IDRC Doctoral Research Award No. 103342-9990675-067

Technical Report

Submitted By: M. Zubairu Wai Date: 12 July 2008

Project: Understanding Contemporary Conflicts in Africa: The Civil War and its Challenge to the Dominant Representations of African Conflicts

Introduction: The aim of this research was two fold: first, it sought to go beyond the immediate impact of policy, and develop an epistemological critique of knowledge on contemporary African conflicts and assess the impact of such knowledge on the formulation of policy; and second to develop alternative ways of looking at such conflicts in order to allow for the reformulation of extant policies as well as the articulation of alternative ones. It started from the basic assumption (as suggested by evidence) that the policies derived from the dominant studies on African conflicts were not producing their desired results where they are being implemented, a proposition that was leading to a questioning of the knowledge and the analytical frameworks on which they are based. The research therefore sought to address this problem by (a) developing a critique of the existing body of knowledge on African conflicts; and (b) suggesting alternative interpretations that would help us better understand these conflicts. Using the as its empirical case, it sought to investigate: (a) what the modalities of the dominant perspectives on contemporary African conflicts were; (b) Who produces them, how and why?; (c) what were included and left out in the knowledge produced (d) what effects were these knowledge having on the articulation of policy towards Africa; what these policies were and what they sought to achieve; and finally, (f) how an alternative reading of the Sierra Leone civil war might lead to the formulation of better understanding and policies.

Fieldwork and data collection started in in the first week of October 2007 and proceeded in two phases as a result of the modification of the initial research plan. Phase one took place between October 2007 and February 2008. It took me to different parts of the country, and concluded with a research seminar (attended by 15 participants) and a public lecture (attracting over 250 people, mainly students and faculty) during which the preliminary findings of the research were presented to the Fourah Bay College (university of Sierra Leone) community. The lecture was well received and led to conversations about, especially the causes and interpretations of the war. Phase two took place between April and June 2008 and focused mainly on archival research, collection and review of news papers, government policy position papers, media content, though a number of interviews with key informants were conducted.

Fieldwork mainly involved a variety of semi-structured interviews with key participants in the conflict (government officials, former combatants of the various factions, senior RUF officials, military officers, the Kamajor militia); observers and victims of the

1 conflict (amputees, victims of sexual violence, residents of Sierra Leone during the war, academics, researchers, policy analysts, journalists, members of the NGO community etc.) and the collection and review of various documents including original (primary) documents, studies commissioned by government and its institutions (like the TRC and Special Court) and NGO reports, transcripts of media reports, documentaries etc.

Background to the Sierra Leone Civil War In March 1991, a small band of insurgents calling itself the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) attacked Sierra Leone from Liberia. The group under the leadership of , an ex-corporal of the Sierra Leone Military Forces, had been convicted in the 1970s for his role in an attempted coup against Siaka Stevens, with the apparent support of Charles Taylor and his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) forces, also at the time fighting an insurgency for control of Liberia, quickly overran and occupied Bomaru and soon opened another front at Zimmi, a south-eastern border town with Liberia across from the Mano River bride. The RUF framed the reasons for the start of the war in terms of the need for removing from power the All People‟s Congress (APC) government (which had ruled Sierra Leone since 1968 and under the leadership of which the crises of the state had deepened), and the quest for social transformation that would enable the creation of a just, democratic and egalitarian society. Framed in such terms, the war attracted initial support in especially Kailahun and Pujehun districts, which had historically been sites of opposition to APC rule. However, whatever initial support that the RUF enjoyed soon evaporated when the war degenerated into a protracted struggle of gratuitous violence and brutality, death and destruction, targeted at the very people its initiators had claimed they wanted to liberate.

The war sharply accentuated the very serious economic and political problems that the state of Sierra Leone had been grappling with since independence. The post-independence state had become a site of woes and misery as political and economic failures under the twenty-three year rule of the APC accentuated the pathologies originally introduced by the colonial state. The concentration of power in the hands of the APC with Stevens firmly at the helm in the 1970s had led to the homogenisation of the formal political space and the alienation and exclusion of large sections of the population from the dominant networks of political and economic power. Within this homogenised reordering of the political and socio-economic spaces had grown complex processes and informal networks through which relations of power and influence, and access to wealth and resources were mediated. With the rural–urban migration characteristic of the colonial and post-colonial political economy of Sierra Leone, there was a presence in cities of large numbers of uneducated and semi-literate and unemployed youths. Stevens and his followers in the APC found this group a particularly useful resource in their quest to consolidate power. They were initially used as thugs to intimidate the opposition through gratuitous acts of violence and other intimidating tactics. It was these groups that later become the hub of the RUF war machine. Similarly, they later made up the majority of the rank and file of the army after the war broke out 1991 and the need to recruit more people into the army arose. Elections in Sierra Leone became a violent affair and broke the opposition so badly, that by the time the one party state was established in 1978, the opposition was a spent force.

