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by Young, Crawford

  Angola High Yes No Yes No

  Burundi High Yes No Yes No

  CAR Low No Yes Yes Some

  Chad Moderate No No Yes Some

  Congo-B Moderate No No Yes No

  Congo-K High Yes No Yes Some

  Ivory Coast Low No No Yes No

  Liberia High Yes No Yes No

  Mali Low No Yes No No

  Niger Low No Yes No Some

  Nigeria Low Yes Yes No Some

  Rwanda High Yes No Yes No

  Senegal Low Yes Yes Yes Some

  Sierra Leone High Yes No Yes No

  Somalia High Yes Some Yes Yes

  Sudan High Yes Yes Yes Some

  Uganda Moderate Yes No Yes No

  * My qualitative judgment, based on the monographic sources for each conflict.

  ** Includes providing sanctuary or armed support for insurgents or military intervention in support of government.

  To illuminate both general patterns and the range of variation, I turn next to a closer look at the eighteen conflicts, beginning with a summary account of four of the most intense and important civil wars, those fought in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somali, and Sudan. A condensed overview of several other violent conflicts not previously discussed then follows. Some that are considered in earlier chapters need no further detail here. I return to overall comparative observations in the concluding section. Here I begin with the Liberia and Sierra Leone civil wars, examined jointly because of their inextricable intertwining.

  Liberia and Sierra Leone

  Among the interpenetrated conflicts in West Africa, by far the most important are the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In many respects, these two brutal and prolonged internal wars defined the character of new conflict patterns in Africa; they have attracted a large volume of academic analysis, often excellent. Their outbreak coincided with the start of the democratic wave in Africa; the incursion of the initially small band led by Charles Taylor, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), in December 1989 was simultaneous with the summoning of the Benin national conference. The multiplication of armed militias, the scale of the atrocities by all sides, the exploitation of child soldiers, the ideological void surrounding the fighting, the instrumentalization of high-value resources to finance insurgency, and the high degree of external involvement in efforts to halt the combats all foreshadowed patterns that shaped subsequent internal wars.

  The striking parallels between the two polities, and the broadly similar chronologies of conflict, reinforce the invitation to paired analysis. Both countries grew out of externally sponsored resettlements of freed slaves, Freetown (1787) and Monrovia (1822).29 The cultural groupings that emerged from this origin, creoles in Sierra Leone and Americo-Liberians in Liberia, were distinct from the vastly more numerous hinterland populations in their Victorian synthesis of European and African social practices and their habits of entitlement.

  Competitive decolonization elections in Sierra Leone shifted power decisively to the hinterland in the early 1960s; a polarity between the two largest ethnic groupings, Mende in the south and east, and mostly Muslim Temne and related groups in the north, became imprinted on the party system from the outset. The two leading political formations, the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) and All People’s Congress, had electoral strongholds in south and north respectively, though Jimmy Kandeh’s data on the 2002 and 2007 elections show that balloting did not entirely follow ethnic lines.30

  In Liberia, the state modernization and unification ambitions of longtime president William Tubman (1944–71) gradually extended patronage access and social promotion to some hinterland elites. Ethnic geography was more complex than in Sierra Leone; there were a number of visible groups. Not able were the coastal Kru, well represented in Monrovia, and the Mandingo (elsewhere known as Malinke) Muslim traders prominent in the commercial sphere, widely regarded as alien intruders.31

  Symptoms of incipient crisis appeared in both states by the later 1970s. In Liberia, the increasingly contested rule of William Tolbert (1971–80) was shaken by rice riots in 1979, triggered by a sharp price rise accompanied by suspicion of profiteering and corruption, and by generalized resentment over an austerity program.32 Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and a small band of conspirators assassinated Tolbert in 1980, seized power, and then executed thirteen Tolbert henchmen on the Monrovia beach. Among them was Tolbert’s son, wed to a goddaughter of Ivory Coast president Houphouët-Boigny, an affront Houphouët-Boigny never forgave. Initially acclaimed as a savior acting on behalf of the hinterland majority, Doe soon lost his luster as he expanded on the patronage system of his predecessors, developed profitable mercantile ties with the Mandingo traders, and embezzled state funds with impunity—an estimated $300 million over his decade of rule, or half the 1989 GDP.33 He also relied heavily on his Krahn coethnics (only 5% of the population), or more accurately, on two of the sixteen Krahn clans, in his military.34 The levels of brutality in his rule far exceeded previous norms. Nonetheless, he enjoyed the sponsorship and protection of the United States as a reliable cold war (and anti-Libyan) client; his notorious rigging of a 1985 election was endorsed by Washington.

