Sierra Leone: A hard peace pill to swallow

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan does not like the peace deal in Sierra Leone. "No one can feel happy about a peace obtained on such terms," he wrote late last month. "...It is very hard to reconcile with ending the culture of impunity." But he has nevertheless recommended the deal to the UN Security Council.

Around half of Sierra Leone's people have been driven from their homes by a decade of civil war. Human Rights Watch has described the atrocities committed there in the last round of fighting as "the worst we have seen anywhere in the world" -- and now the man responsible for those atrocities has been given control of the country's diamond wealth.

Cpl. Foday Sankoh began the tragedy in Sierra Leone ten years ago by launching a revolt modeled on that of Sergeant Samuel Doe in next-door Liberia. Both countries had the same basic problem: they were founded by freed African slaves in the 19th century (from the United States in Liberia's case, from the British empire in Sierra Leone's), and the descendants of the ex-slaves subsequently became rapacious elites lording it over the tribal peoples of the interior.

Sergeant Doe's revolt in Liberia in 1980, like Corporal Sankoh's in Sierra Leone in 1989, sought to overturn this pseudo- ethnic tyranny and even, in a muddled way, to spread the wealth to formerly excluded ethnic groups. However, both men quickly ran into an insuperable obstacle. If your rule is based on military force -- and if you have just destroyed the military system of hierarchy and obedience by staging a corporals' coup -- then the only way to get your soldiers to obey is to let them loot.

So the ruination of these already poor countries began. Any sergeant who could persuade a battalion of soldiers to back him with promises of pillage was eligible for the presidency. Coup succeeded coup, civil war became chronic and many-sided, and services like schools, clinics and water supplies vanished even in the cities.

The wider international community ignored the horrors, but the Economic Community of West African States tried to help. ECOMOG, a multinational African force led by Nigerian troops, intervened in both countries, but to no avail.

The ECOMOG troops themselves were prone to panic, mutiny and larceny --- in Liberia, civilians claimed that the acronym stood for "Every Car and Moveable Object Gone" -- and no political solution that excluded the warlords could be made to stick. Finally, in 1997, the Liberians in desperation voted to make the most atrocious and egomaniacal of the killers, Charles Taylor, their new president.

Nobody actually wanted Taylor as president, but they had concluded that there could be no peace unless he got the presidency. His people steal, of course, but at least the killing has stopped. And now Sierra Leone, with equal reluctance, is taking the same route.

In March, 1996 the people of Sierra Leone elected Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, a respected former UN official, to the presidency. This greatly annoyed Foday Sankoh and his army of thugs and kidnapped children, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). They immediately launched a new war against the elected government, which soon controlled little beyond the capital, Freetown, and a few cities in the interior.

"The future is in your hands," the victorious candidate's election slogan had exhorted -- so as part of its terrorist campaign the RUF began cutting the hands off civilians at random. "Go and ask Tejan Kabbah for a hand," they would tell the helpless amputees, who number in the tens of thousands. And after Nigerian strongman Gen. Sani Abacha died last year, Nigeria rapidly lost the will to spend more money on peacekeeping in Sierra Leone

So the UN gritted its teeth and mediated a deal that brings the RUF into the government with four cabinet posts, four deputy ministries, and a job for Sankoh at the head of the organization that controls the country's US$250 million-a-year diamond business. That may give him enough cash-flow to buy off and demobilize his troops -- if he can trust his new partners not to turn against him afterwards.

But what were the options? The RUF controlled most of the interior, there was no prospect of dislodging it, and people were dying in huge numbers. "In Bo, Blama and Kenema we are seeing starving adults," said aid agency worker Nathalie Ernoux. "That means the children have died already. We fully expect, when we have access, to find areas in which there are no survivors under the age of two."

The UN is endorsing a rotten deal that may not even work. The "culture of impunity" that is finally being challenged by international war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia and by the newly created International Criminal Court is being accepted for the more desperate bits of Africa.

Earlier this year NATO waged a thousand-plane war and spent uncounted billions of dollars to save two million Kosovars; nobody outside of Africa has lifted a finger for four million Sierra Leoneans. The rich countries have just pledged $2.1 billion for regional reconstruction in the Balkans; when the UN asked for only $25 million for Sierra Leone, barely a third of it was covered.

Africans are on their own, so they cannot always afford the luxury of high principles. They have to make deals with the devil. Let us hope that this one works.