2

With the official opposition silenced, radical youths (mostly unemployed and marginalised) and university students emerged as the unofficial, and in fact only formidable opposition, to Stevens and the APC. The APC almost fell from power as a result of the student demonstrations in 1977. Stevens‟ response was a clenched fisted reprisals and the further tightening of the political space. The one party state came in the following year, in 1978. The impact of negative external forces on the economy like the 1973 oil shocks and falling commodity prices, coupled with certain bad policy choices pursued by the government, like the lavished hosting of the OAU conference in 1980, and devaluing the national currency, constrained and frustrated development efforts and led to an increasing constriction of the economy. These conditions, coupled with the exclusion of certain sections of the population from the dominant networks of power and wealth through marginalisation in the economic and political spheres, created conditions susceptible to external meddling and internal strife. Radical student tapped into these frustrations and anger, and championed the cause of the neglected and marginalised sections of society. On university campuses and in the „potes‟ of Freetown and other cities and towns in the country, reflections on the dire political and economic situation in the country led to the development of a revolutionary consciousness, as these groups raved against what unflatteringly came to be known as “di system”. It was this rising revolutionary consciousness that led to the quest for revolution and eventually the formation of the RUF.

When Stevens retired in 1985, after having first hand-picked his successor in the person of General Joseph Momoh, the head of the Sierra Leone Military Forces, the country was taken closer to implosion. Momoh lacked half the charisma of Stevens, and inherited a centralised authoritarian state without having the character of a despot. He ended up being manipulated by some powerful forces within his own inner circle, further accentuating the conditions for an insurrection. The economic decline in the 1970s had reached full blown crisis proportions in the mid 1980s. With such economic decline, the IMF and World Bank intervened and subjected the state to structural adjustment policies which further exacerbated an already bad economic situation. It increased economic hardships for the citizenry while at the same time the internal control mechanisms of an oppressive state were coming under considerable strain. SAPs undermined and weakened the capacity of the state to provide the basic social services and its capacity to respond to the unfolding crisis. Under both internal and external pressures, Momoh started reforming the state. However, those reforms and changes did not stop the war from happening.

On April 29 1992, one year into the war, young officers of the Sierra Leone Army, (SLA) fighting against the rebels, drove from the war fronts into Freetown and overthrew Momoh‟s government in a military coup, and set up the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) military junta, under the leadership of Captain . The unpopularity of the APC, both domestically and abroad, initially translated into widespread popular support for the NPRC. There were high expectations that the NPRC would live up to its promises and clean up the mess of the APC, end the war, revive the economy which had virtually collapsed in the mid-1980s and act as credible referees in

3 the democratisation process. However, within a year of its rule, it had started to become apparent that it would be difficult for the NPRC to achieve these self-proclaimed priorities. Amidst increasing indiscipline in the army, accusations of collaboration between the army and the rebels they were fighting (some of which was unjustified), the intensification of RUF attacks across the country and the spiralling of the war out of control, increasing level of violence against civilians, and mounting accusation of corruption against junta officials, public perception of the NPRC regime changed and pressure, both at home and abroad, mounted on them to democratise the state and return the country to civil rule.

The NPRC announced a transition time table in November 1994. By June of the same year, Interim National Electoral Commission (INEC) had registered thirteen political parties and concluded the registration of voters between December 1995 and February 1996. The first round of the elections were held on 26 and 27 February and the second run-off, between Ahmed Tejan Kabbah of the Sierra Leone Peoples‟ Party (SLPP) and John Karefa-Smart of the United National People‟s Party (UNPP) in March 1996. The SLPP gained the majority of seats in parliament and Tejan Kabbah, its presidential candidate, won the presidency.

Kabbah‟s new government took over on 29 March 1996 and continued the negotiations started by the military NPRC junta. Ten months of tortuous negotiations between Kabbah‟s SLPP government and Sankoh‟s RUF rebels, produced a peace agreement, which was signed in Abidjan on 30 November, 1996. The agreement put an immediate end to the war. For a moment it appeared as if the expectations that the elections would bring peace were being met. However, any sense of optimism and excitement soon vanished as the peace process started to stall and unravel. First, implementing the peace accord proved much more difficult than negotiating it, as both the RUF and the government frustrated each other in its implementation. That mutual frustration emanated from pathologies of the peace process itself.

For a rebel organisation interested in power and for which they had fought for over five years, the was an odd and problematic document at best. Its power sharing instruments were only limited to joint institutions created for the implementation of the accord and not sharing in government. No senior government (ministerial) positions were offered Sankoh and his RUF. A newly elected government not only felt confident that it had the people‟s mandate, but also the need, in a democratic system, to protect the constitution of Sierra Leone, which would have been violated if the RUF, a movement that refused to participate in the elections, were brought into government. Another problem was that President Kabbah proved himself to be weak, wavering and indecisive. His weakness and indecisiveness, among several other factors, made it possible, for his government to be overthrown in a military coup on 25 May 1997, thirteen months after the elections. Kabbah fled to Guinea and set up a government in exile to garner international support. The coup makers, accusing the government of favouring the Kamajoh militia over the regular army, and accusing Kabbah of failure to consolidate the peace achieved in Abidjan, disbanded the Kamajoh militia and invited the RUF rebels to share power as part of the new junta‟s plan to end the war. This action of

4 the Sierra Leone army has remained puzzling. It has also remained an area of the conflict that begs explanation. The Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), as the junta named itself, sprung Major out of prison and made him chairman of the rebel junta. Johnny Paul Koroma, had been arrested on September 8 1996, for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government and was awaiting trial when the coup took place.