  In Sierra Leone, Siaka Stevens, initially elected to power in 1967 as a progressive reformer, ruled until 1985 (after a military interlude in 1967–68). He maneuvered to impose a political monopoly and single-party rule by 1973 and then constructed an increasingly venal neopatrimonial system by securing personal control over the flow of diamond exports, accumulating a fortune estimated at $500 million in the process. The value of diamonds flowing through formal, taxable channels, once an important state revenue and foreign exchange source, had dwindled to $100,000 by 1987. The remainder was illegally marketed, mostly through private Lebanese channels, in networks linked to Stevens. State institutions, well organized and provisioned in the 1960s, were starved of resources and deteriorated. Far from seeking to build a state, Stevens’s strategy aimed above all to deny resources to rival strongmen, which had the result of in effect equipping his private controlled networks with sovereignty and setting the stage for a modality of rule that became characteristic of the age of warlord politics.35 He installed a pliant officer, Joseph Momoh, to succeed him in 1985; Momoh was powerless to alter the system. The deepening public frustrations and social anger first flowed into pressures for multiparty elections, to which Momoh conceded by 1991. But before these could occur the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) took form in Liberia and invaded, and in January 1992, Momoh was ousted by junior officers led by Valentine Strasser.

  The era of guerrilla warfare punctuated by moments of relative calm thus opened in 1989 (Liberia) and 1991 (Sierra Leone). The wars flowed together from the outset and remained interwoven until their termination in 2002 (Sierra Leone) and 2003 (Liberia). Both countries had periods of remission in 1996–97, during which internationally monitored and astonishingly peaceful national elections took place that won endorsement as free and fair by large international observer teams. However, civil war soon reignited with renewed ferocity, further brutalizing society, displacing millions, and destroying state infrastructure. From the very outset of the two internal wars, the international community mobilized to send peacekeepers and seek diplomatic settlements; in both cases, mediated negotiations produced a series of seeming accords that soon unraveled. But finally agreements leading to successful elections in Sierra Leone (2002) and Liberia (2005) produced stability and relatively credible regimes that restored a more lasting peace.36

  The two initial guerrilla armies, Taylor’s NPFL and Foday Sankoh’s RUF, both had a core of leaders that had undergone training in Libyan camps near Benghazi and had a joint ambition to overthrow the two incumbent regimes. Included in the Libyan camps were a handful of radical university students inspired by the Qadhafy Green Book and anti-imperial doctrine. At the time, the Libyan leader’s mood with respect to his Western adversaries was belligerent, and he hosted a number of guerrilla training sites.

  In the Liberian case, the NPFL
also benefited from the availability of groups of former soldiers once linked to Thomas Quiwonkpa, mastermind of the original Doe coup but then estranged and marginalized. Quiwonkpa led an unsuccessful coup attempt in 1985; his mutilated corpse was dragged through the streets of Monrovia, enraging his followers and his Gio community. Taylor himself, partly of Americo-Liberian descent, was tied through marriage to the Quiwonkpa group. On returning from university training in the United States, he was appointed by Doe to a government procurement agency, a ready conduit for corruption. In 1983, he absconded to America with $900,000; charged with embezzlement, he was arrested in Massachusetts but escaped in 1985 and made his way back to West Africa.37

  By the late 1980s, the Liberian diaspora in the United States and West Africa was desperate to eliminate the Doe regime. Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso were likewise keen to see the elimination of Doe; with their facilitation, Taylor was able to enter Liberia from Ivory Coast with a small band of one hundred fighters, to be welcomed by the local population. Troops, mostly made up of Krahn, sent to repel the invaders engaged in indiscriminate slaughter, redoubling the support for Taylor and ensuring a flow of new recruits, who were soon joined by former Quiwonkpa soldiers. Future interim ruler Amos Sawyer and president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf collected small amounts of funds to back the Taylor insurgency.

