with cocked guns, not blue helmets. When 900 Nigerian soldiers--here at Kabbah’s invitation to train the army--were caught in Freetown during the coup of 1997, they came out fighting for the government, though the legal basis of their advocacy is still in dispute.

Since then, the Nigerian military has never left, suffering an estimated 700 killed at the hands of the various rebel factions over the past three years. Earlier, the Nigerians and Ghanaians battled RUF rebels and their allies in neighboring Liberia.

Today the Nigerians are part of UNAMSIL, the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone, but old memories die hard. Last week, three Nigerian peacekeepers in blue helmets were reportedly killed in a street battle in Freetown with former combatants from Koroma’s forces. Three of Koroma’s erstwhile soldiers also reportedly died.

Authorities said the two sides were settling an old score; one unconfirmed report said the former Koroma fighters had hatched a plan to kidnap Kabbah and force him to release Sankoh, the RUF leader who has been under arrest for two weeks.

“One of the worst things you can do in a situation such as Sierra Leone is change the mandate with the same people on the ground,” said Eric Berman, author of “Peacekeeping in Africa: Capabilities and Culpabilities,” a recently published book. “There are many gray areas in such situations, but it is primarily an issue of mind-set.”

Berman and other analysts say the difficulties are complicated by this mineral-rich country’s lucrative trade in diamonds.

Diamond Trade Lures Major Warring Groups

The Nigerians--including some officers--are known to have extensive business dealings in the gem industry here. In addition, all the major warring groups--from the Kamajors to the RUF--have drawn the current battle lines in the hope that they will ultimately get or retain a piece of the diamond pie.

“As long as they [the RUF] stay in the diamond areas, they have the opportunity to get arms,” said Sovula, the Kamajors intelligence officer. “If the government can only encourage the military and [Civil Defense Force] to come together as one, I think we can pursue them to Kono and the diamond area.”

Yet history has shown that nothing in Sierra Leone works quite so simply--or so transparently. If the government forces were to take control of Kono, the richest diamond district in the east, some bets are on that members of the ragtag military coalition would turn on each other.

At the Freetown airport last weekend, a Ukrainian cargo jet arrived with supplies for the U.N. peacekeeping mission. In the latest twist in the Sierra Leonean adaptation of the story of the Trojan horse, even a huge aircraft on a humanitarian mission may not be entirely what it seems.

Blazed in blue across the tail of the Antonov-124 cargo plane is the name Antonov Design Bureau, a Kiev-based aircraft operator that is apparently no stranger to the conflict in Sierra Leone.

In April 1999, Maj. Gen. Felix Mujakperuo, then commander of the West African intervention force in Sierra Leone, accused Liberia and Burkina Faso of shipping arms--later identified as assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and antitank guided missiles systems--to Sankoh’s rebels through Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.

According to Ukrainian documents cited in a report by New York-based Human Rights Watch, the transport plane contracted for the transaction was an Antonov-124 cargo aircraft. The operator: Antonov Design Bureau.