A ‘Bandaging Operation’ Unravels in Sierra Leone

The U.N.-brokered peace agreement to end Sierra Leone’s civil war seemed destined to fail from the moment it was signed last July. The commitment of the principal parties was questionable from the start.

This month, doubts about the peace deal were proved right. A conflict that never quite ended burst into full flame as rebels isolated or seized hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers and threatened to embroil the international community in an intractable war.

What went wrong?

The U.N.-brokered settlement brought together three parties. On one side of the conflict stood the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, an often-brutal rebel movement led by former army corporal and television cameraman Foday Sankoh. It faced President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah’s government, which was politically weak and without a trustworthy army. In the middle stood the international community that had been hesitant to commit resources needed to reach a palatable solution.

The deal gave political power to warlords--Sankoh and his allies were awarded positions in the government, and a majority of his rebels refused to surrender their weapons--in exchange for a tenuous peace. Many in Sierra Leone felt that the Kabbah administration had sacrificed too much to the rebels.

There was immediate anxiety over the pullout late last month of a Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force that had been the rebels’ main nemesis for most of the war years. Its replacement: a hodgepodge of U.N. soldiers, initially numbering only 6,000, who knew little about the terrain and political allegiances and were burdened by poor communications and resources. Many observers predicted that the U.N. force would run into problems.

Early this month, Sankoh’s rebels cut off an estimated 500 U.N. peacekeepers, stripping some of their guns, clothes and armored personnel carriers. The rebels claimed that the clashes began because peacekeepers were forcibly disarming their fighters--a charge U.N. officials deny. At least four peacekeepers were killed.

Analysts say the crisis serves a harsh lesson to the United Nations, and they question the world organization’s wisdom in signing off on a peace deal labeled by critics as a “bandaging operation” to keep Sierra Leone at least teetering along.

“The signs have been there, that things could not work out as the U.N. had expected,” said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of Human Rights Watch/Africa. “They were trying to do something on the cheap. They thought that they would give some incentives to the RUF to cooperate, play ball, and everyone would kiss and make up.”

The rebels were not only granted a general amnesty, they also received four Cabinet posts and four deputy ministerial positions. The agreement also allowed the rebel movement to transform itself into a political party. A death penalty imposed on Sankoh in 1997 was lifted. He was appointed vice president in a new coalition government led by Kabbah and given control of the country’s main source of foreign exchange: diamond mines.

Diplomats who participated in the peace negotiations in the West African nation of Togo acknowledged that the deal was designed to appease the rebels and to forge some semblance of stability, no matter the human cost. The U.N. had been accused of being lax in its attitude toward this tiny nation’s conflict while playing a more active role in trying to halt wars in the former Yugoslavia, and the world organization was anxious to set the record straight.

“What you had in the international community was the tendency to try to get by with the minimum of complications,” Takirambudde said. “The tendency was not to antagonize Sankoh, not to antagonize the RUF.”

Political observers in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital, say Sankoh was emboldened by this attitude, which allowed him to maintain virtually a parallel government and continue to mine diamonds.

The peace deal provoked anger and resentment among many Sierra Leoneans, who felt that the rebel leader and his followers were being rewarded for their deeds. The conflict claimed the lives of at least 50,000 people. Countless others were maimed and mutilated by the rebels, who often hacked off the limbs of suspected opponents, civilians and even young children.

Human rights advocates warned that the prevailing sense of injustice was bound to fuel bitterness and violence. Although some semblance of normalcy returned to the steamy seaside capital, at least 50% of the country remained in rebel hands. A substantial proportion of Sierra Leone’s 6 million people were living behind rebel lines and subjected to rebel governance.

Yet the victims of the eight-year war were encouraged by Kabbah to swallow their pain, forgive, forget and move on. Reconciliation became Sierra Leone’s forced national slogan.

“There are people who, because of greed, would be willing to forget the atrocities these people have committed, just to have power,” Malan James Amara, program manager for relief and resettlement at Sierra Leone’s National Commission for Reconstruction, Rehabilitation and Resettlement, said in a recent interview.

In the absence of a war crimes tribunal to try those responsible for untold atrocities, the Togo peace brokers called for the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission modeled after a panel that eased South Africa’s transition from minority white rule. But it was not until February that Parliament passed legislation creating the commission. The selection process for commissioners had just begun when the crisis flared.

The commission was meant to provide a forum where victims could air their grievances and perpetrators could repent, or at least try to justify their heinous actions. The panel was given a wide mandate and power to subpoena witnesses. But the nation’s judiciary, responsible for investigating crimes for the commission, is weak and lacks resources, limiting its ability to track down witnesses and persuade them to provide evidence.

On arriving in Freetown last November to take his position in government, Sankoh had apologized--and even shed tears--for the atrocities that he and his men were accused of committing. But it soon became clear that the rebels had little interest in rebuilding confidence among the thousands of innocents maimed, tortured and emotionally violated during the war.

Instead, fighters continued to loot villages, burn houses, rape women, and mutilate and execute civilians, much as they had during the war.

“The signature abuses of the RUF were still going on . . . but there was little done to stop those abuses,” Takirambudde said. “Generally, it was for fear that doing so would send the wrong message . . . to those who are still in the bush and discourage them from disarming.”

Rights activists said that, after months of “seeing and reporting” no evil, the U.N. in January started to denounce the situation. But the damage had been done.

Efforts to disarm rebels and integrate them into the national army--or at least ensure that they had some economic alternative--also failed. To date, only an estimated 16,000 fighters--less than half a force once estimated at 45,000--have been disarmed.

The rebels blocked the deployment of U.N. forces in key areas and, on several occasions, stole their weapons and equipment. The U.N. force, which has grown to 8,900 members, is still short of the 11,000-member force envisioned. Critics say the disarmament program was marred by incompetence and bad administration.

“It’s been a sort of second-class peacekeeping operation,” Washington-based Africa specialist Salih Booker recently told a U.S. news broadcast. “It’s been [carried out by] troops who are poorly trained [and] underequipped, and the number has been inadequate for the task at hand.”

Local political commentators and outside analysts suspect that the rebels are holding on to enough guns to manipulate still-unscheduled presidential elections. But Sankoh has argued that, without a sound guarantee of economic opportunities, most of the rebels have been reluctant to put down their weapons.

The RUF arose in the early 1990s and began to clash with the army of President Joseph Momoh. In 1996, Sankoh signed a peace deal with Kabbah, who had been elected president earlier that year. The deal fell apart in 1997 when elements of the military staged a coup and invited the rebels to join them in Freetown. The rebel-military partnership ended in February 1998, and the Nigerian-led West African peacekeeping force helped to restore Kabbah to power the following month. But the rebels continued to fight.

Now their guns are turned on the U.N. peacekeepers as Sankoh’s rebels again are threatening the capital. And Sankoh has been missing since protesters clashed with his bodyguards outside his Freetown home Monday.

As thousands of frightened civilians continued to pour into the steamy seaside capital, political observers said that it was time for the U.N. to confront its failure to bring stability to Sierra Leone. They said the U.N. should instead focus on channeling the appropriate resources and funding into forging a proper, more tasteful deal.

“Quite clearly, the [original] peace agreement was built on false hope and denial,” Takirambudde said.