  The snowballing expansion of the NPFL was matched by the melting of Doe’s support. Regime corruption had exceeded the limits of toleration for his major foreign aid supporter, and the imminent end of the cold war erased any motivation to continue overlooking it. Doe had increasingly followed the Stevens pathway of seeking resources outside the state channels, all but abandoning the bureaucracy. Little stood in the way of the Taylor advance; the NPFL was at the gates of Monrovia in August 1990, when Nigeria mobilized West African states to prevent his takeover. An ECOMOG intervention force blocked their path.

  Shortly thereafter, an NPFL splinter led by Prince Johnson managed to capture Doe. Johnson personally conducted his execution in macabre circumstances. ECOMOG installed an interim Monrovia government under respected scholar and American university professor Amos Sawyer; this regime had little authority but did retain the crucial resource of international recognition and sovereignty. The Taylor forces, however, occupied much of the hinterland and gained control over the key tradable resources: diamonds, timber, and rubber. Thus by 1991 the NPFL had ample revenues to pay its forces and purchase weapons. Meanwhile, Taylor declared himself head of a “Greater Liberia,” in which he included portions of Sierra Leone and Guinea. This would have encompassed a major part of the Sierra Leone diamond fields, a good part of whose output was smuggled through Liberia by Mandingo traders. He also facilitated the organization of the RUF in zones he controlled and expedited its 1991 invasion of Sierra Leone.

  Meanwhile, assaults on ethnic groups that were beneficiaries of the Doe regime multiplied, and many were killed. In response, Krahn and Mandingo clamored for weapons. Soon a movement responding to their security pleas, the anti-Taylor United Liberation Movement of Liberia (ULIMO), led by Mandingo Alhaji Kromah, arose and carved out a sphere of operation along the Guinea border. The Krahn elements soon broke off into a separate faction under Roosevelt Johnson known as ULIMO-J; Kromah’s group was called ULIMO-K. ULIMO-J acquired control of some diamond mining areas and tapped into illicit trading nets in Sierra Leone. ULIMO-K derived its revenue from Mandingo control of transit trade into Guinea. A further ULIMO splinter, the misnamed Liberian Peace Council (LPC), emerged in 1993, and acquired control of some rubber estates.

  Warlord politics now became institutionalized. Taylor and his NPFL was the most important in size and revenue, as well as the most notorious for its atrocities. The recruitment of child soldiers gained momentum, as did the brutalization of society through pillage and rape, with all militias culpable. The various factions plundered the vital substance of the Liberian economy in an effort to sustain their unending militia warfare; an estimated 150– 250,000 fatalities resulted, and by 1996, half the population was displaced.38

  A series of unsuccessful peace conferences outside the country took place. In 1993, Nigeria served as the lead negotiator as well as primary ECOMOG participant and helped establish the Transitional National Government under a succession of heads, but like its predecessor, this government had no authority outside Monrovia. In 1996, agreement was reached whereby all the major factions would be incorporated in the government, all militias would be disarmed, and national elections would be held in 1997. Miraculously, though disarmament was at best partial, the elections took part in a peaceful climate; Taylor defeated his main opponent, Johnson-Sirleaf, with 75% of the vote. The outcome was accepted by all parties, and the election conduct won the blessing of the international community. Peace for a shattered country seemed at hand.

  But events in neighboring Sierra Leone cast their shadow. The RUF force that had organized in Liberia under Taylor’s sponsorship invaded in 1991 and found initial welcome as well as ready recruits from a rural population whose disaffection with the Freetown elite and national government was by now intense. Stevens distrusted the Sierra Leone army and so had kept it small (it had three thousand members at the time of RUF invasion). It recruited using ethnoregional criteria, and it was poorly equipped; Stevens satisfied his security needs with private militias operating in the diamond fields or militias maintained by the mining companies (iron ore and rutile, or titanium dioxide). The military, like the population at large, was seething with discontent and had little capacity to rout the RUF, initially a small force.