There was widespread domestic and international opposition to the coup and a call for the restoration of constitutional order in Sierra Leone. In October 1997, following the lead of ECOWAS which had taken similar decision earlier, the UN Security Council imposed sanctions against the junta. The sanctions included an embargo on the supply of arms and petroleum products and ECOMOG was mandated to enforce the embargo. Negotiations got underway spearheaded primarily by ECOWAS and a Peace Plan was reached in Conakry in October 1997. Under the plan Johnny Paul Koroma and members of the junta were granted immunity from prosecution, in exchange for leaving power and disarming to ECOMOG. But the Junta proved intransigent and several attempts at a peaceful settlement failed. As domestic and international pressures intensified on the junta, so also did their unyieldingness and brutality against civilians. The Conakry Peace Plan finally collapsed in February 1998 and ECOMOG, with the help of the South African mercenary firm, Sandline International, and the pro-government (CDF), especially the local Kamajor militia, plus members of the Sierra Leone Army who were loyal to the government in exile and who had surrendered to ECOMOG to demonstrate that loyalty, started an offensive to dislodge the rebel junta from Freetown and power. By 12 February, 1998, ECOMOG had chased the rebel junta out of Freetown. Kabbah returned from exile and resumed the reigns of government on 10 March 1998. Throughout this period, pacifying Sierra Leone proved not only difficult but elusive. In fact, the security situation further deteriorated after Kabbah‟s restoration.

Regrouping along the Liberian border, with the help of Charles Taylor, who was now president of Liberia, RUF began a fresh offensive in December 1998. The bulk of the AFRC forces who had, at the time of their routing from Freetown in February 1998, headed towards Kabala in the Northern Province, also, under the leadership of Captain SAJ Musa, former number two in the NPRC Junta, and who had been appoint chief secretary of state under the AFRC, started a fresh offensive against ECOMOG. As the RUF moved from Kono to Makeni (the provincial headquarter of the Northern Province) the AFRC forces under SAJ Musa‟s command moved from Kabala to Freetown. By 6 January 1999, they were already in control of half of Freetown, though Musa himself had been killed at Benguema, the main military training centre in outskirts of Freetown. Kabbah again fled the city as the rebel soldiers burnt, looted and killed.

At this stage of the conflict, it had become clear to everyone that perhaps there was no military solution to the conflict. Thus, though a Nigerian military operation under the auspices of ECOMOG removed the rebels from the city, a negotiated settlement was sought to the conflict. On July 7, 1999, a peace agreement was signed between the RUF and the government of Sierra Leone in Lomé, the capital of Togo. Under the terms of the agreement, the RUF received four full cabinet positions, and four deputy ministerial

5 positions. Foday Sankoh, in a capacity equivalent to the position of vice president, was placed in charge of the natural recourses of the country, and post-war reconstruction by being appointed chairman of the Commission for Strategic Resources, National Reconstruction and Development. The agreement granted “absolute and free pardon and reprieve to [Sankoh and] all combatants and collaborators” guilty of atrocities and crimes committed during the war. It also provided for the setting up of a truth and reconciliation commission, a commission for the consolidation of peace, a DDR programme for demobilizing, and disarming all combatants. It also provided for the restructuring of the army, transforming the RUF into a political party, and an access to RUF members for posts in the restructured army and bureaucracy.

In October 1999, the UN Security Council established the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). It incorporated its Observer Mission in Sierra Leone (UNOMIL), established in 1998 after Kabbah‟s return, into the new mission. Initially, UNAMSIL‟s capacity was put at a maximum of 6,000 troops and was gradually increased to almost 18,000 troops, the biggest UN mission in the world, at the height of its operation. The primary responsibility of UNAMSIL was to help implement the peace agreement and carry out the DDR programme. UN peacekeepers started arriving in Freetown in November 1999, amidst RUF attacks on ECOMOG troops, and their objection to the deployment of the UN. Sam “Mosquito” Bokari, the RUF‟s field command and deputy to Sankoh, warned against such deployments. In April 2000, they started abducting UN peacekeepers being deployed in the country and by May of that same year, were on their way to attacking Freetown. Pandemonium gripped Freetown at the real prospects of an imminent unravelling of the peace process. Under the threat of collapse, 800 British paratroops arrived in Freetown under the pretext of evacuating British and nationals from Western countries and deployed around Lungi, the international airport and with the help of former AFRC junta chairman Johnny Paul Koroma, saved the UN mission from collapse. Meanwhile, demonstrations called in Freetown by civil society groups to protest Sankoh‟s intransigence, turned violent when RUF rebels at Sankoh‟s residence opened fire on defenceless protesters and killed twenty of them in cold blood. An arrest order was issued for Sankoh and he fled and went into hiding. He was later capture and incarcerated. That event marked the beginning of the demise of the RUF.