  Taken by surprise, the Freetown regime desperately recruited new troops to confront the rebels; as Momoh after his 1992 ouster lamented, training and discipline was lacking, and “a large number of undesirables, waifs, strays, lay abouts and bandits may now be in the nation’s uniform.”39 Deployed in the countryside, this ragged force spent more time terrorizing the local population than attacking the RUF; for villagers, those in uniform became known as “sobels,” or, in Kandeh’s phrase, soldiers “who took the guise of rebels to pillage, rape, maim and murder.”40

  In this deteriorating situation, junior officers led by Captain Valentine Strasser ousted Momoh in 1992, establishing the National Provisional Ruling Council and promising national elections in 1996 after the “clean up” of corrupt rule and defeat of the RUF. The customary postcoup euphoria sustained the young officers, most of whom were in their twenties and many of whom were high school dropouts, for a few months. With the help of Guinean and Nigerian troops, the RUF was pushed back from most of the areas it had overrun in 1993. But the combat became more complex, as some soldiers defected to the RUF, others operated semiindependently as sobels, and a new communal self-defense militia, the Kamajors, at first composed of initiation groups and hunters, took form in Mende areas in the south. A number of Liberian youths joined the RUF or other militia forces as well.

  Yet a further complicating factor was government recourse to mercenary fighters, initially Gurkhas (Nepalese) discharged from the British army and then South African professionals (mostly former special forces or white-officered black soldiers used in destabilizing neighboring states) employed by Executive Outcomes. Though the Gurkhas were ineffective, Executive Outcomes helped repel a 1995 RUF effort to attack Freetown and once again drove them out of most areas they occupied. The presence of these professional soldiers helped provide the window of security that made 1996 elections possible.

  Though the Strasser provisional regime appeared for a moment to improve the economy, lowering inflation substantially and winning a debt reduction from the international financial monitors, the formal economy was corroding. Official diamond mining vanished, replaced by illicit artisanal digging and smuggling. Control of the output became the major target for all parties and the payment source for Executive Outcomes. By 1995, the insecure environment surrounding the iron, bauxite, and rutile (titanium oxide) mines forced their closure.

  Rebellion tapped a deep reservoi
r of alienation that those outside Freetown and the ruling institutions experienced. Declining rural well-being during the Stevens and Momoh regimes, combined with the conspicuous wealth of the political elite, spawned a sense of exclusion felt most keenly by the young. Escape from rural poverty by education or formal employment seemed foreclosed, as schools deteriorated and the formal economy declined. The oppressive behavior of local government agents and chiefs added to the undercurrents of disaffection, which meant that state forces could not count on national loyalty as a resource against rebel forces.

  The RUF was never an ethnic movement; even though its leader Sankoh was a northerner, the majority of its fighters came from the south and east. Nonetheless, Kamajor leaders presented it as an alien force, and many of the Freetown elite perceived it in geoethnic terms.41 Although the RUF discourse spoke vaguely of revolutionary aims, and its manifesto bore the title “Footpaths to Democracy,” any ideological content to the movement’s purposes disappeared in the maelstrom of violence its agents unleashed on local populations. Little effort was made to win local support or, for that matter, to administer areas that it occupied at times. Some rural youths might join in the hope of securing a survival livelihood or because the loss of their families left them no other choice; the power provided by a gun perhaps attracted others. Many were urban marginals or former soldiers. But many other recruits were obtained locally by coercion or abduction, and villages were forced to provide food and supplies or were simply pillaged. The pattern of atrocities—amputations, rape, burning of villages—appeared early in the game and remained a permanent feature, reinforcing the local hostility that the RUF often encountered. RUF forces resided in forest camps, which served as bases for plunder expeditions; for the most part, they were roving rather than stationary bandits.42

  Thus by 1995 diverse military forces—the national army, sobels, RUF, Kamajors, Executive Outcomes, and ECOMOG, among which numbered fighters having floating loyalties—were operating in many areas of the country. Strasser by then had developed an appetite for power and reneged on his promise not to run for office. To block his ambitions, a rival member of the Strasser junta, Julius Bio, overthrew him in January 1996 and announced that elections would go forward. An Executive Outcomes offensive produced a moment of remission in the combat, and miraculously the first multiparty elections since 1967 took place later in 1996, with strong international support. Inadequate security required use of a national proportional representation system rather than constituency-level tabulation. Still, even more remarkably, the conduct of the voting met minimum standards of respectability, permitting international observers to bless the outcome. The SLPP, led by Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, whose primary base was in the south, emerged as the leading party among five significant contenders. With a Liberian peace accord also in place and election preparations proceeding on schedule for a July 1997 vote, at the beginning of 1997 the West African nightmare seemed to end.