There was another twitch: elements of the former AFRC, calling themselves , rejected their being homogenised with the RUF, and started demanding a special peace accord with the government to accommodate their concerns, which they claimed, were not met in the original Lome accords. From their Okra Hills hideout, they started attacking villages, and blockaded the highway to vehicular traffic, looting and abducting people. Eleven British soldiers were abducted by this group in August 2000. This led to British military action against the West Side Boys that neutralised the group. This eventually paved the way for the deployment of UN troops in the country beginning March 2001. Disarmament started two months later. The British International Military Advisory and Training Team (IMATT), which has been in Sierra Leone since June 2000, focused on retraining and restructuring the Sierra Leone Army. The UN concentrated not only on the DDR programme, but also on retraining the police. By early 2002,

6 UNAMSIL announced the completion of the disarmament of about 75 thousand ex- combatants. President Kabbah declared the war officially ended in January 2002.

Research Objective i. The main research objective was to develop an epistemological critique of the way the Sierra Leone civil war has been interpreted by using the experiences, insights, memories, narratives, interpretations of the local communities who experienced, witnessed, suffered or participated in the war.

ii. To understand and account for the root causes of the war and to develop, based on i. above, an alternative account of events and alternative interpretation of the war.

iii. To give opportunity to local communities to narrate their experiences and views about the war, and articulate what their concerns are in the post-conflict society.

iv. To provide new information and insight that would allow for the reformulation of extant policy frameworks and the articulation of new policy that would help in the building and consolidation of peace in post-conflict Sierra Leone.

Research Design: A preliminary field trip was made to Sierra Leone in the summer of 2006 before the commencement of fieldwork in October 2007. This trip provided the basis for the design of a research problematic and allowed for the thinking through of some of the issues that would become central to the research. Moreover, it allowed for the designing of a method for data collection, the identification and making of contacts with a number of people who would be important to the research and data collection process when fieldwork commenced. It was also during this trip that decision was made on which institutions to target and who to turn to for assistance when once in Sierra Leone. As a result of this trip, the research proposal was developed and submitted to IDRC.

Once in Sierra Leone, some minor adjustments had to be made to the original plan. I was hosted by both the Department of Political Science and Department of History at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone (FBC/USL). Both departments are terribly understaffed, and asked me to help with teaching a couple of undergraduate courses (one being “Government and Politics of Sierra Leone,” a second year undergraduate Political Science course, and the other being “African Historiography and Contemporary Rebellions and Wars”, a third year History course) on a part-time basis (in an unpaid volunteer position). These two departments offered the institutional support that I needed for fieldwork and research and helped immensely in the organising of the research seminars and public lecture. The Centre for Development and Security Analysis (CEDSA), I found, was not very useful for my project, partly because of its location (though a part of the Department of Political Science, is located somewhere downtown

7 Freetown, and not at the main FBC campus at Mount Aureol) but also because their research focus centres on contemporary socio-economic processes in the country.

Combining full time research and part-time teaching, though a challenge was helpful in many ways. First, it allowed me to fully become a part of the FBC community, which in turn provided the opportunity for me to meet and network with researchers and academics doing work on the Sierra Leone conflict and various other aspects of the socio- economic and political life of the country. Second, the opportunity to teach undergraduate courses, (an important feat in itself because of the shortage of faculty and teaching staff at the university), challenged me to rethink some of my own assumptions about the war, as these courses provided an opportunity for reflecting on the post-independence African experience in a classroom setting. This helped/forced me to clarify my own thoughts on a number issues not only relating to my doctoral research, but also socio-economic and political realities of contemporary Africa.

Challenges in the Field: As a result of a couple of strange mishaps, I had to modify my initial plan of continuously staying in Sierra Leone throughout the eight months period for which the research is funded. First, in late January, my laptop computer crashed, and attempts at recovering the data stored on it (including all the interviews I had conducted since I arrived in the field) failed. This was a really agonising and difficult problem to deal with. The failure of attempts to recover the files in Freetown forced me to return to Canada to see if it was possible to recover the files. Second, early in the fieldwork, I also realised that some of my most important “research subjects”, namely former student radicals who laid the foundation of the movement that later became the RUF, and prominent members of the National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) junta which took over reigns of government in April 1992 and who ruled Sierra Leone till 1996 when they handed over to a civilian elected government, now lived in the United States. I judged based on the information I was getting in the filed, that it was absolutely necessary to have a conversation with some of these figures. For these two compelling reasons, I was forced to return to Toronto in February 2008, in order to seek professional help to retrieve the lost data from my computer and at the same time explore the possibility of contacting and interviewing my research subjects in the US.

In Toronto, the data was recovered, but most of it was damaged beyond repair. In relation to the interviews, I succeeded in contacting and interviewing a number of former student radicals and NPRC officials living in the US by telephone. I returned to Sierra Leone in April 2008 to complete my research and redo some of the interviews that I had lost due to the failing of my computer. The second phase of fieldwork focused on replacing lost data and archival research. A number of the participants gave me a second interview with briefer contents. However, I lost the recordings of some of those interviews when, two weeks before I left Sierra Leone, my voice recorder got stolen, with a number of then just-concluded interviews on it.

The problem of communication and transport were also big challenges. Land telephone lines are practically down in Sierra Leone, and telephone communication services are

8 accessed though mobile phone companies, whose network coverage is very limited to the cities and towns, and whose services are in most cases very expensive. Internet services are for the most part unreliable and prohibitively expensive. While travelling around the country was interesting, the poor road network posed a serious challenge.

Data Collection: Methods I adopted a qualitative method of data collection based on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) techniques which included semi-structured interviews with key participants, focus-group discussions with rural communities and triangulation. This is important, because of the fact that the majority of the population of Sierra Leone (between 60 and 70 percent) is illiterate, a fact that rendered questionnaires inappropriate. I sought to interview everybody who experienced the war either as a participant, victim, or observer: the rebels, the military, the , the local populations and communities, victims and perpetrators of violence, government officials, former student radicals, members of the SL Diaspora, civil society and the NGO community. My focus was to know and understand how these people understood and interpreted the war, what their accounts of events are, how they understood the nature of violence and what they think caused the war.

The interviews were therefore structured in a way that encouraged and allowed the participants to lead the conversations where ever possible and tell their stories in the way that they thought best; to discuss their experiences and memories of the war; what they thought were the most important things about the war, without seeking to formalise the conversations within a set of pre-established rules and without the aid of a set of pre- figured questions. The questions that guided the interviews evolved during the conversations interviews and focus group discussions and those interviewed were seen as experts from whom I could learn. Accuracy was achieved through triangulation, a means by which data from multiple sources were collected, collated, analysed and synthesised. Thus the various gaps which appeared in interviews for example, were always filled by information from other documents: policy pronouncements, newspaper reports, transcripts of new broadcast etc.

Research Blocks For practical purposes, I divided the country up (for research) in four broad blocks, corresponding to the country‟s political and administrative divisions and sub-divisions: Western Area, Southern, Eastern and Northern Provinces and their administrative districts.

i. Western Area: comprise the Freetown peninsula on the western tip of the country where Freetown the national capital is based and other peninsula towns and villages. I was mainly based in Freetown. This choice was deliberate. Even though there have been various efforts to decentralise authority in the country in the post-war period, Sierra Leone still remains, for all practical purposes, a centralised state with power concentrated in Freetown as the seat of executive authority in the country. Though Freetown remained

9 insulated from rebel attacks until the AFRC coup in 1997, the war was, to a very large extent, always targeted at Freetown. And once it got to Freetown, some of the fiercest battles, and gravest atrocities took place their. The policies for prosecuting the war were also developed there. The most important government institutions, offices, officials, are based in Freetown. Almost all of the newspapers and press houses are based in Freetown. My host institution is also located in Freetown. Research in Freetown yielded a wealth of data. I interviewed very important participants in the war: senior government officials, senior military officers, policy officers, officials of the defence ministry, and ex- commanders and the leadership of the former RUF rebels etc.

In addition to Freetown, my research covered the peninsula towns and villages: Jui (where the main ECOMOG military garrison was based in the Greater Freetown area) Lumpa, Waterloo and Benguima (where the main military training centre and barracks is situated), Tombo (where the AFRC first regrouped after being ousted from power in Freetown by ECOMOG in 1998), Regent (another military garrison town during the war), Aberdeen, Goodrich and Songo. ii. Southern Province: comprise four administrative districts: Bo, Bonthe, Moyamba and Pujehun. For practical reasons, and time constraints, I only covered two of these districts, Bo and Pujehun. Bo is the provincial headquarter of the province and the second most important city in the country after Freetown. The second brigade headquarter of the Sierra Leone Army was based at Bo and it was involved in some of the fiercest battles of the war and the defence of the other provincial cities, town and villages. Pujehun is one of the two districts (the other being Kailahun in the sast) where the original incursions initiating the war took place. For the other two districts (Bonthe and Moyamba), I met a number of people who were residents of these districts during the war in both Bo and Freetown, and given the time constraints within which I was working, I chose to forego them. iii. Eastern Province: this province perhaps experienced the war more than any of the other provinces. For starters, the war started in Kailahun district, one of the three administrative districts of the province and throughout the war, remained the headquarters of the RUF rebel movement. That the war started in Kailahun and Pujehun is important: apart from the fact that these two districts border Liberia, they historically were hotbeds of opposition to the APC government that the RUF claimed it was seeking to remove from power. The initial support that the RUF received in these areas could partly be accounted for in their historical opposition to APC rule. Kailahun is also home to one of the most strategic military garrisons (the Daru Barracks on the Moa River) which was repeatedly attacked by the rebels and scene of some of the fiercest battles and contestations between the rebels and government troops early in the war early in the war. The Provincial headquarter, Kenema, and

10 especially the diamondiferous Kono district also witnessed some of the fiercest battles during the war as various warring factions fought over control of the diamond fields. Indeed the Eastern Province was the most important area in the war and because of this, I covered all three districts. My travels took me up to Bomaru where the first shots of the war were fired.

iv. Northern Province: This is the largest province in Sierra Leone. It comprises five administrative districts: Bombali (its main city, Makeni, is the provincial headquarter) Kambia and Koinadugu (bordering Guinea on the north), Port Loko (house to Lungi where the international airport is situated) and Tonkolili. The research focused on the areas in the North where the major battles took place during the war like Makeni, Lungi, Mile 91 (in Tonkolili) etc. Though the war did not reach the Northern Province until 1995 when rebels first attacked Makali (in the ), that province increasingly became important for the rebels after they changed their strategy in early 1994 from conventional to guerrilla warfare. The Tonkolili District borders the diamond rich Kono district and became very important as the war progressed.

After the AFRC coup in 1997 and the subsequent ECOMOG military action that removed the rebel junta from power in February 1998, Kabala (the administrative headquarter of the Koinadugu District) became the base for the renegade members of the ousted junta and their supporters in the army. When the fresh RUF offensive which culminated in the invasion of Freetown in January 1999 started, Makeni became the centre of their activities as they captured this city and moved on to Freetown. Even after the Lome Peace Agreement in July 1999 resulted in a ceasefire, Makeni as the new RUF headquarter remained under rebel control until the UN concluded its DDR programme in 2001 when the entire country was reintegration and reunited under a single administrative control. In fact Bombali was the only district in the Northern Province that was completely overran and remained under RUF control after disarmament.

My focus therefore was on the areas that could be where the conflict was concentrated: these included Port Loko (Lungi which, because of the airport, was a major ECOMOG garrison town) Bombali (mainly Makeni and Masiaka on the Freetown highway), Tonkolili (Masingbi, Matotoka, Magburuka, Makali, Mile 91) and Koinadugu (Kabala). Time could not allow me to make a field trip to Kambia.

Preliminary Findings and Observations Since the interviews are still being transcribed, and the data is yet to be thoroughly synthesised and analysed, what is presented here are only brief snippets of a very preliminary reflection and tentative observation based on highlights and recollections of the memories from fieldwork.

11 Generally, the interviews and data seem to indicate that:

1. From its inception to its conclusion, the war was, and remained, shrouded in misinformation and misinterpretation which is an ad verbatim confirmation of the assumption that drove this research from the start, namely, that there is a fundamental problem with the way the war has been interpreted and understood thus far. For example, though the war is seen in media, policy and academic circles as a quintessential example of a natural resource (diamond) war, that its origins lie in rebel greed and the economic aspirations of the major actors; reflected for example in the claim that “Underneath the political issues on the surface of the conflict are the economic factors that drove the war from the outset. Sierra Leone offers a prime example of an internal conflict where economic aspirations for control of valuable mineral resources, especially diamonds, have been largely responsible for its inception” (Hirsch 2001; see also Collier 2000; Collier and Hoeffler 2001; Cooper 2005; Hirsch 2001; Le Billon 2000; Keen 1998, 1999, 2005), there is very little evidence to sustain this claim.

Almost everybody I interviewed from the major participants in the war (rebels, the military, the CDF, government officials) to victims and ordinary observers of the violence during the war, while accepting that diamonds played a role in the prolongation of the war, rejected completely the idea that the war was caused by or was even about diamonds. As one observer told me in an interview, “those who come to investigate the war already have their agendas and have their minds made up before they arrive in the country. What they do is look for clues that confirm their beliefs, perceptions and theories. They frame the questions in ways that force their interviewees to say what they want to hear which is then used as the basis of their interpretation.”

2. The war was a complex political struggle, animated by various competing and sometimes overlapping interests. These interests tended to have shifted and changed as the conflict progressed so that at some point, especially towards the end of the conflict, it was very difficult to ascertain why exactly the war was raging, whose purposes were being served by its prolongation; what objectives were the insurgents fighting for; or who was fighting against who and for what. Many politicians piggy-backed on the war as loyalties changed and political and military alliances crumbled and changed.

3. The most vexatious and puzzling aspect of the war was the collaboration of notional adversaries, the national army and the rebels they were fighting against, to overthrow the civilian government in Freetown in May 1997. This puzzling event has rather somewhat been simplistically interpreted, not as moments of specific expressions of power political acts, but as evidence of the convergence of economic motives and interests of the actors, those factors for which the war had been initiated in the first place (and as an explanation of the prolongation of the war – see Keen 2005). This (mis)characterisation of such a complex play of political misses, as the data indicates, very important class and political

12 complexes that animated the war. The data indicate that even in those moments when the war appeared “senseless”, it was always driven by politics and political considerations: the ultimate prize of capturing political power in Freetown remained compelling for the RUF throughout the war. That was why for example, even after the Lome Peace Agreement, when the RUF through a power-sharing deal, gained cabinet positions in government and Foday Sankoh became vice president with control over all the country‟s strategic minerals (including diamonds), the RUF still plotted and attempted to overthrow the government and take power in Freetown. If it was only economic motives driving the war, a good power-sharing deal and control over the country‟s mineral resources would have been enough.

4. The nature of politics in the Sierra Leone, the way in which power was exercised during the APC years, and the economic difficulties that developed during those years were cited as some of the “root causes” of the war. Despite the fact that the war degenerated into a destructive and violent conflict, there is somewhat a general agreement that there were genuine reasons why it started; what is objectionable for most observers in the country was the way in which it raged and unfolded and the way it was prosecuted. Most of the former rebels I interviewed still believe in the justification of their actions taking up arms against what they saw as an oppressive state and did not express remorse over what the war became.

5. The disturbingly high and pervasive levels of violence and the widespread destruction unleashed on the country during the war were partly be accounted for in two factors: (a) the influence of Liberian (NPFL) factor; and (b) the way in which power is organised and exercised in Sierra Leone. NPFL fighters were loaned by Charles Taylor to Foday Sankoh in order to help him start his insurgency in Sierra Leone. This, interviews with especially former rebels seems to indicate was what partly laid the foundation for subsequent acts of violence unleashed on the populace during the war. The Liberian war had already turned nasty at the time that NPFL fighters were shipped to Sierra Leone as mercenaries (disturbing images and tales of the brutalities that were happening in the Liberian civil war was widely available throughout Sierra Leone before the start of the RUF incursion). The data indicates that with such a mindset of the NPFL fighters, it was very difficult for Foday Sankoh, who did not have full control over the NPFL mercenaries, to establish full control over them. They were loyal and responsible, not to Sankoh, but to Taylor. The brutalities and heavy-handedness that they introduced in the very early stages of the war, partly laid the foundation for the uncontrolled violence that became pervasive throughout the RUF insurgency. This initial act of violence and brutalities inspired its continued and continuous imitation and perpetration; and it perfectly fit with the modality of the nature and exercise of power in Sierra Leone society.

6. The dominant way in which power is organised and exercised in Sierra Leone encourages violence and abuse. For example, being in the reach of someone‟s power puts one at risk in the exercised of that power. In the university for

13 instance, being in the reach of a professor‟s power puts students at risk of becoming victims of that professor‟s whims. A mere disagreement with a professor‟s position during class debates or seminars might lead to a student being failed in a particular course. Altercations between protesting students and the university administration frequently led to expulsions and rustication. It is interesting that the RUF idea really gained fruition after a group of about 40 students were expelled in the mid 1980s for protesting the deplorable conditions on university dorms and campuses. These students, some of whom went to exile in Ghana, with the assistance of the Libyan government, saw revolution as the only means of reforming an autocratic state, and started military training in Libya at various times between 1987 and 1988. Though the bulk of these students later abandoned the quest for revolution and left the movement before the war started, the projected they had started matured into what later became the RUF, when it was hijacked by a disgruntled ex-corporal who had a historical grievance against the APC. The victimization of these students was directly implicated the RUF rebellion. Similarly, in the offices, secretaries or workers have been known to be illegally dismissed or unjustly punished for refusing to grant their superior‟s request for a favour, in most cases not connected with the job.

7. Such practices were taken to their logical conclusions, and partly resulted in the kinds of violence witnessed in the Sierra Leone civil war. RUF fighters saw their guns as the source of the power that they had over society and they exercised that power in ways that were consistent with the dominant ways in which power is organised and exercised in Sierra Leone society. In the war situation, it was very easy for anyone who was within the reach of their gun, which was the manifestation of both the power of those wielding it and the way they exercised it, to become victims of the logic and power of its exercise. This seemed to have been further exacerbated by the fact that the initial foundation of violence had already been laid by the NPFL elements in the RUF, and there were patterns of violence embedded in social and power relations in Sierra Leone society which created a convenient atmosphere for violence to fester and get out of hands. Residual tensions resulting from past social intercourse and power relations between individuals, families and communities, capitalised and on the opportunity provided by the war to settle old scores. Some of these included tensions resulting from family feuds over land; disputes between land owners and cattle rearers, abuse of the powers of the chiefdom authority and Native Administration Courts; the high-handed rule of the section chiefs and their unfair and unjust imposition of fines; disputes between opposing and competing chieftain families, etc. At different times, various people joined the insurgents or armed factions to further the specific agendas that they had.

8. Foday Sankoh also incrementally lost control over the movement and his combatants and the direction of the war: various individual commanders were left on as lords of the areas they controlled. This does not mean that Foday Sankoh lost the loyalty of his fighting men – they remained loyal to him as the case of his falling out with his Field Commander and deputy, Sam “Mosquito” Bokari,

14 indicated: the rest of the military leadership sided with him and not with Bokari and when during his incarceration in some members of the rebel movement sought to remove him as leader and the military commanders and rank and file of the rebel movement refused to support them and in fact arrested and punished them for daring to attempt a coup against Sankoh. But the interviews seem to suggest that he lost control over their day to day action at the battle field as each commander was left to prosecute the war in the war they felt most fitting.

9. Based on all of these factors, a particular violent power political culture developed during the war. Most rebels I spoke to confirmed that the initial violence was inspired by the NPFL forces, in that most RUF fighters conscripted or recruited in Sierra Leone sought to demonstrate to their NPFL counterparts (who had very little respect for them) that they were brave and capable of fighting. “One way in which we demonstrated that was by engaging in the acts that the NPFL fighters were so feared for” a former rebel commander told me. Because of this imitation, the rebels soon developed a reputation for brutality and inspired fear across the country. Various chilling and disturbing stories of rebel brutality (some of which deliberately exaggerated) started emerging very early in the conflict. The military too, not wanting to be outdone by the rebels, started to copy these acts. As a military officer told me, “we had to demonstrate bravery against the rebels on the battle field.” And part of that “bravery” involved mirroring the ferocity and violence of the rebels or even at times surpassing it. “We wanted people to fear us like they feared the rebels: so that when they say the army is coming people would respond in the same way as they would do when they say the rebels are coming.” To be able to defeat the rebels, some reasoned, they had to demonstrate to the rebels that they were capable of certain ferocity, brutality, violence (the mind or guts to engage in the same violence that they were engaged in). This they believed would command fear and respect. The CDF, especially the Kamajor also say the same thing. As a former Kamajor told me in an interview, “fear commands respect and we wanted when they say the Kamajor have arrived anywhere, for people to be fearful of us. It is only through fear that one can get respect.”

10. Thus, contrary to the popular perception in both academic and policy making circles that the war was caused and prolonged by a struggle over diamonds and natural resources, what the data seems to be indicating is that it was a complex political struggle undergirded by multiple political and social complexes. The violence which seems to be partly accounted for by the nature of the exercise of power in Sierra Leone society and the violence it makes possible, poses a major question: how then do we account for that power, what is the genealogical locus its genesis? I offer the speculation that to understand the nature of this power and to account for the locus of its genesis, we have to look at the historical constitution of the Sierra Leone state and the violence on which it thrived, how it organised and exercised power, and how those legacies impacted on rule in the post-independence state. Mahmood Mamdani‟s Citizen and Subject (especially the chapters on “Decentralised Despotism” as the way in which power was

15 organised in the colonial state) and Archille Mbembe‟s On the Postcolony (the chapters “Of Commadement” and “The Aesthetic of Vulgarity”) might be necessary starting points.

Lessons for Policy Conflicts in Africa are severely affecting the continent‟s development prospects by entrenching poverty and accentuating underdevelopment. If policy has to respond to these problems and achieve the desired result of transforming these societies, the knowledges that inform them must be largely based on accurate information and interpretation. As the data seems to be indicating, both academic and policy discourses have been missing important aspects of the Sierra Leone conflict. What we have are sometimes reductionist and prejudicial interpretations that stereotypify the African continent as „conflictive‟ instead of seeking to thoroughly understand why these conflicts occur, especially in the frequency in which they occur. Little wonder studies are showing that some of the policies informed by these interpretations are not producing their desired results in transforming these societies. By approaching conflicts and policy from the perspective of knowledge production, and by seeking to interrogate the ways in which knowledge is produced about conflicts and how these knowledges affect the articulation of policies, this research is addressing important omission in the literature on conflicts and generating “evidence-based findings that can be used to inform policy and programming decisions on root causes of violent conflict”.

By focusing on the Sierra Leone civil war, my research has sought to engage the academic and policy making communities into rethinking the dominant ways in which (African) conflicts have been understood and interpreted, and through that, orient the discourse towards rethinking policy as well. The conceptual starting point has been based on the assumption that there is need for investigating the types of knowledge that inform policy and the systematic analysis of those policy instruments or frameworks so that spaces can be created for the articulation or reformulation of acceptable alternatives. So far, the data seems to be indicating that an alternative interpretation of the Sierra Leone war is possible and necessary. The insights provided by this research in relation to the Sierra Leone civil war can be used by policy makers to propose a theoretically and empirically informed perspective that would help us understand the various dimensions of conflict and peace in not only Sierra Leone but elsewhere on the African continent.

The recent consensus in the international development and policy making arenas about the utility of incorporating war into development discourse, (and this invariably has meant that peace is now regarded as a condition of possibility for achieving development and promoting democracy), has still not been able provide satisfactory answers to specific questions about the specificity of certain types of conflicts. Questions still remain regarding the utility of certain types of knowledges and interpretations of specific types of conflicts which inform the policy instruments that seek to promote peace. To be effective policy should be dependent on perspectives and knowledges that fully understand the nature of conflicts and accurately explains their nature and the dynamics of the societies in which they occur. The important contribution of the study is suggesting, at least in the Sierra Leone what needs to be taken into account. Two major

16 major issues arise which are important for policy: (a) the knowledge question and its implication for policy and (b) questions about the nature of power and the way rule and power are organised and exercised in (African states) before, during and after violent conflicts. These two interelated issues are imporatnat questions that should be central to policy makers in addressing conflicts situations.

Further discussion will take place when all of the data is analysed and documented in the final dissertation.

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